Dear miyoid:

So good to read from you first thing this Tuesday morning (my time), and such a long and detailed post! First, I want to summarize what you shared on Oct 4 and today, Nov 30, in my own words, adding quotes from you because you say it best:

On October 4, you posted after an absence from your thread of 2 months and 10 days. You shared that during this absence, you visited your father in your hometown, had a mental breakdown there, stayed at your step father’s empty house for 3 days, had fun there, “accidently had a fling“, then another guy flirted with you and you were “able to reject” him, which made you feel “a bit of power“, being able to choose: “I consider myself as someone who cannot choose… I can choose… I’m learning to choose for me“). You started a relationship with a “very sincere” new guy, “My guy“, as you referred to him.

Almost 2 months later, November 30, you shared that your guy has “maybe more traumas” than you have, that “he has been an understanding person“, and that this relationship is “the most adult relationship” you’ve ever had. You “can be more open” with him, and you still fear abandonment. But you know that this fear has to do with your childhood and not with your guy’s behavior. He has been reminding you that he loves you, “sometimes a few times a day, sometimes a few times in a week“.

On Oct 4 and Nov 30, you shared this about your emotional experience as a child, an emotional experience that you keep re-experiencing as a young adult: when you were able to distract yourself with a computer or with a friend who interested you, you were okay, but the moment you lost your interest and were not able to distract yourself “with the computer, with a game, or something interesting“, right when you were not focused on something that could distract you, you felt “suddenly depressed and suffocated“, “a deep longing I couldn’t stand but cry“, “so miserable“, feeling “that weird, ugly feeling deep down… feeling unsafe and bad…so vulnerable“, having “these mental breakdowns“, and you “cried a lot“. You shared: “almost always, after some distraction hours with other people, I accidentally found a moment to feel like myself again and I started crying”.

I want to understand that feeling, that suffocating, “weird, ugly feeling deep down”, and I think I know this particular feeling: I was maybe 10, I was dropped at my aunt’s house, a few hours away from my mother, to stay there for a few days without my mother. There was food and children and I was treated well, but I remember a moment when the smell of the food became overwhelmingly unpleasant, and I felt intense repulsion and panic, as if the smell was going to kill me. I remember being surprised about it, because I never experienced this before. I remember not understanding what was happening or why. I remember panicked, walking out of my aunt’s house and standing as far away from it as possible so to escape the smell, but the smell was still very strong. I don’t remember what happened next, but it probably qualifies as a mental breakdown. And as a result of that mental breakdown, inconsolable crying I imagine, my aunt contacted my uncle as soon as possible. He was the only one with a vehicle, a scooter with a sidecar, and he gave me a ride in that sidecar all the way back to my mother.  I remember how anxious I felt, how impatient I was to be back with my mother. When he stopped for gas, my anxiety went up, when he was back on the road. I felt a relief, I could breathe again because I was getting closer and closer to my mother.

Can you relate to this?

I hope that you don’t mind that I explore my experience above a bit further, on your thread. My little research may help you as well as helping me:

calm clinic. com/ anxiety/ symptoms/ sensory problems, reads:  “Anxiety can affect your body in fairly unusual ways. While you may be aware that anxiety can cause your heart rate to increase and your body to sweat, you may not be aware that anxiety can have a much broader impact on all of your senses. In this article, we’ll look at a small sample of some of the sensory problems caused by anxiety, and discuss what you can do to control these experiences… From vision to touch, anxiety can affect you in nearly every way… Every one of your senses can be affected by anxiety in different ways. Anxiety can also lead you to develop more long-standing issues, where you start to experience unusual physical symptoms that don’t generally fall under the category of anxiety. Let’s take a look at each of the five senses individually and discuss some of the most common anxiety symptoms that fall under each category…

“Touch.. Sensory abnormalities related to touch are common, although often the person suffering from them doesn’t realize that it’s a sensory problem. Anxiety can cause numbness and tingling, especially in the limbs… burning sensations on their skin… hot or cold sensations in their body… Many people also develop an increased sensitivity to pain and discomfort, and others experience a positive touch in a negative way, such as when you hold hands with someone…

“Hearing…  There is some evidence that anxiety is associated with auditory hallucinations (such as hearing voices), although these are fairly uncommon, according to a 2016 paper on the topic… anxiety can… make it more difficult to pay attention to what’s going on around you… you fail to hear something.. . It can also make the noises you hear around you seem harsher and more grating.

“Vision… Vision is often affected by anxiety. The adrenaline released by anxiety dilates the pupils, and when the pupils are dilated you may experience any number of symptoms: * Brighter lights and light flashes. * Blurry vision. *Tunnel vision…

“Taste…  There is some evidence…  that stress changes the sensitivity of taste buds… Anxiety may also cause you to become more sensitive to certain types of tastes.

“Smell… Anxiety and emotion more generally do seem to affect the way in which a person perceives smells (in terms of the intensity of the smell and how quickly that smell is noticed)… Furthermore, anxiety can make people more sensitive to bad smells. They may focus on them more or notice them more often. That gives the impression that there are more negative smells, when in reality the person is simply noticing them”-

– this makes it clear to me why, as a child and onward (not as much now), I was so very, very sensitive to physical discomfort such as wearing clothes that were not loose enough, temperatures that were too high, the sensation of sweating. Any and every physical discomfort, so it seems, bothered me so much. Also, sounds sounded so loud and so disturbing, the sun’s light and other lights felt too bright, and touch often felt threatening, and so on.

About your anxiety, you wrote on Jan 11, 2021: “the anxiety starts from the center of my chest and then it expands. And I keep feeding it, expands more and more. I have to learn not to feed it“. I am more aware today, because of your thread and my research above, just how powerful anxiety is, how much it affects us in so many ways. I wonder if there is anything at all about us that is not greatly affected by severe anxiety. I think that it is right for you and for me to notice when our anxiety goes up, then take a few deep breaths. If we are sitting, get up and walk around, distract for a while (instead of continuing to sit with the anxiety, breathing shallowly, feeding our anxiety with negative over-thinking). Also, I believe that when we are anxious for too long (an excitation of our nervous system), our brains/ bodies collapse into depression (a quieting/ deadening of that prolonged neural excitation). Treating and managing the anxiety should take care of the depression as well, I figure.

As I reviewed your posts on this thread, I realize how indeed (!!!) breaking up with your ex-boyfriend was indeed the right thing for you to do (“I know it was the good thing to do, even if I wasn’t the person who broke it off…I know that this is the right thing, to move on“): his behavior fueled your anxiety and kept it elevated. Your current boyfriend, on the other hand, even though he suffered childhood traumas,  he does not punish you for his traumas by mistreating you.

Two more things: (1) As a child and onward, you distracted yourself in front of the computer. Not having had a computer growing up, I distracted myself with extensive daydreaming, often while listening to music from the radio, (2) When I read this in your recent post: “For my father and my sister, there are two types of people. The ones that they own, and the ones that they don’t own…. For the people they do not own, they are charming…  I was lost in this contradiction as well. I didn’t realize what was happening, I was just lost“, I realized that I never read a more accurate depiction of what I experienced with my mother: she owned me, so she told me that I was “a big zero” and often treated me accordingly. She didn’t own other people, so she flattered them, and glorified them: oh-how-great-thou-are, paraphrased, is what she told those she did not own, treating them as her superiors. School peers and other people used to tell me how wonderful my mother was and how lucky I was. Like you, I too was lost and confused by this contradiction, not understanding it. In your most recent post, you helped me understand: thank you!

anita