Dear Adrian Gallardo:

Regarding the album- I didn’t hear of it until you mentioned it. I googled the lyrics after reading your thread so to try to understand you better.

Regarding your question as I now understand it to be: How long did my anxiety, intrusive thoughts, clenched jaws, last?

My answer: fifty years or so, and going. But much improvement made. It started when I was a child, continued into teenage years- lots of obsessions and compulsions (like counting, touching things, walking forward and backward, reading again and again, the same sentence, and many more). Less compulsions since I was thirty or so. I took lots of psychiatric drugs for 17 years which changed how I felt but did not at all improve my life. After the drugs, when I got off them all, three years ago, I experienced a lot of anxiety. But psychotherapy helped me to manage and heal from more and more of it, over time.

anita

Dear Adrian Gallardo:

There are many, many expressions of anxiety, from Tourette Syndrome (my case), to OCD (my case), to psychosis (not yet..) to obesity, to drug abuse, to many syndromes, like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome… so many, many. We are all born with fear-genes and we get scared enough, as children, that overwhelming fear will express itself in multiple of ways over one’s lifetime.

Regarding your comment that I am strong: people survive a whole lot of trauma; but few people thrive in spite of serious, long term trauma.

anita

Dear Adrian Gallardo:

Maybe I can help you understand better what is in the power of your thinking and what is not.

The tension in your lower jaw, grinding your teeth, let’s say. That just happens, doesn’t it. You don’t want it to happen. So you focus on your jaws, thinking: if “all the power you possess lies within, that it’s all in (my) mind” (the first sentence in your thread), then why can’t I control my jaw, command it to relax?

Is that your thinking?

If it is, then this is my input: animals don’t think like we do. They don’t have the language that we have and they don’t observe themselves. They don’t have the ability to look at themselves and wonder why this or that happens and if they can control themselves. Everything they do is guided by instincts they are born with and/ or emotions. They feel hungry-> they look for food. They feel angry-> they fight. They feel scared-> they run. And so forth. They don’t THINK: What SHOULD I do now. They FEEL-> they DO.

As humans, we still are animals. So a lot of what we do is guided by the instincts we are born with and by emotions. The fact that we have an additional part of the brain that thinks, does not cancel the parts of the brain directing us by instinct and emotion.

Your jaws and eyes behave according to instinct and emotions, and are not subject to your thinking. You can temporarily focus and guide them to behave a certain way by your thinking, but it is not possible to always focus on your jaws and eyes, so as you lose focus, your jaws and eyes are back to be guided by instinct and emotion.

Is this helpful to you? Let me know.

anita

Dear Adrian Gallardo:

Glad my input is somewhat helpful to you. I hope you feel comfortable to let me know anytime what of my writing to you is right with you and what doesn’t feel right: what you agree with and what you disagree with. I am here to teach you and to learn from you. Both.

I will explain the Tourette’s as an expression of anxiety: as a child, I was stuck with my mother who scared me by threatening to commit suicide or by attacking me in various ways. So the animal part of me, instinctively and emotionally, needed to either Fight or Flight (run away). Both natural responses require MOVEMENT. But I wasn’t able to do either: couldn’t fight a bigger person and my own mother and had nowhere to run away to. But the urge to make a MOVE (fight or flight/run) persisted, day after day. That urge “MOVED” my facial muscles to form facial tics. That urge to move, MOVED my neck muscles to form neck tics, and so forth, as I suffered from tics all over.

So I didn’t RUN, but my facial muscles “ran away” and every other muscle “ran away” or engaged in the Flight response – or the Fight response, while my overall body stayed in one place.

If I did Fight or Flight, as animals in nature do, then I wouldn’t have developed tics. I would have been out of danger (either dead if I lost the fight or away from danger if I ran away).

anita

Dear Adrian Gallardo:

Can anxiety affect how a person thinks, you asked. Yes, very much so. When there is fear in your brain, that means the brain believes there is DANGER to attend to. The number one priority of any animal, humans included, it to attend to danger so to escape it and survive.

Let’s say you walk outside and a big, aggressive dog shows up- you feel fear right away- you look for a stick on the ground, anything to fight away the dog. You pick up a stick and as the dog approaches you, you hit its head with the stick, trying to get to its eyes, etc. You attended to the danger and fighting to survive.

When you are anxious, you are not aware of the danger. Where is it? What is it? You don’t know. You feel fear but you don’t know what it is that is scaring you. Next, the THINKING part of the brain is looking for the danger, so to attend to it and protect yourself. So it looks and keeps looking for it, hence the OVERTHINKING/ OBSESSING. You look around and imagine danger in the way people look at you. You hear a loud voice and your first thought: danger! You think there is danger here and there and you keep looking for it.

The fear, without a clear danger, keeps circulating in the brain, and it is wired as it exists in connections between nerve cells in the brain, and the thinking keeps looking for the danger.

anita

Dear Adrian Gallardo:

Anxiety, definitely anxiety is behind your focus and great distress about body discomforts. I know that kind of distress, I still suffer from it. It is the fear of long ago, circulating in the brain looking for a “home”, a place to nest, finding its place in your tight jaws. In my case, the fear nests in my belly and I focus on every noise and movement there.

There is a new thread today, right here, written by a new member whose anxiety is nesting in part of her body (see if you find that thread…?)

It is very common, to focus on a bodily discomfort or a bodily feature (how a body part looks like, sounds like, smells like, etc.) and it is anxiety nesting here or there.

Exercising is good for anxiety- take long, fast walks- breathing air when walking fast, inhaling deeply helps the anxiety. Take breaks, do relaxing activities like listening to relaxing music (not so much the rap). Psychotherapy with a competent therapist to examine and heal the anxiety is best.

You mention it before, the fighting you witnessed: are you saying that the origin of your anxiety is when you were a child, at night, hearing the sounds of your sister and her boyfriend fighting? How old were you and how often did they fight? Describe what that was like..?

anita

Dear Adrian Gallardo:

Maybe as a child you daydreamed or played games and that calmed you down then. Maybe now you no longer daydream or play the way you did then, so the anxiety increased. Maybe new calming habits will help to reduce it.

anita

Dear Adrian Gallardo:

I didn’t understand: “I know they (your family) are the source”- the source of your troubles? I think you only shared here about your sister and her boyfriends’ fights. What else about your family life brought about your current distress?

You wrote “before the cycle continues” onto your nephew. Please tell me about that cycle…?

anita