The Thread of Anxiety...Part 3

[This is the third post in a series having to do with anxiety. You can check out part one here and part two here.]

It was February of 1999 when it happened, when the ‘crazies came to town’, and I hit rock bottom.  The months leading up to my breakdown were difficult to say the least.  Emotionally, I was up and down.  My anxiety and obsessive thoughts about doing the wrong thing and hurting people were increasing and becoming unmanageable.  I was constantly feeling like I had said or done something that hurt someone in some way.  I was unable to think clearly.  Unable to assess whether I really had done something wrong.  I was always worried that God was angry with me and wanted nothing to do with me until I “made things right” with the people I had “hurt”.  I can’t describe how torturous and exhausting these thoughts were to me.  There was no end to them and they were wearing me down.  Below, is a journal entry dated, January 4, 1999.


                    “1999 is off to a rough start for me.  It is pretty dark from where I stand God. 
                    You know that I am hanging on by a thread.  I have never had such a great
                    desire for my life to end.  The thought of killing myself has been on my mind,
                    on and off, for awhile now.  I also notice a desire to inflict pain on myself.”

And that was before I hit rock bottom.  

Rock bottom came in February, just after Valentines Day.  I just couldn’t do it anymore.  I didn’t have the strength. I was so tired and so hurting and so sick.  It was difficult to get off the sofa.  To eat.  To function.  All I wanted to do was sleep; so I didn’t have to think.  All I could do was cry.  At the time, unbeknownst to me, my two closest friends were monitoring me and wondering if they should bring me to the Mental Health Center and check me in for a little stay.  Thankfully, with the support of friends, my mom, and my therapist, I was able to get the help I needed (although being admitted wouldn’t have hurt in the least).

It’s hard to describe just how “crazy” my thoughts were during the next few months but I have a couple of examples that might help:

        I might be watching TV and see a person who was really funny looking to me….say a
        bald guy with a serious comb over and a Tom Selleck moustache and I would think to
        myself, ‘Man, that guy looks ridiculous!  Doesn’t anyone love him enough to tell him?’.     
       Then, I would feel guilty for thinking those things (yes just THINKING them).  I would
        then start to panic because I had no idea who this guy was and how to get a hold of him
        so I could apologize.  And since I couldn’t apologize and “make it right”, God had to be
        angry and want nothing to do with me. 

        Another example, probably my favorite, would be the Paint Chip Incident.  Now, I live
        in an old house and back in the day they painted the houses with lead paint.  As my
        readers know, lead paint is dangerous.  You do not want to be eating it, inhaling the
        dust, etc.  You also don’t want to be eating or playing in the dirt around a house with
        lead paint because the lead in the old paint chips can leach into the soil.  I had power
        washed the house, back in the fall.  Power washing creates paint chips.  I didn’t know
        what to do.  I was freaking out.  Had I contaminated our entire neighborhood?  Do I
        need to door to door and apologize?  Could I have single handedly cause the mental
        retardation of all the children in the neighborhood? 

        As I wrote in a previous post, obsessive thoughts often come with compulsive behavior. 
        The behavior attempts to reduce the anxiety that was created by the obsessive thoughts. 
        So, I came up with behavior plan.  I would simply clean up the paint chips.  I would rake
        them into a little pile and bag them up or better yet, get a Shop Vac and suck them up. 
        I mean, how hard could it be. 

       Well, as I stared to rake, I realized that there seemed to be layer upon layer of paint chips
        in the dirt.  It just didn’t end.  The little pile turned into 9 bags of paint chip contaminated
       dirt (these went into the basement of the garage and remained there for the next 10 years).
       If that wasn’t bad enough, I realized that the paint chips extended into the grass.  If you   
       separated the grass, you could see the chips.  So, I got the Shop Vac, the hand rack and
       went to town.  Except I couldn’t get them all.  They were EVERYWHERE.  At that point I
       called my boyfriend and broke down.  I can only imagine what that whole scene must have
       looked like from a causual walker-byer.  There I was, sitting in the middle of the lawn, with
       a Shop Vac in one hand, a little rake in the other, bawling on the cordless phone.  To this
       day, I can’t tell that story without laughing.

I think the turning point for me was medication.  I had resisted it for so long.  I felt that by going on medication, I was not trusting God.  As a result, I suffered longer than I needed to.  I remember coming to terms with the fact that I needed medicine:

                           “ God, I am sitting here, thinking about all that has happened in the
                           past few weeks and months.  I have not a clue why or exactly what
                           but I do know that there is something not right with my brain.  And
                           no matter how hard I try, I have no control over it.  It is very hard to
                           say that, I feel like I am copping out or something. Or  I’m doubting 
                           you and your power. God, I know that you have the power to change
                           this is a second but for some reason you’re not and I need medication                  
                           If you are choosing to bring healing through a pill, I’ll take it.”
                                                                                              - Journal Entry from March 1999

Once the medication hit a therapeutic level, things began to change.  Slowly.  I was able to begin to see the obsessive thoughts for what they were.  I was able to talk myself down off the ledge more easily.  It gave me the edge I needed to begin to look deeper inside myself.  It was shortly after this that my therapist and I figured out that I had OCD.  I finally had a name for it.  I didn’t feel so alone anymore. 

I began to realize that God was not angry with me.  That He wasn’t waiting for me to screw up so He could punish me.  No, He loved me and had never left me but was there with me even when the pain was so great I wished I were dead. 

It has been 13 years now.  I continue to struggle with anxiety but the OCD is changing.  About a year ago, I started seeing a new therapist (the old one had moved to Maine).  I have been able to look at some painful things in my life and the effect they have had on me. How they have influenced  and shaped me  How they have contributed to my anxiety and fueled my OCD.  As I uncover these things, I am learning to live in a new way and the OCD seems to be dying down. 

It has been a long road for me. One filled with ups and downs.  With joy and sorrow.  I have learned a great deal about anxiety, about myself, about God.  Although it has been painful, it can’t say that I would change it.  It is part of my story.  Of who I am and who I am to become.  It is an unfinished story that I look forward to watching unfold.

The Thread of Anxiety... Part 2

[This is the second post in a series having to do with anxiety.  You can check out the first post here.]

You would think that becoming a Christian would have helped with the anxiety and OCD but it actually had the opposite effect.  It only made it worse.  I should give a little bit of my faith background here, as it is so critical in how my anxiety has played out over the years.

The churches my family attended when I was a kid were of the Fundamental, Baptisty, Born Again type.  It was the 80’s and the ‘Turn or Burn’ preaching was prevalent.  God loved me and I needed to accept Jesus or I was going to hell.  That was my introduction to God.  To Jesus.  The thought of going to hell terrified me.  And so began my relationship with God.  One mixed with love and lots fear.

As a young adult, I become more serious about my faith.  I went to church regularly, read my Bible and attended Bible study.  I really wanted God to be in every part of my life. I felt that my life finally had purpose, direction, hope.  But as often happens, I fell into the performance trap with God.  If I am doing the right things then God is happy with me and if I am doing the wrong thing then He is angry with me. He loves me…He loves me not.  This type of thinking permeated my life and my faith.  And as a result  caused me a great deal of anxiety.

I was so afraid of making the wrong decision.  Of God being angry with me.  At times, it could be so overwhelming and debilitating.  A great example of this was Nate.  When I was 19, I fell in love.  Hard.  He was the love of my life (or so I thought… I was 19 for goodness sake and most 19 year olds are idiots). I was going to marry this guy and live happily ever after.  Then the fears came.  What if this was not the person God had for me?  What if it was not ‘His Will’ for my life?  What if I am going to make a huge mistake and ruin both our lives?  Do I love Nate more than God? (THAT is a BIG no no and a sure sign that God doesn’t want you with that person).  The questions would go round and round in my head and I had no way to know what God really wanted.  Some days, I thought Nate was exactly what God wanted for me and other days I felt the exact opposite.  So, the questions continued.  Obsessive thoughts that I could not control.  They would wear me down.  Some days it was hard to function normally.  And I would cry….a lot.  I was so afraid that God was angry with me for being in this relationship.

Eventually, the relationship with Nate ended and I leveled out emotionally.  This leveling out was NOT because my (undiagnosed) anxiety disorder had gotten any better (at this point, I had no clue that their something was wrong with me) but rather because I no longer had to wrestle with the question of whether or not Nate and I should be together.  I would continue to struggle with the anxiety and OCD throughout college and well into my late 20’s.  It was then that everything changed.  It was then that the ‘crazies’ came to town….

The Thread of Anxiety

[Anxiety has been part of my life for as far back as I can remember.  It is like a piece of thread woven into the tapestry that is my life.  Good or bad, it is a part of me.  It has shaped me.  It has refined me.  It has almost killed me.  This might take a few posts, so bear with me as I attempt to share this part of me and the impact it has had on my life….]

I was a pretty fun loving, outgoing kid.  I was very chatty too.  I had the nick name ‘motor mouth’.  Surprising huh? I was also an anxious kid.  I have a feeling I came out of the womb with a low grade anxiety level that only grew as I experienced my world.  And I was a worrier for sure.  And a serious worrier at that.  I mean, if I got distracted from I was worrying about and forgot what was bugging me, I would keep thinking about it until I remembered.  Now, that is commitment. I was also a sensitive kid. I was that kid that couldn’t kill the insects for the 6^th grade bug collection science project; I drew pictures of them instead.  I was also sensitive to people’s emotions and moods as well. I would pick up on all kinds of relational nuances and subtleties that could be overwhelming to a child.  Honestly, I think it was my sensitivity to all that was going on around me that made me anxious and worried.  

It didn’t help that I grew up in the 80’s when the cold war tensions were high and the AIDS epidemic was beginning.  There also seemed to be an endless number of children being abducted by creepy guys in windowless vans. And, I knew that I was next.  I could see the news headlines, “Girl Disappears on Route to Friends House… Authorities not Hopeful.”  On top of all that, my Dad was a bit paranoid of Governmental Conspiracies and had me convinced that the movie “RED DAWN” was going to happen, it was just a matter of time. (For you young whippersnappers, “Red Dawn” was a movie about the US being invaded by Russia, or Cuba, or some other scary country and it scared the shit out of me).  This is NOT something to tell you highly sensitive, anxious child.  It shouldn’t have surprised me really, my Dad never showed a lot of discernment when it came to what was appropriate to share with his children.  This is the same man that took my brother and I to see the movie, “Porky’s” when I was 11 years old.  

When I hit the 6^th grade, my anxiety hit a new level and began to manifest itself in a very  apparent way.  At the time, Obessive Complusive Disorder (OCD) was not recognized or understood as it is today.  OCD is an anxiety disorder that is characterized by intrusive, unwanted thoughts that create stress, fear, worry, etc.  It is generally accompanied by some sort of compulsive behavior in hopes of relieving the stress, fear, worry, etc.  Mine was of the classic nature.  Hand washing.  I would wash my hands constantly.  Now, this was in 1982 and I was in school for 7 hours a day, 5 days a week.  Do you remember the hand soap they had back then?  It was like powdered Tide but pink. Needless to say, It didn’t take long for my hands to become a bloody mess. Literally.

My parents were obviously concerned and wanted to know why I was washing my hand in incessantly but I wouldn’t tell them.  I pretended I didn’t know.  But I knew why.  You see, there was a man who owned the local bowling alley who was arrested for child molestation.  I knew this man.  It was very upsetting and anxiety producing for me.  Every time I thought of it, I felt dirty and NEEDED to wash my hands.  I know what you’re thinking, “Did this man molest you?”  No.  If he did, I have buried it down deep and have no memory of it.  And as far as I know, I was never molested by anyone as a child .

So, my parents tried to figure out what was going on but I was of no help. They did take me to the doctor and I was given a prescription hand cream that would help my hands heal. It actually would have worked quite well but I was unable to stop the compulsive hand washing.  This was when my Dad took it up a notch (I think out of desperation).  He pulled me aside and told me that if I didn’t stop washing my hands, they would get infected, I would get gangrene and they would have to cut them off.  It worked. I stopped.  And life went on as normal….sort of.   

I wish I could say that my hand washing was an isolated incident and that my OCD never reared its’ ugly again but that is not the case…..