kimberley2010
06-12-2010, 05:30 PM
I have been suffering from anxiety on and off for the last few years and today i decided to write an account of how it affects me in the hope of explaining more to my family what im going through and how i will beat it. I try to outline and explain in detail the distressing symptoms i feel.
I thought i would post it here for others to read because i know it always makes me feel better when i know im not alone with the way i feel. If anyone has any support or advice i would be so happy to hear from you. I also hope this brings a small degree of comfort to someone who reads it. i warn you now its fairly long!
At the age of 22 I have suffered for 3 major periods of time with crippling bouts of what has been diagnosed as a panic disorder. I am finally getting the right treatment and help so that I can hopefully eliminate this dreadful illness from my life completely and stop it from happening again. As my doctor tells me, at the moment I’m in the middle of a storm, there will be ups and downs, but at the end of the storm there will be calm. As I want to write a full account on the struggle I am having with anxiety I feel it’s important to mention the history and what triggered it for me.
My problems with anxiety started around the age of 17. One night in with my
boyfriend we decided to smoke what only can be described as some sort of super skunk – I was later told what I went through that night was probably the similar equivalent to an acid trip. I don’t remember too much about that night but I know that I had never felt anything remotely similar to that in my life, I didn’t even realise it was possible for the human body to feel such things. The first real memory I have of that trip was hearing someone panicking and shrieking and another voice trying to calm this person down. I suddenly came back to reality and realised that it was actually me that was panicking and my boyfriend was desperately trying to comfort me. The hours that followed were so disturbing; I constantly felt like I was being pulled in an out of reality, almost as though I was having an out of body experience. My boyfriend whilst hugging me could feel me physically being ‘pulled away’ as I clung onto him desperately trying to stay in ‘reality.’ Everything that was said repeated in my head 3 times, and I can still hear myself saying ‘I’m gone again’ and the echoes that followed after I got pulled ‘away’ again. I remember thinking at that time that there was no way that my brain was ever going to be normal again, and five years on it has only just occurred to me that I have been harbouring and dwelling on this thought ever since.
After that night things went back to normal although I was completely shaken up about what had happened. I remember complaining about feeling spaced out, almost as though I hadn’t quite returned back to my normal state after the trip, but I put this to one side and was just grateful that I felt relatively normal again. A few weeks went past and it appears that subconsciously I must have been thinking about the way I was feeling more that I realised as this was when I first experienced my first real bout of anxiety. I was sitting in the assembly hall at school and all of a sudden it was like a switch just flicked in my brain. I got the biggest rush of fear just take over my entire body and it’s almost as though my thoughts felt all jumbled up and I couldn’t think straight. I managed to sit through the assembly but as soon as it finished I ran straight back to my room and called my mum. I had absolutely no idea what was happening to me and was absolutely petrified, before this I had always thought of myself as a very stable down to earth girl and now I felt as though I had completely lost control. I was taken straight to the doctor and immediately diagnosed with anxiety. As I felt so distressed I was referred straight to a psychiatrist where I went and did my best to explain my problems and symptoms. I immediately was diagnosed with obsessive thought disorder, a common symptom of anxiety. We decided to go down the medication route, although some people believe anxiety it best treated through means of techniques such a cognative behaviour therapy, I had my A levels coming up very soon and needed to get better as soon as possible. I started taking tablets that I cannot even remember the name of, but they started to have some unfavourable side effects on me, so I was then put on Fluoxetine, commonly known as Prozac, which is used in successfully treating anxiety disorders, not just depression as its famously known for. After months of struggling with this disorder, frequent visits to my psychiatrist and the medicine finally kicking in meant that eventually I started to feel like my normal self again. After I believed I was better I was very quick to dismiss the medicine and felt quite ashamed about how ‘weak’ and ‘pathetic’ I felt when looking back at the state that I had been in. I think it also just scared me looking at how much I deteriorated from being such a stable person to this vulnerable wreck needing to sleep in my mums bed for weeks. I stopped the medication much more abruptly than I should have done but I just couldn’t wait to move on and leave what had happened behind me.
I went on to have 3 incredible years at university, where I believed I had not been affected by anxiety in the slightest. However now when I look back there were definitely times where I did feel a degree of anxiousness, it was just nowhere near as distressing as the time before and I just constantly put it to the back of my mind. I guess this eventually caught up with me because one night after having a lovely night with my new boyfriend I suffered my first panic attack in about 4 years. It all started when I started to become aware that my throat was feeling slightly tight and that I couldn’t breathe very well, I tried to ignore this though as I didn’t want to make a fuss in front of my new boyfriend. We were lying in bed talking and all of a sudden the room started to spin and everything he was saying to me started to stop making sense. I stood up not really knowing what I was doing and proceeded to faint, with my boyfriend luckily catching me before I hit the floor. When I came to I asked him to call an ambulance because I had recently been diagnosed with diabetes and I was terrified that perhaps my sugar level had dropped too low and I was having a fit. It may sound dramatic but I had never felt anything like that and I was petrified. After having my blood pressure taken and sugar levels checked it seemed that nothing was the matter. The weeks that followed I had every test by the best doctors in London as I was convinced there must be something wrong with me, but they found nothing. The only problem that this fainting fit had caused was the triggering of my anxiety disorder again. I can imagine the reason this happened is because my body was reminded of the out of control and almost out of body experienced It felt that time I had the bad trip, and once more I was back to where I never thought I would be again. I was sent straight to a different psychiatrist that was recommended to me by another doctor in London and once again I poured over the details of my problems. We decided that as Fluoxetine had worked so well for me the first time it would make sense to start this treatment immediately to get me better as soon as possible, as I was starting a ski season in a few months time. Luckily with regular trips to the doctor and taking it easy for a few weeks once again I finally started feeling like myself again and went off to enjoy my ski season with no real problems. However I made the mistake of coming off the medicine very abruptly again.
This brings me to where I am now. It’s hard to put into words the exact feelings and emotions that run through me at times when I feel like this and I thought that the only way I can expect people to try understand the way I am feeling to put into words what is happening to me as it happens, because once it has passed I can no longer envisage the physical and emotional distress that it causes me. Once again my anxiety was triggered by a fainting spell again, which I am starting to learn may be caused from pent up small pangs of anxiety from months before hand that I have ignored.
I think the most distressing and upsetting symptom for me is depersonalization. The only way I can explain this feeling for people that have not experienced it is complete detachment from your body. It’s almost as though you feel like you are watching someone else do the things you are doing. Everything surrounding you feels quite dreamy and unrealistic, and dwelling on this feeling too much can create very negative feelings for me. For those who have never suffered with it, I pray they never do as I feel that no one should have to suffer from this. The only time I get a slight moment of normality is when I close my eyes and think about how I felt when I wasn’t suffering from anxiety. Then once they are open again I am dragged back into what has now become my reality. The dreamy and detached feeling that I feel on a constant basis is completely unsettling – and the days where I am too tired to fight with my thoughts about how I will feel better I often feel as though I’m just going to fade away, almost like my brain is just going to switch off as it becomes completely detached – it sounds completely odd but that’s the only way to describe it. This symptom affects me in different ways on a daily basis. Sometimes it gets so bad that I do not want to be around of speak to people because having to concentrate and listen to what they are saying just emphasizes how detached and odd I feel, having to sit at a dinner table is almost unbearable for me at times. Other days it helps me to be around people as it makes me feel more ‘alive’ and ‘real’ and physical contact can sometimes make a huge difference.
The most distressing times for me are what I can only describe as the peak of my anxiety attacks. The first time this happened to me (the fainting incident) I thought it was just a one off and put it down to low sugar levels or dehydration after the doctors dismissed it being anything serious, unfortunately I have come to learn that I can trigger this kind of attack simply from a very high level of anxiety and have experienced it numerous times during this bout of anxiety. The general routine of these attacks is as follows; I usually start to make myself completely aware of how detached I feel, especially if someone is talking to me their words start to become confusing and stop making much sense to me. I feel my brain start going blurry and almost like I am slowly just fading away from reality, it genuinely feels at these moments that I am living the last few seconds of my life. I get a huge burning rush that goes up my body at that moment where I feel like its just all going to end. Only once have I actually lost consciousness from this but it feels as though I am going to every time this happens. Its as though my body is wanting me to pass out almost to just get a few seconds of calm and stop my thoughts from becoming completely overwhelming. These funny turns are new symptoms for me, as I never experienced anything like it the first bout of anxiety I got, and only once (which was the trigger) in the second bout. A lot of the time my actual anxious thoughts are about getting one of these funny turns, which often triggers them, making it a vicious circle.
I seem to suffer from many of the different symptoms that come along with anxiety. Perhaps the hardest to budge for me personally are the obsessive thoughts that I get, which I have suffered from since the very first time I developed the anxiety. My brain is in overdrive for 24 hours a day, bombarding me with disturbing and catastrophizing thoughts. The main ones that affect me are:
1) I am, or have gone mad.
2) I have lost or am losing touch with reality.
3) I feel as though my brain is just going to ‘switch off’ or I will ‘fade away’
4) I feel like I will never be/have forgotten what its like to be normal again.
The only way I can describe the feeling that these obsessive thoughts give me, to a person that has not suffered, is that feeling if you think too much into the thought of death; everyone at some point has sat and thought long and hard about the perpetuity of death, and once you think about this in depth it all gets a bit overwhelming and you have to stop thinking about it. For me this is a frequent occurrence with all sorts of these disturbing thoughts so overpowering I feel that I just simply cannot control them. It’s the times that they get so overwhelming where I generally get one of my fainting turns.
I also suffer anxiety about my physical health on a daily basis. There is always some point during the day where I am convinced my throat is closing up. Although it never happens and I always manage to forget about it after a while it is still unsettling and uncomfortable when it happens. I also panic that I am just going to die, especially when I get one of my fainting spells and also another huge fear of mine is the thought of losing my sight. Although all these things may sound ridiculous but they are actually very disturbing in my current state of mind.
I am now three weeks into starting the Fluoxitine and have yet to feel many positive affects which is very disconcerting for me considering by this point the two times before I have been like this I have seen significant improvements in the way I was feeling. The only positive thought I can draw from this is that this is the worst attack I am going to have to overcome, and instead of just ignoring it the second I feel better I am going to learn more and receive ongoing treatment to ensure I have eliminated this once and for all. Another reason I think this anxiety has seemed to have been prolonged more than usual is because I knew I had to be better in a few weeks for a holiday. I had numerous psychology sessions packed into the few days before I was due to go but I woke up on the morning and much to my utter disappointment I just knew that I couldn’t go. That was two days ago and I know that it was the right decision to make. I now have all the time in the world to relax and recover and take as much time as I need.
I am having some good and bad days at the moment. When I say good I mean bare-able. There have been some days where I have felt so anxious every second of the day I just didn’t even know what to do with myself. Recently I have generally been able to relax myself more, with a little help from valium, and just either watch television or use my computer; these are the only real times I can take my mind of the way I feel for a few minutes, I have to have a constant distraction to stop the anxious thoughts taking over. I feel at the moment that I am just hanging around waiting for the medicine to start kicking in to give me that extra boost I need to take control over my thoughts. The way the medicine has helped me before is that it seems to suppress the obsessive thoughts to a bearable level and once this starts happening I start to feel as though I can finally get a grip of them and not allow them to get too overwhelming. I am on 60mgs a day at the moment so with any luck it should start really kicking in within the next couple of days.
This is the first time I have actually seeked psychological help for this illness, the first two times I just saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed my problems and prescribed me with medicine but now I am also have frequent meetings with a psychologist aswell. She has helped explain many things to me and although it doesn’t stop the feelings I am getting it is sometimes a huge comfort to think about the things I have discussed with her in my sessions. One of the most important things that she has assured me of is that I am not going mad. Although I ‘feel’ mad at the moment I am not and will not lose control of my brain. It is hard for me to believe this a lot of the time but having that professional promise has given me a certain degree of comfort. Another thing that the sessions help me with are the realization that the things I am feeling are normal. I believed that I had a serious mental issue and that no one else could possibly be feeling the way I do but after her assurance, and vast internet research I have come to the understanding that actually all the symptoms I have are completely normal and are just the awful side effects of anxiety and they are completely harmless. The most important thing about this time that I have become unwell is that I am determined for this to be the last time this happens to me.. Never before has the fact been addressed that I have been blaming myself for years for smoking that marijuana and I have an inbuilt belief that I have actually ruined my brain and that I would never be normal again. I think this is going to be important to address once I have started to improve slightly as my anxiety will never truly go until I accept the fact that I haven’t ruined my brain and I can be 100% normal again. I think we are also going to work with techniques like cognative behaviour therapy to ensure the prevention of this happening again.
At the moment I look at the way I feel and I find it hard to believe that I will ever feel well again. I get extremely low thinking about all the fun I have when I am feeling good and almost start feeling guilty for not appreciating it more. I need to just sit tight and be patient. Hopefully because this time I have felt so bad and it is going to be a longer road for recovery these feelings of appreciation will stay with me rather than me just trying to ignore it ever happed like the first two times. I also hope to have more empathy for others when I feel better and more understanding to those with these types of problems, because as I said before the first two times I recovered I liked to pretend it had never happened and I didn’t want to admit that I had been so ‘weak’ at some points. I’ve now come to accept that I’m not weak its just a part of my personality that I can deal with and eventually overcome and if I can gain any positivity out of this happening again is that I have gained a much larger understanding of anxiety and hopefully in the future I can finally accept that I’m not going crazy, I’m not weak, I’m not abnormal and its certainly not something to be embarrassed and ashamed about.
I thought i would post it here for others to read because i know it always makes me feel better when i know im not alone with the way i feel. If anyone has any support or advice i would be so happy to hear from you. I also hope this brings a small degree of comfort to someone who reads it. i warn you now its fairly long!
At the age of 22 I have suffered for 3 major periods of time with crippling bouts of what has been diagnosed as a panic disorder. I am finally getting the right treatment and help so that I can hopefully eliminate this dreadful illness from my life completely and stop it from happening again. As my doctor tells me, at the moment I’m in the middle of a storm, there will be ups and downs, but at the end of the storm there will be calm. As I want to write a full account on the struggle I am having with anxiety I feel it’s important to mention the history and what triggered it for me.
My problems with anxiety started around the age of 17. One night in with my
boyfriend we decided to smoke what only can be described as some sort of super skunk – I was later told what I went through that night was probably the similar equivalent to an acid trip. I don’t remember too much about that night but I know that I had never felt anything remotely similar to that in my life, I didn’t even realise it was possible for the human body to feel such things. The first real memory I have of that trip was hearing someone panicking and shrieking and another voice trying to calm this person down. I suddenly came back to reality and realised that it was actually me that was panicking and my boyfriend was desperately trying to comfort me. The hours that followed were so disturbing; I constantly felt like I was being pulled in an out of reality, almost as though I was having an out of body experience. My boyfriend whilst hugging me could feel me physically being ‘pulled away’ as I clung onto him desperately trying to stay in ‘reality.’ Everything that was said repeated in my head 3 times, and I can still hear myself saying ‘I’m gone again’ and the echoes that followed after I got pulled ‘away’ again. I remember thinking at that time that there was no way that my brain was ever going to be normal again, and five years on it has only just occurred to me that I have been harbouring and dwelling on this thought ever since.
After that night things went back to normal although I was completely shaken up about what had happened. I remember complaining about feeling spaced out, almost as though I hadn’t quite returned back to my normal state after the trip, but I put this to one side and was just grateful that I felt relatively normal again. A few weeks went past and it appears that subconsciously I must have been thinking about the way I was feeling more that I realised as this was when I first experienced my first real bout of anxiety. I was sitting in the assembly hall at school and all of a sudden it was like a switch just flicked in my brain. I got the biggest rush of fear just take over my entire body and it’s almost as though my thoughts felt all jumbled up and I couldn’t think straight. I managed to sit through the assembly but as soon as it finished I ran straight back to my room and called my mum. I had absolutely no idea what was happening to me and was absolutely petrified, before this I had always thought of myself as a very stable down to earth girl and now I felt as though I had completely lost control. I was taken straight to the doctor and immediately diagnosed with anxiety. As I felt so distressed I was referred straight to a psychiatrist where I went and did my best to explain my problems and symptoms. I immediately was diagnosed with obsessive thought disorder, a common symptom of anxiety. We decided to go down the medication route, although some people believe anxiety it best treated through means of techniques such a cognative behaviour therapy, I had my A levels coming up very soon and needed to get better as soon as possible. I started taking tablets that I cannot even remember the name of, but they started to have some unfavourable side effects on me, so I was then put on Fluoxetine, commonly known as Prozac, which is used in successfully treating anxiety disorders, not just depression as its famously known for. After months of struggling with this disorder, frequent visits to my psychiatrist and the medicine finally kicking in meant that eventually I started to feel like my normal self again. After I believed I was better I was very quick to dismiss the medicine and felt quite ashamed about how ‘weak’ and ‘pathetic’ I felt when looking back at the state that I had been in. I think it also just scared me looking at how much I deteriorated from being such a stable person to this vulnerable wreck needing to sleep in my mums bed for weeks. I stopped the medication much more abruptly than I should have done but I just couldn’t wait to move on and leave what had happened behind me.
I went on to have 3 incredible years at university, where I believed I had not been affected by anxiety in the slightest. However now when I look back there were definitely times where I did feel a degree of anxiousness, it was just nowhere near as distressing as the time before and I just constantly put it to the back of my mind. I guess this eventually caught up with me because one night after having a lovely night with my new boyfriend I suffered my first panic attack in about 4 years. It all started when I started to become aware that my throat was feeling slightly tight and that I couldn’t breathe very well, I tried to ignore this though as I didn’t want to make a fuss in front of my new boyfriend. We were lying in bed talking and all of a sudden the room started to spin and everything he was saying to me started to stop making sense. I stood up not really knowing what I was doing and proceeded to faint, with my boyfriend luckily catching me before I hit the floor. When I came to I asked him to call an ambulance because I had recently been diagnosed with diabetes and I was terrified that perhaps my sugar level had dropped too low and I was having a fit. It may sound dramatic but I had never felt anything like that and I was petrified. After having my blood pressure taken and sugar levels checked it seemed that nothing was the matter. The weeks that followed I had every test by the best doctors in London as I was convinced there must be something wrong with me, but they found nothing. The only problem that this fainting fit had caused was the triggering of my anxiety disorder again. I can imagine the reason this happened is because my body was reminded of the out of control and almost out of body experienced It felt that time I had the bad trip, and once more I was back to where I never thought I would be again. I was sent straight to a different psychiatrist that was recommended to me by another doctor in London and once again I poured over the details of my problems. We decided that as Fluoxetine had worked so well for me the first time it would make sense to start this treatment immediately to get me better as soon as possible, as I was starting a ski season in a few months time. Luckily with regular trips to the doctor and taking it easy for a few weeks once again I finally started feeling like myself again and went off to enjoy my ski season with no real problems. However I made the mistake of coming off the medicine very abruptly again.
This brings me to where I am now. It’s hard to put into words the exact feelings and emotions that run through me at times when I feel like this and I thought that the only way I can expect people to try understand the way I am feeling to put into words what is happening to me as it happens, because once it has passed I can no longer envisage the physical and emotional distress that it causes me. Once again my anxiety was triggered by a fainting spell again, which I am starting to learn may be caused from pent up small pangs of anxiety from months before hand that I have ignored.
I think the most distressing and upsetting symptom for me is depersonalization. The only way I can explain this feeling for people that have not experienced it is complete detachment from your body. It’s almost as though you feel like you are watching someone else do the things you are doing. Everything surrounding you feels quite dreamy and unrealistic, and dwelling on this feeling too much can create very negative feelings for me. For those who have never suffered with it, I pray they never do as I feel that no one should have to suffer from this. The only time I get a slight moment of normality is when I close my eyes and think about how I felt when I wasn’t suffering from anxiety. Then once they are open again I am dragged back into what has now become my reality. The dreamy and detached feeling that I feel on a constant basis is completely unsettling – and the days where I am too tired to fight with my thoughts about how I will feel better I often feel as though I’m just going to fade away, almost like my brain is just going to switch off as it becomes completely detached – it sounds completely odd but that’s the only way to describe it. This symptom affects me in different ways on a daily basis. Sometimes it gets so bad that I do not want to be around of speak to people because having to concentrate and listen to what they are saying just emphasizes how detached and odd I feel, having to sit at a dinner table is almost unbearable for me at times. Other days it helps me to be around people as it makes me feel more ‘alive’ and ‘real’ and physical contact can sometimes make a huge difference.
The most distressing times for me are what I can only describe as the peak of my anxiety attacks. The first time this happened to me (the fainting incident) I thought it was just a one off and put it down to low sugar levels or dehydration after the doctors dismissed it being anything serious, unfortunately I have come to learn that I can trigger this kind of attack simply from a very high level of anxiety and have experienced it numerous times during this bout of anxiety. The general routine of these attacks is as follows; I usually start to make myself completely aware of how detached I feel, especially if someone is talking to me their words start to become confusing and stop making much sense to me. I feel my brain start going blurry and almost like I am slowly just fading away from reality, it genuinely feels at these moments that I am living the last few seconds of my life. I get a huge burning rush that goes up my body at that moment where I feel like its just all going to end. Only once have I actually lost consciousness from this but it feels as though I am going to every time this happens. Its as though my body is wanting me to pass out almost to just get a few seconds of calm and stop my thoughts from becoming completely overwhelming. These funny turns are new symptoms for me, as I never experienced anything like it the first bout of anxiety I got, and only once (which was the trigger) in the second bout. A lot of the time my actual anxious thoughts are about getting one of these funny turns, which often triggers them, making it a vicious circle.
I seem to suffer from many of the different symptoms that come along with anxiety. Perhaps the hardest to budge for me personally are the obsessive thoughts that I get, which I have suffered from since the very first time I developed the anxiety. My brain is in overdrive for 24 hours a day, bombarding me with disturbing and catastrophizing thoughts. The main ones that affect me are:
1) I am, or have gone mad.
2) I have lost or am losing touch with reality.
3) I feel as though my brain is just going to ‘switch off’ or I will ‘fade away’
4) I feel like I will never be/have forgotten what its like to be normal again.
The only way I can describe the feeling that these obsessive thoughts give me, to a person that has not suffered, is that feeling if you think too much into the thought of death; everyone at some point has sat and thought long and hard about the perpetuity of death, and once you think about this in depth it all gets a bit overwhelming and you have to stop thinking about it. For me this is a frequent occurrence with all sorts of these disturbing thoughts so overpowering I feel that I just simply cannot control them. It’s the times that they get so overwhelming where I generally get one of my fainting turns.
I also suffer anxiety about my physical health on a daily basis. There is always some point during the day where I am convinced my throat is closing up. Although it never happens and I always manage to forget about it after a while it is still unsettling and uncomfortable when it happens. I also panic that I am just going to die, especially when I get one of my fainting spells and also another huge fear of mine is the thought of losing my sight. Although all these things may sound ridiculous but they are actually very disturbing in my current state of mind.
I am now three weeks into starting the Fluoxitine and have yet to feel many positive affects which is very disconcerting for me considering by this point the two times before I have been like this I have seen significant improvements in the way I was feeling. The only positive thought I can draw from this is that this is the worst attack I am going to have to overcome, and instead of just ignoring it the second I feel better I am going to learn more and receive ongoing treatment to ensure I have eliminated this once and for all. Another reason I think this anxiety has seemed to have been prolonged more than usual is because I knew I had to be better in a few weeks for a holiday. I had numerous psychology sessions packed into the few days before I was due to go but I woke up on the morning and much to my utter disappointment I just knew that I couldn’t go. That was two days ago and I know that it was the right decision to make. I now have all the time in the world to relax and recover and take as much time as I need.
I am having some good and bad days at the moment. When I say good I mean bare-able. There have been some days where I have felt so anxious every second of the day I just didn’t even know what to do with myself. Recently I have generally been able to relax myself more, with a little help from valium, and just either watch television or use my computer; these are the only real times I can take my mind of the way I feel for a few minutes, I have to have a constant distraction to stop the anxious thoughts taking over. I feel at the moment that I am just hanging around waiting for the medicine to start kicking in to give me that extra boost I need to take control over my thoughts. The way the medicine has helped me before is that it seems to suppress the obsessive thoughts to a bearable level and once this starts happening I start to feel as though I can finally get a grip of them and not allow them to get too overwhelming. I am on 60mgs a day at the moment so with any luck it should start really kicking in within the next couple of days.
This is the first time I have actually seeked psychological help for this illness, the first two times I just saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed my problems and prescribed me with medicine but now I am also have frequent meetings with a psychologist aswell. She has helped explain many things to me and although it doesn’t stop the feelings I am getting it is sometimes a huge comfort to think about the things I have discussed with her in my sessions. One of the most important things that she has assured me of is that I am not going mad. Although I ‘feel’ mad at the moment I am not and will not lose control of my brain. It is hard for me to believe this a lot of the time but having that professional promise has given me a certain degree of comfort. Another thing that the sessions help me with are the realization that the things I am feeling are normal. I believed that I had a serious mental issue and that no one else could possibly be feeling the way I do but after her assurance, and vast internet research I have come to the understanding that actually all the symptoms I have are completely normal and are just the awful side effects of anxiety and they are completely harmless. The most important thing about this time that I have become unwell is that I am determined for this to be the last time this happens to me.. Never before has the fact been addressed that I have been blaming myself for years for smoking that marijuana and I have an inbuilt belief that I have actually ruined my brain and that I would never be normal again. I think this is going to be important to address once I have started to improve slightly as my anxiety will never truly go until I accept the fact that I haven’t ruined my brain and I can be 100% normal again. I think we are also going to work with techniques like cognative behaviour therapy to ensure the prevention of this happening again.
At the moment I look at the way I feel and I find it hard to believe that I will ever feel well again. I get extremely low thinking about all the fun I have when I am feeling good and almost start feeling guilty for not appreciating it more. I need to just sit tight and be patient. Hopefully because this time I have felt so bad and it is going to be a longer road for recovery these feelings of appreciation will stay with me rather than me just trying to ignore it ever happed like the first two times. I also hope to have more empathy for others when I feel better and more understanding to those with these types of problems, because as I said before the first two times I recovered I liked to pretend it had never happened and I didn’t want to admit that I had been so ‘weak’ at some points. I’ve now come to accept that I’m not weak its just a part of my personality that I can deal with and eventually overcome and if I can gain any positivity out of this happening again is that I have gained a much larger understanding of anxiety and hopefully in the future I can finally accept that I’m not going crazy, I’m not weak, I’m not abnormal and its certainly not something to be embarrassed and ashamed about.