Wishing It Was & Making It Happen

This morning I was dancing in my living room (something I do for exercise and brain chemistry therapy), listening to Santana's Supernatural. One of the songs, "Wishing it Was," perfectly describes the dilemma of bad brain chemistry.  Here are some of the lyrics:  "Beauty and grace is what touches me most / Good times can put me in fear / I always feel safe when things are bad / So I cannot let you come near / It seems that I thrive on the dark side of things / I always feel alive when death bell rings / Now you come and bring out the tears in me."

As I explained in my theory of bad brain chemistry, the hyper-alert or super-observant person feels anxious because she is aware of the dangers or potential dangers around her.  Once she figures out where that danger is coming from and deals with it--by fighting or running away from it--she feels better. But for those of us who live in a relatively safe environment, real dangers are few and far between.  Yet despite the absence of danger, the hyperalert (HA) person still feels anxious.  He wants to fix the anxiety, but in order to do so, he must find the source of that anxiety and deal with it.  That's pretty hard to do, of course, when it doesn't exist.  So he comes up with a source of danger, something not too difficult to do if he has any kind of imagination.  Once he identifies the "danger," then he can respond to it and feel better.

I think the seemingly paradoxical statement from the speaker in the song--"I always feel safe when things are bad"--illustrates my point quite well.  If things are going well for him, he gets anxious, because he knows danger is lurking somewhere: "Good times put me in fear."  But once he responds to the danger, he feels better: "I always feel alive when the death bell rings." 

But the line that is the most poignant, and perhaps most indicative of the bad brain chemistry dilemma is this one: "So I cannot let you come near."  He can't allow himself to be happy with someone he loves because that makes him unhappy.

Here's the chorus of the song: "Pain never makes me cry, but happiness does / It's so strange to watch your life walk by / Wishing it was / Wishing it was more like a fantasy / Where every day surprises me / Wishing it was."

He'd like to have a "fantasy" life where he enjoys the "surprises" of life, but he can't.  To me, surprise has a good connotation: something you don't expect happens to you, and you're pleased.  If something unexpected happens to an anxious person, he's afraid.  That's not going to work in a love relationship because part of getting to know someone is exploring the differences, delighting in the strangeness of the other.  For the hyperalert person, the stranger is a threat that must be escaped from or destroyed.

The last part of the song shows his regret over the way he is: "This feeling won't last cause I cannot survive / I tell you I've been here before / When it's moving this fast / It's a matter of time / One of us walks out the door." He chooses to escape the danger of a relationship before it goes too far.

In the wild, animals only explore the strange other when they feel safe.  Bad brain chemistry interferes with the natural inclination to explore, to socialize, to pair-bond because it won't allow the person to feel safe when she is safe.

And that's what I struggle to do every day--make the bad brain chemistry go away so I can enjoy the good things in life.

The Hidden Face of Bad Brain Chemistry

At 4:30 this morning I woke up, as I usually do, but was unable to fall back to sleep.  I remembered that my mother is once again threatening to leave the nursing home and move back in with my sister, despite the fact that she is well cared for in a very nice home. Even she admits it's a nice home, which is a big admission for her.  Then I remembered all the other times over the years that she and my father and my sister have made terrible decisions.  Of course, when that would happen I'd be angry and frustrated because I care about them and the pain they go through when things go wrong. I always hope they will listen to me or learn from their mistakes, but it seems as if they seldom do.  They refuse to plan ahead or anticipate the consequences of their decisions until it's too late and the die has been cast.

Ah well, it's not as if I've never made a bad decision.  I do know, though, that many bad decisions are the result of bad brain chemistry.  For instance, when I'm in the throes of depression or fear or rage, I just want out of it, and will do anything to make a change to my mood.  In the past, I would change my mood by changing my life--quit my job, move to a new state, etc.  I've since learned that all I needed to do was make the bad brain chemistry go away.  And making it go away is simple--I just do some scanning activity, such as playing Solitaire.  Exercise helps too.  Or writing, as I'm doing now.

I can't control other people, and I guess I don't really want to.  I just want them to know what I know--that brain chemistry is controlling them, but they can do something about it.  They can help themselves before they do something they'll regret.  They can get a handle on bad brain chemistry.

Of course, knowing what to do and doing it are two different things.  Rage is a manifestation of bad brain chemistry that's particularly difficult to control, I've found.  When I'm in a rage, I lash out before I can remember that it's just bad brain chemistry, that it's a response to fear, and that how I'm about to respond--yell at my boss or pass on a curve, for instance--is probably way over the top and may be quite risky.

How to keep from letting bad brain chemistry rule?  Recognize it for what it is.  Don't be fooled by the disguise.  What looks like righteous indignation may really be craven fear.  What seems like a rational decision based on facts is underneath an irrational decision based on bad brain chemistry and trumped up evidence.  Be suspicious of speed.  Most decisions don't have to be made immediately, so what's the hurry?

Again, not so easy when the mood is upon me.  But I keep working on it.  And I'll keep posting my progress here.

My Daily Dread

Early this morning, as usual, I awoke with a feeling of dread. I've read that the body is at its lowest ebb around 3 a.m., and I know that must be true because that is the time that I seem to feel the worst.  If I can go back to sleep, I'm okay, but if I don't go to sleep right away, I start thinking.  Usually I'm thinking of all the things that either have gone wrong or could go wrong, things I did or didn't do that I regret, things I fear or resent.  Once I start thinking that way, it's hard to stop.  Often I end up staying awake, getting up in three or four hours to go to work, sleep deprived.

It's been many years since I slept through the night without waking, without going through the hour of dread.  It's been only about 10 years that I've recognized the dread for what it is--bad brain chemistry--and tried to deal with it rationally, using a number of mental tricks I've developed to stop the obsessive thinking so I can go back to sleep.

Sometimes I think about a story I want to write, or one I've read.  Or I think about a mundane task I need to perform and visualize myself going through it.  And if I'm really having a hard time putting thoughts aside, I play word games in my head.  One that works well is to imagine a word that's fairly long and has a variety of vowels and consonants in it, such as perpendicular, and try to come up with as many words as possible that can be made from those letters, such as per, perp, pen, pic, pend, ped, pile, etc.  That exercise focuses my mind on something neutral, forcing it to set aside the obsessive thoughts and allow me to go back to sleep.

This morning, I thought about starting this blog, how I would begin to tell the story of a problem that has plagued me nearly all my life.  That technique worked pretty well; I was able to drift off and get a couple more hours of sleep.  It wasn't the first time I've used that particular focusing trick; I've planned this blog many times before, but never followed through.  This time, for whatever reason, I've been able to move past planning and actually begin.

So here I am, chronicling what for me is a daily struggle to keep what I used to call the gloomy-doomies at bay.  Writing is one of the things I do that helps.  But I have to be careful not to make writing an occasion for anxiety. If it's to work as a therapeutic endeavor, it has to be virtually risk-free. Perhaps that's why blogging works--I have very little to lose with this form of writing, especially since almost no one knows I'm here.  It is what it is: my thoughts on the topic at hand at the particular moment I write them.  I do try to be coherent and express myself as well as I can, but the important point is to get it down on "paper," to create a message that communicates what I know and feel about . . . whatever.

Here is something I know about dealing with bad brain chemistry: it's not at all easy, but it is, I think, simple.  And it is possible.  The main truth, the one I start with, is that chemical imbalance is a physical problem but one that can be solved by using the mind.  And that is what I'm chronicling here: my defective brain chemistry, its effects, and my efforts to control as much as possible its impact on my life.