Blurring The Edges - The Mind Thing

The mind thing.

That's what I called it before I heard the terms 'fragmentation' or 'dissociation'.

For a long time I have been aware of the mind thing. It happens sometimes when my anxiety levels get really high begin to tip over into panic. Sadly, it doesn't hang around when a full blown panic attack strikes. Instead it usually appears at the most inconvenient time, usually when I am in a situation where I am engaged in conversation with someone and cannot possibly indicate that there is anything even slightly wrong.

Picture me, driving up a dual carriageway, with one of our more 'interesting' students in my car (minbus overflow - educational trip - kid not to be trusted in large groups).
Of course I have been stressed. ALL trips out raise my (normally too-moderate-to-be-comfortable) anxiety levels, but it's not as if I am panicking or anything... At least, I don't think so, until the zooming begins and the swooping darkness and the sense of that I am losing my grip on reality. It is as though my mind has suddenly begun to push against itself to create a little dented fontanelle, space enough to fold inwards.
I am battling the growing sense of what I can only describe as 'being corridored'. My mind is becoming a breath stealingly narrow passage lit by low energy bulbs which won't warm up.
And all the time, the disaffected student is talking and I am trying to focus on the words and respond at the same time as forcing my eyes to blink hard and believe that the road and traffic ahead is actually real. It is not a computer game. I am 'in' this.
My steering wheel feels part of my hands and when we arrive, I fall into the disquieted aftermath.

The warning often precedes a panic attack which doesn't always come, but if it does, can be a sweeping tornado which wreaks havoc on my inner landscape.
Panic attacks are really a post all of their own but I give them some mention here because, although not always, they are often linked to 'the mind thing'.

Another of the strangest and most disturbing things that I experience when I am zoning out is that the person who I am trying to focus on ("act normal for goodness sakes, act normal!") begins to blur around the edges and then, as though I have starred at the sun for a long time and looked away, the grey patches appear and start to swim around them and over them.
Disorientating to say the least. To say more would be to describe the nausea and the dizziness that swells and washes in crested waves through my head and gut.
I'll leave it there for fear of drowning!

The mind thing happened in therapy. It often does to some extent.
Last session she zoomed in and out and was almost overwhelmed by the monsterous steel grey amoebic blobs which looked as though they were trying to blot her out completely.
Today I knew when it was going to start because the volume went down and I hardly dared look at her. When she asked if she was zooming in and out I explained that she was blurry, as though looking at a photo taken with a soft focus lens. She thought that my mind needed to blur her. It's a protection thing. Psychobabble?
I'm not sure.

I would be interested to know if anyone else experiences this, fragmenting of their mind when they try to talk or anything similar.

More About Walls.

A while back I read this extract by A.J Mahari. She writes about Borderline Personality Disorder which, by by the way, is one pathology that I don't have. However, I think much of what she writes applies to most of us in one way or another (or atlest, at one time or another)

Walls

Walls. Emotional walls, physical walls. Walls of anger, walls of rage, walls of fat; walls that are all designed to protect. Protect what? Have you ever got to the point where you wonder this, protect what?


So much of the "Borderline" behavior and "acting out" is all designed to protect by throwing up walls between oneself and others or oneself and one's very own feelings.


It can get very lonely and isolated and depressing within the confines of these walls. Walls that push loved ones away while a child aspect of you screams for their arms around you, screams for nurture. You reject this nurture, you must protect from the closeness and ache ever so much in the rejecting distance that you yourself have created by becoming a slave to the need for the protection of your walls.

For some people these walls are the scars of self-injury, of cutting themselves over and over again in an effort to find some safe comfort, close comfort from a distance.


For others, numbing out feelings and anger with food the walls that pin you in are layers and layers of fat, eaten there by your own choice to protect and not to learn.


No matter how many walls you can entrap yourself behind, giving more and more power and time to the pain that you seek to protect yourself from feeling.....the pain is always there, close by, maybe an arms length away, a cut away, a burn away, a drink or drug away or a few chocolate bars, a cake, a pie away....there, waiting ever so patiently to be felt, acknowledged and expressed.


If you have built these walls, of behavior, of rage, of injury, of fat, (or of thinness that threatens your life) how can you find your way back to the pain? That pain, being held at bay, on the other side of your walls, is the bridge to your freedom. It is the way to once and for all leave this angst behind.


Borderline Personality Disorder causes those who have it to wall themselves off from what they need and want in ways that recapitulate the past and how they were walled off from that original care-giver with whom no bond was possible.


Think about this today, was that your fault? Do you need to go on punishing yourself, adding wall after wall to your arsenal of lonely, aching defense? You were a young and rightfully needy young child. The "original" wall, that so annihilated you, that threatened your very existence so completely, emotionally, if not physically as well....that fractured your ego to one degree or another is not yours. Go back, get in touch with those feelings, from that original wall of wounds. Feel them and express them, safely and (I speak from experience) you can then learn how to set yourself free from the walls that you are still building. You need to let the "original pain" in, let it flood in (with support/ in therapy), then, learn to cry, grieve it, express it, let it flood out....the results will be a new view on much of your life and of others. You can then systematically, slowly, over time begin to dismantle your walls.

These walls may have "originally" risen up from others in your life who hurt you and let you down, but once you reach adulthood, (by chronological age) it is up to you to get there emotionally too. Reclaim yourself.

You are "good enough", you are "worthy" you do deserve to know a life outside of all of those BPD walls.

Walls. Emotional walls, physical walls. Walls of anger, walls of rage, walls of fat; walls that are all designed to protect. Protect what? Have you ever got to the point where you wonder this, protect what?


The answer is you are trying, in the "here and now" to constantly protect yourself from the "original" wounds of yesterday....you can't anymore, they have already happened, the cause is now long gone.....Subsequently, however, you've continued to make the choice to re-live and re-live this agony....you don't have to anymore. Stop trying to protect yourself from what has happened and what can be over when you choose for it to be. (Through hard work/therapy).


The walls are your walls. The walls are reactionary. The walls are no longer necessary. Step beyond the illusionary safety of the very walls that are much of the source of your pain today.....the world awaits your arrival....you are that world...you are that world waiting to be born, yet again.


Take the walls down. Those walls are no longer viable. They are not holding out new pain, they are holding in very old pain. Take the walls down.


© Ms. A.J. Mahari - May 9, 1999

The first time I read this I was torn between loving it for it's understanding and feeling frustrated by it for its rather blithe 'take down the walls' command.
I love the wisdom, but I hate the state of open vulnerability that it implies we should be living in, should we take down our walls.
I find myself loving the concept of being free, no longer imprisoned, living out of the shadows. And yet, hating the reality of being raw, exposed, at risk.
Walls are there for a reason aren't they? To say that they are no longer serving a useful purpose seems presumptuous at best.

Please feel free to respond. I'm interested in what others make of this.

Playing Mummies and Daddies

To say I that I was an anxious kid would be to downplay the terror that tore through me each night and very often, in situations during the day. But, downplay it I do... I guess because my parents just seemed to receive it with a mixture of shoulder shrugging, eye rolling, 'she's absolutely bloody neurotic and hopefully she'll grow out if it', kind of concerned bemusement.

Those words.
"NEUROTIC". "ABSURD". "RIDICULOUS".
They stuck.
They define me now. Not just then.

I had an "OVERACTIVE IMAGINATION".
I did too.
Forget monsters in the wardrobe. We're talking real men here, lying under my bed with a 12 inch syringe of a lethal chemical which, upon being injected into the bloodstream, would cause almost instant paralysis. I would die in screaming pain without being able to utter a sound.
Overactive imagination? I think so too.

The hardest thing perhaps was that, instead of being able to take refuge in childish sleep, I was an incurable insomniac from the earliest age.
I was the night watch. Guarding the house. Responsible for the safety of my family.

It's a thankless task being a watchman while the rest of your world sleeps.

Lonely hours spent crunched up on the stairs, staring at the shadows.
Waiting.

Straining to hear.
Shivering.
Nightie pulled and stretchd over cold, bony knees. A leather bound volume of Shakespeare at my feet, a heavy weapon.

More neurosis.
It would appear that I believed that an excess of alcohol would cause a person to become dangerous. Thus, I thought that when drunk (which was an infrequent occurance) my dad would murder my mum as she slept. Whenever they had been out to friends' houses, I waited for hours outside their room to hear my mother's muffled screams.

I also believed that if people slept on their backs, they would swallow their tongues and choke to death as they slept.
Nobody else seemed to care about this. Nobody seemed bothered that my sisters might be suffocated by on of their own organs.

So I was responsible for keeping them alive.

Four, five, times a night I would tread on trembling tiptoes into their rooms and either suffer the heart stopping panic of finding one of them asleep on their back, or the warm rush of relief to find one curled up and sleeping on her side.
Each time I found them in the death position, I would gently place my finger under her nose to check that she was breathing.
Then I would carefully roll her on her side and tuck the duvet behind her.

Today my therapist listened to me explain the night time procedure of checking they were still breathing and said it was what a new mother did to her new baby.
She said I took on the mother role.
I felt winded by this. (No pun intended)!

I thought about this and thought about my watching the shadows and realised I took on the father role too.
Both.
She said it was like playing mummies and daddies, except for real.

I'm not sure I like the implications. But I was blown away by the understanding of what I was doing.