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Breaking the Mind Whirl

(What goes on when we get in a spin)

"Anxiety not only feeds off itself, it also chews away at our ability to cope with it"

This chapter explores a little of what is going on when we find ourselves in an anxious, stressed, or depressed state of mind and what we can do about it. We will be exploring this in some detail in order to better understand how to recognise what is going on and what to do about it.

Mind Whirl

We all experience mind whirl from time to time. Some are able to identify it as anxiety, some as a form of depression, some are more familiar with a seemingly endless repetition of thoughts, and to some it shows as a tendency to mentally gnaw away uncomfortably at a problem.

There are a couple of key features about this state of mind that help us work with it. Firstly, whether we are consciously aware of it or not, there is an associated string of thoughts that at some point loops back on itself and begins again. Secondly, there is no final resolution to the thinking.

The actual thinking activity can become very complex. There may be more than one thought loop going on, and there may be several apparent solutions that appear from time to time, but ultimately these are being rejected as unsatisfactory for one reason or another.

But we cannot change what we are not aware of. If we are to disentangle what is going on and work through it we must first raise our level of awareness.

Case Story – Justin's Girlfriend

"Why does this keep happening to me?" complained Justin, "How come all my girlfriends end up running away from me?" Justin was a well-liked, accomplished, and intelligent man, but somehow he kept finding himself in relationships that were going nowhere. This time he was seriously fed up with the cycle but didn't know how to proceed.

Justin didn't want to push his latest girlfriend Safa but he wanted her to make it clear whether or not she was seriously interested in him and whether she actually wanted be in a relationship with him. When they got together they really enjoyed each other's company and had developed a full physical relationship. The problem was that it was not a committed relationship; they did not see each other on a regular basis and Safa had shown no sign of wanting to introduce him to her circle of friends.

Justin worried constantly that their relationship was about to end and was frustrated when he thought that he was not being taken seriously. He deduced that Safa, because she had been hurt in the past, was so scared to commit that she would rather lose her friendship than make their relationship public. It turned out that Justin was also worried that he would soon be 40 years old and thought it was getting too late to have children and build a family, something he really wanted.

By listing his worries and his wants and looking for common themes in his past relationships, Justin was able to see a pattern emerging. Partly because he was a strongly independent man himself, he was attracted to women that also seemed strongly independent. He wanted a partner that was decisive and was able to live with and match his own spirit and ambition. What he had not realised is that the women he thought of as strong and independent would also be women who protected their independence and who would be less willing to commit. He also realised that his fear of "running out of time" was making him behave in a needy and intense way that probably did indeed scare his girlfriends.

Once Justin was clearer about his own wants and how these affected his choices and behaviours he was able to relax more when he was with Safa and to talk to her more openly about his hopes and fears. He was also more able to realistically think about their relationship without thinking that it was so much down to Safa's attitude whether it developed further or not.

Breaking into the Whirl

In the chapter "Dealing With Emotion" we identified some basic techniques that can work well with low levels of anxiety or anxiety that is related to a single event. When it comes to dealing with longer-term anxiety we may need some slightly stronger medicine however, and here are two approaches that can work well: truth-telling and addressing the fear.

Case Story – Ailisha's Ordeal

It was nearly 5 years before Ailisha sought support. As a student nurse, she had been sleeping alone in her student house during a summer break when all the other students had gone home. She was woken by the sounds of a group of men smashing their way in and noisily ransacking the house, gradually working their way up towards her bedroom at the top of the house. She rang the police and attempted to barricade herself in. She switched her music player on loud to try and scare the intruders, but this had no noticeable effect. Thankfully the police arrived quickly and in force, just in time to stop the men breaking into the room that she was in at the top of the house.

She had apparently coped well at the time, even though the court case had been extremely challenging with threats made before and after the trial and attempts made by the families of the burglars to blame her for bringing 'shame' to their families. She had returned to her studies and graduated with distinction.

Now, 5 years later, she found herself reliving her ordeal. She wanted to set up home with her boyfriend and start a family, but every time she thought about moving to a house of their own she found herself gripped by fear. She found herself remembering what had happened and was getting nightmares. She also started to have panic attacks during the day. Ailisha was clearly suffering from a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, and she found a therapist to work with to deal directly with this, but in the meantime she also worked on relieving her anxiety.

One thing became clear; at the time of the break-in she had indeed coped but more for the benefit of her friends and family than for herself. She had never really admitted what she had felt and what she had feared while the men were in the house and so she had never really come to terms with it as fully as she needed to. Now her feelings had resurfaced because the idea of living in a separate house (rather than in the shared flat that she lived in to avoid her fears of being alone) was reminding her of that night. Her memory was coming back as a direct replay of the feelings that she had experienced at the time.

Her fears were that she couldn't cope, that she would always be too scared to live a normal life, and that life was threatening. Things improved almost immediately, when she started to share honestly about her ordeal and when she started to keep a journal of her thoughts and feelings. She was able to go a considerable way towards breaking the link to her feelings of panic by recognising that they came from the past rather than the present, so the panic attacks passed. She was also able to start to challenge her fears about her ability to cope by reminding herself that actually she had coped with an extremely serious and scary situation. She also knew that she could work with her boyfriend to secure their new home so that she would not feel so at risk.

The deeper trauma would take more work, but she no longer had the debilitating anxiety whenever she thought of the future.

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