Learning to Trust My Body Again
tw: anxiety, panic attacks, body image, medication, nightmares
Trying to come up with a title for this article had me a little stumped. Until I went back to my problem statement from my first therapy session, and it was to do with the lack of control I had over my body, I simply had none. I have been fairly candid in talking about this in my earlier posts on here, and now I will give the open honest truth of my experience of therapy after a course of six sessions over the last three months.
I decided to try therapy, and by decided it was the only choice I had after I experienced weeks of crippling physical anxiety symptoms. I had experienced panic attacks since I was around 17 over things like exam stress, but these were triggers or situations that were manageable.
It was in the November lockdown that overthinking, worrying and negative thought patterns got so out of control and began to affect my body. I couldn’t sleep and I genuinely mean I did not sleep the entire night some days, and the days I managed to sleep because of exhaustion I was terrorised by anxiety-induced nightmares.
These then began to have a physical toll on my body from extreme nausea to the point I was not even eating one child-size portion of food a day because my mouth would just reject everything or I would throw up whatever else I managed to eat. There would be days where I became so sensitive to everything — taste, smell, touch, sound, and light. I couldn’t even cope with the sound of a person's voice. I could only find solace in laying in my bedroom in the complete dark, and even then my body ached so severely it felt like I was dying. My entire body was tense from head to even my fingertips being sensitive to the slightest movement.
It was one of those late afternoons, laying in my room in the dark, crying so hard because I could not stop this pain, that I self-referred myself for therapy. That was my first choice because medication terrifies me after having a bad run with medication when I was younger for a condition I did not even have, which left me wiped out for ten months.
It was a two-week wait, and then the first session began.
Session One — Releasing the Weight
After a telephone assessment with someone I could not remember I was assigned to a therapist, and this was my first session with her. A lot of it was a repeat of the assessment going through my questionnaire scores on low mood and anxiety, both of which started off very high with anxiety being significantly higher than the low mood. Assessments of risk took place and these two things are part of every session, in part to measure how I am feeling and to make sure I am safe, but I also feel safe.
Truth be told I did not feel safe. I did not feel safe from my own mind because it made me feel unsafe in my own body.
I remember being so nervous about the phone call because it meant I had to face a lot of things I had buried deep within. I told her, Hope, the full version of what leaving faith was like for me, and how I never really got to talk about what happened because there was never a safe space to do that. Even when I talk about it on social media, and at talks with organisations I still never give the full story because honestly, it is too painful to talk about.
I cried so much. Like streams and streams of tears. It was like a weight had finally been lifted off my shoulders.
My experience has led me to be very independent, almost hyper independent because I lost my core support system for a while and I had to become independent otherwise I would have just crumbled into not existence. It also hardened my heart and ability to trust because at a time the people I never had to question the trust and care around were gone, and were ready to cut me off. At that time and a while after, before I started to heal, I only had trust in a small circle of friends, who without I would not have made it to twenty-one, and now I am almost twenty-three.
Explaining these things, and the culture and background I came from, she gave me the reassurance that I was not crazy or broken for seeing the world in the way I do.
I cannot tell you how much I needed to hear that.
Our session ended with homework. I was given a format to put together a problem statement, on just one issue I wanted to focus on, the issue that was making life unbearable. That was super important for me at the time, and to put into practice now because with anxiety you can overthink and worry about a million things at once, and that is what can make you spiral.
After the session, I felt so physically drained. I had the most raging headache and my body was beat. But, I felt relief, I felt the pain that had been clutching at my chest relax for the first time in a long while.
Sessions Two + Three — Not “My Anxiety” + Sleep Routines
The next two sessions kind of blur into one, and I can’t really differentiate between the two, so here is what I remember from both of them.
The focus of these was on my problem statement.
My main problem was sleep.
I hadn’t slept one peaceful night in several weeks because of overthinking and a combination of nightmares. I would wake up four or five times in the night, shaking and feeling the tightest pain in my chest because of the dreams I was experiencing. It was so bad it was affecting my ability to function in the day time to even do the basic of tasks, such as eating and drinking. It made me feel so drained and scared that I struggled to go outside, there was one week where I only went out the three days I worked and then holed up inside for the rest of the week.
At this point, I was on anti-anxiety medication from my doctor — propranolol. It did really help ease the chest pains I was experiencing, but one of the side effects was nightmares, and it just made mine worse. I had stopped taking them by this session awaiting a call with my doctor, which ended up with me having to go medication free as a lot of anti-depressants are known for their side effects of sleep disturbance and I simply could not afford to go through six weeks of seeing if they ease.
I went through how all of this felt with my therapist. At first, I was reluctant to tell her what I am about to say next because I was worried about the reaction I would get. This was the beginning of December, and I told her I really don’t think I am going to make it into the new year if my body keeps going on like this because the human body surely cannot cope with the level of distress I was going through. That and I had dropped two dress sizes in the space of a month because I was so anxious I couldn’t eat without my body either completely rejecting the food or throwing up.
And that then gave me another thing to worry about because I was afraid if I did start eating normally again I would pile it all on again, and that would not help the already conflicting opinions I had on my body at the time.
My therapist then told me I was completely in my right to feel the way I did about my body and that it was okay to feel that fear of not surviving the stress my body was going under. But, what she then said is that together we are going to find a practical way to give myself control back.
One of those being not calling it ‘my anxiety’ and visualising it as something separate from myself. I now call ‘my anxiety,’ Karen (yes, I use humour to cope with my pain) and that helps me a lot when I begin to spiral because I can tell her the things I would tell a friend if they said someone was saying all these horrible things about them. It has really helped me separate the worry and anxieties from myself. Sometimes it does get too much and I forget to do this, but the times I have been able to use this method I have managed to ground myself again.
Another thing was adapting my sleep routine. I am always one for trying things, especially if it is going to allow me to sleep better. I was given some muscle relaxation techniques to try in bed before I slept to help ease any points of tension in my body, and I have to say this was incredibly useful not just on my anxious days, but on the days my body was just tired.
Meditation is something I tried, I would do this for half an hour in the evenings and I stuck to it for a whole week. It left me in a state of lightness and relaxation that after I journaled I could drift off easy. I have to admit I have fallen out of habit with it lately because honestly, I am now able to drift off to sleep easier without it.
Finally, I kept my phone in do not disturb mode, and now it is set to activate at 5pm every day, to signal the end of my workday and I don’t feel pressured to reply to messages. This has been super helpful because honestly if I see a notification I feel like I have to respond because it’s a pandemic, I really have nothing else to do in the day, I am technically free so I must reply. Especially if it is work-related or if I get a message from a friend who is feeling low, and I have to be there for them at that moment because if I see it and don’t respond I will feel awful about it, and then I won’t sleep, even if I am not in the headspace to give, I will still do it and then I have nothing for myself.
I also have a rule in place the hour before bed my phone is away. Once I have journaled that signals my downtime. The only thing I will use my phone for is to listen to music or my sleep podcast to send me off to sleep. I stick to this most days, as I am human and will have falls where I am caught up in scrolling or I am just sometimes having a stupid fun conversation in the group chats. But, for the most part, it is something I have stuck to and is something that is strictly in place the nights before I have to work.
Session Four — No Tears Left to Cry
After a break over the Christmas period with my busy retail work schedule and my therapist taking annual leave, we met for the first time again in the second week of January.
This was the first session that ended without tears. My anxiety and low mood scores had entered the recovery stage. And in all honesty, I was feeling a lot better, these changes had helped, and being able to have time with my friends over December really helped my mental well-being. Yes, I was still struggling with worrying about several things at once, so this is where ‘worry time’ came into place.
My therapist talked me through this exercise of dedicating one time of the day to just worrying. That is the time to write everything that is/has been bothering me out, deal with it, feel it, and put it away for the day. It is the idea that you note down throughout the day the anxious thoughts, and say ‘I am going to deal with this at 8pm,’ and then you can begin to carry on with the day.
I was already kind of doing this with my journaling before bed, but I would still let myself spiral in the day. Now, this was hard to keep in check during the day, so I would just try and distract myself with other tasks or just simply repeat positive affirmations in my head until I forgot what I was worrying about in the first place.
This is something I do now every night before bed. I write about my day in general, if anything bothered me and how I feel about it writing it at night. I also began to write a list of five good things that day, even if it was as mundane as I ate two meals that day to feeling accomplished that I had managed to a get piece of writing out. I also write down a list of affirmations, of things I wish to have, including good health and self-love.
Session Five — I May Never Heal From Everything and That’s Okay
This was one of the tougher sessions. I had been suffering from nightmares related to a loss in my life. About people, I hadn’t really thought about in a while and it was horrible because they were two people I loved so dearly, and still hold a place in my heart for. They would be telling me the worst things I could think that they thought about me, and it would leave me so shaken.
The loss of them was sudden in my life. There was no closure, no goodbye, just a sharp cutting off. When I explained to my therapist it felt like they had died because you don’t get closure from a dead person, she said it was normal to feel the stages of grief that I had felt and what I was feeling.
The most important thing that she told me is that some people heal, some people are always trying to heal and some people never do, and that’s okay. Things get easier even if you don’t fully heal. That was so important to hear because some of the things I have experienced I don’t think I will ever heal to the point that I was the person I was before them. But, I can get to the point where I can live with it and hopefully grow from it into a more comfortable person.
Session Six — Boundaries: Nurturing Myself
This week we met for our last session. A time of reflection and looking towards the future. The biggest takeaways I got were gaining control over my body again and understanding why it reacts in certain ways, and I don’t need to be afraid of it.
I also learned to put boundaries in place for my own mental health, which is something I have never been good at. Now, I don’t consume coronavirus news because I know it's 9/10 times nothing good, and it triggers a panic attack in me, so I don’t need to know about it.
I also have learned to slow down and not take on more than I can cope with. It was only last year that someone very important to me told me that I need to not take too much on, to not burn myself out because the person I was and the amount of work I was doing pre-pandemic was a lot. It was something I was never told, I was usually praised for doing so many things when in fact I needed to do less so I had more time for myself. He was the first person to use the phrase ‘you need be kind to yourself,’ I have never really heard anyone say that or tell me that I need to do that, and now I share that phrase as much as I can because it has helped me in ways I don’t have enough words to share.
Another boundary I have put in place is not giving more than I can, emotionally. I had the tendency in the past to be the ‘therapy friend’ or give more emotionally than I could. By this, I mean providing emotional support when I was really not in the mind space to do so.
The best way I can describe this is as a cup of water. When my cup is full, I can happily give emotionally and still be physically and emotionally sound in myself. When my cup is half full, I would still give, but then I would be left feeling drained because there was nothing left for me. But, at the time I was really struggling, where my cup was completely empty I was still giving emotionally and that’s where it took its toll on my body because I wasn’t receiving what I needed emotionally.
In part, that was my fault because I am not good at asking for what I need emotionally or even talking about how bad Karen/my anxiety was affecting me because I don’t like to be seen as weak or broken. Even though dealing with anxiety does not make you any of those things, it was how I perceived myself at the time and that’s what I would worry people would think about me so I kept it to myself. Therapy and having that outlet really helped me get my emotional needs met so I could begin to fill my own cup again.
Finally, the last thing I learned is that I will have this condition with me for the rest of my life, and in reality, once the world begins to fix itself again I will fix myself. But, in the meantime I am going to honour my emotions and let myself feel them when they happen, good or bad, happy or sad I am going to feel everything fully. I will no longer try to hide when I am not doing well, I am not going to be part of toxic positivity because that doesn’t help anyone, and it certainly did not help me.
So, What Do I Think Now?
Do I trust my body now? The answer to that question is that it was never my body that was in control of anything, it was my mind.
So, instead, do I trust my mind? Honestly, I still don’t because I still experience a lot of the same symptoms just on a slightly less intense scale and more sporadically. It is this uncertainty of whether I will have a good or bad day, sometimes even if the good/neutral mood I feel will last. My intuition is all out of whack from the experiences of the last couple of months, and now that the physical side of the anxiety has eased I am having to learn how to walk with my mind again.
But, what I can say is that therapy was the best decision I took for myself in 2020, and I am going to do more things for myself. I am no longer skeptical about seeking help for mental health, and instead, I am going to utilise the resources I have and I know where I can go if things ever get bad again. In terms of the type of therapy, this was the most useful to me compared to just talking about things because I was given practical tools to help ease my worries, alongside the reassurance because as much as words can help I need action.
But, the most important thing I took from all of this, was my therapist telling me that I am resilient and nurturing and that even in the hardest of sessions I am still trying to look after myself. That I should be proud of the work I put in because it is pretty damn hard to look at the difficult parts of yourself and work on bettering you. Her telling me that she is not worried about me, and can see the change in me over the last few months.
I don’t worry too much about the future in my day to day because I just take each day as one singular day now. I still struggle with maintaining healthy moods, as they can swing from being complacent and even happy to extreme lows a lot, and even several times a day. I am honouring these shifts and letting myself feel them instead of repressing them. Over the last couple of days, I have been writing this my mood has dropped significantly, and it’s been incredibly hard to rest because when I get the bad days I need to do ten different things to just quieten my mind, and even then sometimes it does not quite work. But, I am trying, and I think that is the only thing we can really do in times like these.
Yet, most importantly, I am learning to be kinder to myself.
