As it says in the “About HardAnxiety” blurb at the top left of the
page, I am diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia, Major Depression, and Codependency.
Throughout my recovery, I have been juggling diagnoses with my care providers, at times I have
been diagnosed with Depression, Dysthimia, Major Depressive Disorder,
Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Codependency,
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Bipolar Disorder, Borderline Personality Disorder and Schizo-Affective Disorder before landing on the current diagnoses. We're not sure, but we think Post-Traumatic Stress and possibly some latent schizophrenia may still be present, but who knows.
My active recovery started one fateful day in October of 2000 when I got a call
from a telemarketer while my girlfriend and I were making dinner. I always
hated
telemarketers and thought they were all worthless pond scum and a disease for a
dying nation. This particular call sent me over the edge and I began to rage.
I yelled and screamed at the caller, totally cracking up, almost crying and my
voice was cracking, and I slammed the phone. My girlfriend came in, and I
began to
cry in her shoulders. I knew then, and told her, that I needed help.
The warning signs were always there. They say hindsight is 20/20. It took me
26 years before I even began my active recovery and three years later I'm still
not sure exactly what I'm recovering from.
I learned from relatives that as a young child I would behave in a hyperactive
manner. In my school years, I remember going into rage and beating up my
brother all the time, throwing expensive things like my new printer, locking
myself up in my room all the time, always being angry with people, not doing my
homework, pretending to be sick so I didn't have to go to school. I felt I was
always teased by my peers, and my caregivers were less than nurturing. In a
compulsive rage incident I even tried killing my brother by running him over
with my bicycle. I even began stealing small items from the local store. I
hardly ever socialized in school for fear of rejection, and did all my school
projects alone when possible. I had trouble paying attention and following
directions. I usually slept through all my classes. I only took showers when
I absolutely had to. I had poor hygeine overall, would never floss my teeth
and hardly ever brush. I would try and get away with wearing the same clothes
day in and day out. I often choked on my food and had to throw up, and that embarassed me. I fantasized about someday ruling the world and paying back everyone for the horrible way I was feeling. I always had trouble sleeping. My parents divorced when I was five, and I was told and believed it was my responsibility to take care of my family, be a husband to my mother and a father to my brother. So I never really learned how to be a kid. My dad remarried a couple times, I lived with my mom, who remarried, and she and my step dad fought everyday, and I was usually in the middle of it, walking on thing ice.
I was accused of being on drugs often, even though to this day I never have even tried them. I was even
accused of being gay a few times because I could never get a girlfriend.
The few girlfriends I had never lasted more than a few weeks.
I even dabbled in satanism and the occult in my teenage years and into my early
twenties, seeking answers for the bigger questions and solutions to the
problems that I wasn't quite aware of. I believed I could come up with spells
to alleviate my problems and make me all well inside. I didn't join any cults
or anything, just read a lot of literature which actually provided me some
insight to myself and the beginnings of a belief that I can help myself by
connecting to a greater power.
As a very young child, up until right after my parents divorced, I had a strong
belief in a christian God and would pray and I remember that making me feel
good. But after the divorce, I became accutely aware of the politics of the
church and that left me scarred. To this day I am unable to get back that
belief in God. I've tried many times and spoken with missionaries and tried
praying with all my heart and allowing myself the willingness to believe, but
deep down I still can't get back that childhood belief I had. I hope I do some
day.
My parents did send me to see a counselor midway through high school, but it
was never clear to me why they did, and my counselor didn't make it clear
either. I thought it was just because they didn't like me listening to heavy
metal. So we just talked about the weather each session for a couple years.
What a waste.
In later years, I suffered from road rage very easily. I avoided social
gatherings. I avoided keeping touch with old friends. I just wanted to be
alone. I just wanted to find that perfect mate to make it all better. I
avoided my family like the plague. Any mild injustice I perceived would send
me into a rage. I would often go into long drown out periods of depression and
isolation. My personal hygeine got worse. I would constantly buy myself things
to make myself feel better, or manipulate other people in subtle ways to get them to
say things, do things, or buy things to make me feel better.
As long as I can remember, I had very dysfunctional parallel inner dialog.
What I call my “voices”, although they are not auditory voices like
those heard by schizophrenics. My inner dialog was filled with anti-nurturing
things, basically every time anybody said anything that was less than nurturing
to me, I recorded it and replayed it to myself constantly. I would even make
up things to say bad about myself. So now today I have hundreds of these
recordings playing back to me almost constantly.
In the fall of 1998, I took a trip abroad to Munich, Germany, having won a number of prestigious scholarships, and the support of my professors and peers at the university I attended, to attend classes at the University of Munich for one year. I'm very proud of this achievement, and it was a wonderful experience. However, at the same time it was a devastating time for me, while I was there, my grandfather died and two of my high school friends died and I was unable to attend any of their funerals, and being far from family and friends in a foreign culture in which my language skills were often inadequate, my anxiety peaked really high and I also slipped into major depression and suicidal ideations. I was able to find a psychologist who was fluent in English, and I saw him frequently for a few months while I was there. He helped clue me into some of the childhood problems I had that were partially to blame for my current problems, but he never (and I didn't either for that matter, even though I was studying psychology at that time in college) caught onto the fact that I had an anxiety disorder or panic attacks. When I look back at this time, I can see that my anxiety and depression basically for the most part ruined one of the most amazing and wonderful times of my life. Like the saying goes, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Just before thanksgiving of 2000, I had a severe rage reaction that immediately
turned into a panic attack. At that point in my life, I had already
acknowledged my problem and no longer allowed my rage to express itself,
instead it became panic attacks. I ended up locking myself up in the closet in
the fetal position crying for four hours. My girlfriend finally came home and
took me to the hospital. That's when I began taking medication and seeing a
psychiatrist in addition to the therapist I had started seeing almost a month
earlier.
There were many times were I would tell my girlfriend that I thought I was going crazy and that I needed to be institionalized. At one point, late at night, I even convinced her to drive me to an institution, where we waited in line for half an hour for someone to talk to us. While sitting there, I saw how bad everyone else was, I realized that my disorder pailed in comparison, so we left and came back home.
For the next three years I have been on more
different medicines than I can easily remember and none of them have been very
effective. I've been to several doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists and
therapists. I've learned many very good recovery tools that I use every day
that enable me to survive life. In January of 2002 I started attending
Codependents Anonymous, which is a twelve step program similar to Alcoholics
Anonymous and is quite helpful for learning how to open up and share my
thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
In the summer of 2002, my girlfriend and I separated and I was laid off. I
vowed to use my time devoted to my recovery, and that I wouldn't start another
relationship until I was satisfied with my recovery. I've kept that vow.
I thought I was coming a long way and was beginning to get better right before
I got laid off and started going off my medications, determined that I could
use the techniques I learned in therapy and the dozens of books I had been
reading. Besides I was losing my job and couldn't afford medicine anymore
anyway. And after all, I had spent more than two years studying biology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience in college, earning 4.0s in all my classes, I thought I knew everything I needed to know to take care of myself.
I was doing OK until November, when my panic attacks started getting worse,
almost the worst they had ever been. It took me a whole month before I decided
that I needed to quit living alone and ask the family for help. That was a
tough decision for me, and required a giant leap of faith, which meant moving
across the country to stay with my cousin, who had recently recovered from her
panic attacks and could understand my problem and help support me in my
recovery. My friends and family have all pledged their support, and I believe
this has been the best decision for me.
Now, I am in a supporting environment and have found a good clinic with a
great therapist and psychiatrist and I think they are doing a wonderful job and
I believe we're getting much closer to finding the right medications that will
help me with the chemical imbalances in my brain. And now that I have a
few of years of recovery and therapy behind me, I am a much more informed
participant in my dealings with my therapist and psychiatrist, and can play a
much more active roll in my own recovery, and take more responsibility for it.
With all this support, I decided to start this website as a way of not only
helping myself express my successes, but also because I believe there is a lack
in the on-line community with regards to personal experiences with these
combinations of disorders, and maybe I can help one or two people out there
with the same problems as me find some commonalities and hope for recovery. I'm also occasionaly active in the various online anxiety and codependency forums under the username HardAnxiety.
|
