About HardAnxiety: This is my online journal, a tool I can use to write about my progress through recovery. I have been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder Type 2:Ultra-Radian Cycling and Panic Disorder with Agoraphobia and also Codependencey.
 
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Useful Web Resources (Links)

History of my disorder

Guides
What are Panic Attacks, Agoraphobia, and Anxiety?

What is Bipolar type 2 and ultra radian cycling?

Guide to my Anxiety Levels and What's it Like?

About the codependency dysfunction

The Fight-or-Flight Response

What if? Thinking

Coping skills I use

Coping with Medication Side-Effects

Breakthroughs
Abandonment Breakthrough

Anger Management and Defense Mechanisms - Just a sad game?

Other
Wandering in a Dream of Emptiness, a poem.

Contact me
email David

Archives
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This space for rent.

Below is the workbook I am curently using, it's a great workbook, and I recommend getting the accompanying book, Facing Codependence, from the same authors.

Click to buy this book

Want to cheer me up? You can buy me something off of my My Amazon.com Wish List .
What a shameless plug, eh?









History of my disorder
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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.

 
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