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Originally posted by Hillbilly

severson,

The greatest help was getting advice from someone who has lived through it, not just a book or some person on a forum. Someone looked me in the eye and made me confess to coddling my symptoms, shrinking away, and basically being irresponsible. That's what is amazing also. I have always hated being confronted and talked down to, but somehow I knew this person was brilliant, had my number, and there was nothing I could do but obey and get better, no excuses.

Pan,
I know you are trying so hard to regain your life and identity, but what you may not realize is that the identity you put forth before your symptoms wasn't getting it done. Discovering, acknowledging, and putting forth for public consumption the real you is the only way to have a clear conscience and to keep your anxiety symptoms at bay — forever. The real you is waiting to be seen. Fear is the only barrier. That's it in a nutshell.

I am posting a link to something I read a long time ago. It is a thread from another "medical advice site" that deals with whatever symptoms a person is fearing. The person to pay attention to is ldman, who became crushed by anxiety while in med school. His story is my story. His story sums it all up. He sat around and cried and worried and wondered and read and hoped and fretted, and prayed and wished that he could just be his old self. Only his old self wasn't so damn cool, at least not to him. As a med student, he was exposed to all sorts of weird things, aberrations from the norm, constantly reading about diseases and drugs and seeing people who were ill.

Probably he wasn't a popular youngster. There is a reference to being obese in the thread, I believe. At any rate, this guy never heard of TMS, or at least doesn't mention it if he did. He praises the Linden Method for helping him see the light. I bought that damn thing as well, but it was too disjointed for me to follow. So he finally just stopped feeding his anxiety three squares a day and letting it sleep in the garage, and it finally left like a stray, unwanted pet.

Enjoy!

http://www.medhelp.org/posts/Mental-Health/what-is-wrong-with-meanxiety/show/268473

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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Originally posted by pan

Hi Hillbilly

I am really of the belief that health anxiety is due to the misinterpretation and subsequent over-catastrophisation of physical anxiety symptoms/sensations which in turn produce frustration, anger and fear. As you have outlined quite succinctly and correctly the physical effect that anxiety has on the body is pretty well documented and understood BUT, the real stumbling block arises when people are advised that the causality of these symptoms is actually emotional/mental in origin. It appears that people really struggle to accept this concept. I do agree with you on some level that all anxiety conditions must become health anxiety as if we do not stress, worry and fixate on the symptoms then the symptoms do indeed lose their power and are no longer fit for purpose….the classic example of this is with the concept of symptom shifting and the changing of disease fixation etc, this is incredibly common (if not a defining factor) with health anxiety as when the sufferer becomes conditioned to eventually accepting of their symptoms a new and improved symptom will crop up to keep the symptom>interpretation>response>fear loop going. You only need see the number of MS worriers who resolve that issue only to then interpret their symptoms as ALS….a prime example of a new and improved fear that develops to fuel the anxiety fire.

Where I personally find Sarno’s and actually any somatic theory interesting in relation to anxiety is in the idea that physical symptoms can be caused by a non organic causality. From my experience the problem with health anxiety is that people become totally and utterly fixated on the physical and totally miss seeing the far bigger picture. What I see time and time again is people who have years and years of poor anxiety management/ emotional issues/fear and black or white thinking under their belts who suddenly experience a stressor and who then start to get all these weird and wonderful physical symptoms kicking off….it is also no surprise that if that stressor is health related you can almost guarantee that health anxiety then develops. The problem is that people convince themselves that these symptoms have ‘come out of the blue’ and ‘how can it be anxiety when I’m not mentally anxious?’….they really struggle to take a step back from where they are at the moment and to consider where they are at the moment in light of all that has gone before. I think that a common trait amongst health anxiety sufferers is the tendency to always believe that they are right, to be suspicious of others and their motives and also to think that if a job is to be done well then it is us that needs to do it, when these traits are seen alongside the idea that the sufferer is actually losing control of their health it is quite easy to see how a health anxiety fixation can develop. What often prolongs this and makes it worse is that the typical sufferer will often have a typical frame of reference that they have applied to all the problems they have faced in their lives and when they apply this to the new worry it is redundant and powerless and the sufferer is just left in a state of bewilderment as they have no other tools to fall back on to solve the puzzle….I like the quote here that ‘problems cannot be solved on the same level of thinking that created them’.

I totally agree with you about the negative elements of visiting various forums. I did actually find a superb post on here about the concept of ‘forum identities’ and the like. I post a lot on anxietyzone and whilst I would love to believe that I do this for the love of my fellow man I also know this is bull****!....every post I write is basically written to me and is just me attempting to reassure myself that my beliefs are correct and valid…I’m not stupid, arrogant or misguided enough to believe for one moment that I am recovered if the first thing I do when I get to work is to check the forum…I know damn well that it is not healthy and it is not recovery BUT it is a better place than I was at 2 years ago, a year ago and a month ago, who knows what next week will bring…account deletion?...maybe!

Health anxiety is an identity Hillbilly, I fell for this and I see it over and over time and time again. Once the body scanning and symptom monitoring takes hold health anxiety becomes the best damn hobby in the world. If we had far more pressing things to do, a far happier and fulfilled life to live it would be pointless and redundant but if we don’t have those things then health anxiety will fill the void very nicely thank you…crikey, if you are physically, mentally and emotionally bored what better pastime is there than ensuring your survival against all the other people who have got this all so wrong….we know we are ill, we will get to the bottom of it and we will be proved right…a waste of time you say, rubbish, what better way to spend your precious time. We then start to embrace the identity. We start to make excuses, we cant do X Y or Z any longer because we are ill, we bookmark all those useful health sites in our browser and we start to search high and low for a cure or if not a cure at least a correct diagnose that is better than this ‘just anxiety’ explanation that we keep getting blown off with…yep, it could be lupus, fibro, ME, IBS, BFS, auto immune etc etc, why haven’t I been tested for those? We start to research all the best vitamins and supplements and often spend a fortune on stuff that we think will ‘make us better’…you do know that magnesium is excellent for twitching right..lol. Basically, before too long we become very good at ‘doing’ health anxiety we pick up all those behaviours that are expected of someone who is ill, sick or broken and we then totally buy into that mindset and all the while we totally fail to see the big elephant that sits in the middle of the room….we totally and utterly fail to comprehend that the origin of our problem is mental/emotional, the continuation of our problem is mental/emotional and that recovery therefore can only come from by addressing this from a mental/emotional perspective.

I have been on the merry-go-round for the best part of 2 years. I too though my symptoms came out of the blue and that I wasn’t anxious but were the result of a health scare stressor. It was only when I started to look beyond the physical and looked at the 20 years of my life before all this began that it started to become obvious that there was a bigger picture. When I looked at my hopes, aspirations, fears and coping strategies that I though on the base level served me so well and which made me such a ‘good’ person I came to see that these has basically put me on a one way path to the day I woke up with the twitching, buzzing, dizziness and depersonalisation. I’m still not fully recovered and I have the one step forward and two scenarios on regular occasions but I’m in a far better place than I was before all this started…yep, I twitch and I buzz but thanks to that I know far more about myself than I ever did before.

I agree with you that recovery is totally about rejecting the physical and stopping falling into the auto response bear traps that anxiety sets for us. I do get annoyed when people think that recovery or part recovery gives us all the answers. I see myself as no different from anyone else who suffers from health anxiety but the only difference is that I have CHOSEN to view myself as well and I have taken the leap of faith to 100% believe and buy into the fact that I am fundamentally well and that my body noise and symptoms are not me and therefore do not determine any concept of wellness for me. The leap of faith is the hardest thing to do as the trick that health anxiety plays is to make us think we know best and it is up to us to safeguard our health and if we ignore these symptoms it is going to be too late. Time and time again I would believe this BS and get drawn into the reassurance seeking and numerous doctor visits and time and time again afterwards I would feel the frustration and anger build as I knew I had fallen victim to health anxiety. I think that is what it is about in many ways…it is so easy to readily accept the badge of being sick, being the victim and being a sufferer and once we do this all is lost as we are just reaffirming the negative and illusionary aspects over and over. I believe that the golden point to remember with health anxiety is that control is only EVER recovered once we actually relinquish the control we think we have…the control that we hold onto and demand is nothing but a sham and the very core of what resigns us to further frustration and misery. I still twitch, I buzz, I ache and I still get the parathesia but I no longer feel the need to interpret these symptoms. These symptoms are not a representation of my mental mindset today and are not in any way determined by my current anxiety level rather they where determined by past thoughts and behaviours and that by carrying on these thoughts and behaviours can only fuel this further. I now recognise that these physical sensations are there because for what ever reason they need to be there and the day they don’t need to be there they will no doubt bugger off as swiftly as they arrived. When that day will be who knows? That is gods work and getting involved in gods work is a sure fire recipe for frustration, anger and fear….and that is where we came in.

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Originally posted by jerica

Pan,

I'm so sorry you were banned, that doesn't seem right to me. You have been so helpful and you understand this stuff so well. I'm glad you're here. I use a different name there. I love your post here and think I will print it out, too. It's like you wrote my bio, lol. :) I hope you will keep posting even if it's to talk about the emotional aspect or just reinforce that we must choose health.

I remember when I first moved from one state to another, starting a new life, everything fresh and exciting. That first year I was pretty much like 98% well and I don't even remember going to a doctor once. I don't think I did, anyway. I felt good, I had a good job, good money, at least a bit of respect in it and didn't feel like a turd, had a really nice apartment that was mine which I set about decorating, had lots of fun. I felt alive and well. I saw myself as well.

Then the next year I went to a concert, came home and started smelling a weird smell. Like chemicals. A hallucination because I had a brain scan and EEG and nothing bad was found. I think I started going back downhill (I had been quite "ill" at least mentally or with TMS symptoms for many years before). Now I feel like I'm just So much worse, thinking of myself as an invalid, unable to walk from here to there or pick up stuff much less have the strength or breath to do laundry or decorate anything. My apartment is dusty and I don't take pride in it anymore. My interest is body body body, breathing breathing OMG I CAN'T BREATHE breathing and chest pain and heart heart heart heart heart.

Life is filled with doctors and therapists and self help books and forums. When I leave the forums I tend to remember there's OTHER STUFF out there and I feel better. Then I start to feel sick again and run back.

You should write a book about all this. Seriously. Even if it's something you publish yourself on Lulu or something. I'd read it. I think your posts are really helpful, really valuable.

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