Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 6 (Gauging an episode)

How to gauge the phenomenon

I am overcoming this stuff gradually.

First, it helped that I got properly diagnosed. My psychologist listened to me explain the symptoms (not as symptoms, but as just a stream of feelings and thoughts about them), then began to rule things out. My family has a notable incidence of schizophrenia and dementia, so let’s just say that anytime I started feeling the connection slip I was 100 times worse off because I feared I was on a one-way trip down a long and unhappy slope.

Second, I am a Virgo. That means I need to understand the crap out of things. So I spent awhile researching these issues. Of course, since the primary issue I was fighting was anxiety-induced depression, these little disorders got put on the backburner for awhile. Not to mention that I had trouble keeping the differences between all the Ds straight for a long time.

Third, I am becoming more and more Mindful. That’s been such a blessing, but I will not proclaim it as a perfect path for everyone. All people have their own path to walk, and when problems arise they need to find the solutions for them. Mine may not work for you, and that’s cool. Try things, get help if you actually could use it, and I wish you peace.

As I’ve been more aware and informed, I’ve realized that I hardly notice the episodes anymore. I am aware they happen, but without the cascading distress they aren’t the paralyzing, maddening events they used to be.

Sometimes my music just doesn’t sound right (yes, my headphones are on correctly – I checked!), so I stop listening to music for a little while. Maybe I have trouble focusing on reading because I am suddenly aware that they are merely patterns of black ink on white paper instead of words with meaning. That’s cool; I’ll go play a video game.

And sometimes I get overwhelmed by sadness at being the last of my alien kind on this God-forsaken ball of rock. Then I text my beloved and let her know I’m feeling totally disconnected from the world (in this case, that means the universe of humanity) and am significantly bumming, at which point she texts back a kiss or a hug or an I Love You, and soon it matters less. No matter how disconnected I feel from my fellow humans, I know they are ready to help me remember: we’re still united.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 5 (Dealing with an episode)

What to do when I drop a connection?

An important thing I do is let folks who are close to me know when I’m having an episode. It helps me not feel like I am going through the experience alone, even if it feels like it. It also alerts them to help me out if I start really suffering through one. Even if the universe seems unreal, the loving hug and kiss from my dearest can work wonders.

I have to keep in mind that all Dissociative episodes, whether they are perception problems about me or everything else, are temporary. If I was cruising along unaware of the disconnected feeling, the moment I start having one is proof that an episode has begun; therefore it will also end.

My biggest strategy is to ride it out until the episode passes. This means I need to employ many tools in my Mindfulness toolkit:

Faith – it started, and it will stop. It will start again sometime, and it will stop in that case too. I am okay regardless.

Acceptance – yeah, it’s happening. Face forward and deal. How I’m feeling about myself or my surroundings doesn’t change their reality or mine; it merely colors my own perception of my reality. If the world doesn’t seem quite right, it’s okay. If I don’t feel quite connected to humanity at the moment, it’s okay.

Be Present – especially when the universe doesn’t feel quite real. I can re-establish my connection to the universe through focus and awareness if I patiently choose to. See, my awareness has shifted without my say so: it’s up to me to get it back. If it’s an internalized thing, then I can be an alien all I need to be, but I’m Here and Now regardless of my perception of self.

Rest – man, I can’t emphasize this enough. Whatever issue a person faces, it’s a tougher slog if they’re worn out.

Take action – one common strategy for coping is to immerse oneself with sensory input that reconnects us with the world around us.  Engage the universe perceptually through the senses. When we perceive the universe it becomes real to us. The more we perceive it, the more real it becomes. Therefore as we engage the universe with our senses mindfully, consciously, reality reasserts itself in our minds.

Engage – by staying social and involved in routine and life, the episodes are likely to pass more quickly and cause less anxiety. Let the people closest to you know you’re struggling if that would help them not feel so shut out all of a sudden or distressed as you seem to be very distracted. Sure, you might need to limit your social activity at times, but make sure you are just visiting the cave and not moving into it.

Be aware – view it realistically and gauge how “bad’ the situation really is. The earliest episodes seem horrible, because you suddenly feel like everything you believed (that is, took for granted) about the real world is turned on its ear. But if you can understand just how relative the issue actually is, you can adjust your response mindfully.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 2 (Dissociative Disorder)

Dissociative Disorder: Sorry, your connection was lost

Here is my flawed understanding of what these Dissociative Disorders are all about for me.

My more-or-less literal translation of the 4 Ds is that my Connection has been lost along with my mind’s sense of Order, whether the lost connection is with Myself or Everything Else.

Everything you think and feel is based on associations. That’s why some folks can love things you can’t stand: they have a different association with that thing. Or why you really love someone who your parents can’t stand. These associations are developed by experiencing the universe through your senses and making connections; thoughts and emotions are connected to experiences and people.

These connections – these associations – we usually take for granted; except when someone tells us they enjoy mayonnaise in their chili or having spiders crawl on their face, and then we look at them as if they’ve lost their minds for having such warped views.

Mindfulness in particular teaches us to stop hurrying from point A to point B all the time at the expense of feeling and experiencing the Here and Now of the many steps in the journey. It teaches us that we are all connected to the people and universe around us, and that it is very grounding to get consciously in touch with that connection.

Now imagine you’re talking to your best friend, and suddenly your words sound hollow in your ears. Sounds almost seem to drop from “normal” to “flat.” Or maybe I just suddenly become hyper-aware of how uniquely different I am from this friend. It’s disorienting to suddenly be so completely robbed of your connection even as the words leave your mouth, especially when the friend just converses on, oblivious that a huge shift has occurred.

Now imagine you’re in the middle of a conversation with your boss about why his new budget initiative will bankrupt the company within the hour, and BAM! Just like that you are ripped away from the Here and Now and plunged into another universe that looks and feels and sounds and tastes and smells just like the one you’re from, but you know in your bones that it isn’t the real world.

Sights and sounds seem flat, like you’re watching a closed circuit TV transmission of your interactions with the world, real-time but not really here. Now you’re in the ultimate interactive video game, one where the main character does everything you do, but it isn’t really you: it’s the character you’re controlling in the game you’re playing.

We’re talking about a sudden dissociation, the opposite of association; a loss of connection rather than the achievement or maintaining of connection. Connection to what, you ask? Oh man. Everything.

So this is a perception issue. I’m not really being yanked into a parallel earth, although that might actually make me feel better about the episode: it would at least make sense then. This sudden event makes no sense to me from the moment it happens.

My subconscious awareness of connection to the grand world around me is suddenly shaken, and all I’m left with is an overwhelming, undeniable, conscious sensation that I’ve just lost that connection.

From there, it varies based on what suddenly doesn’t seem right anymore.

Allergic to Anxiety?

When you have allergies, certain foods or times of the year can make you miserable. It isn’t so much the things or the times, but the fact that your body’s immune system overreacts to certain things, and you have a reaction to coming into contact with them.

If you go to an allergy doctor, they can identify your allergic triggers by watching how you react when brought into contact with certain known triggers. Then a strategy is devised, often a mix of medicines that help suppress the body’s immune overreaction coupled with removing the triggers from your environment (or removing yourself from triggering environments where possible).

Anxiety works a lot the same way.

Things trigger your anxiety reaction in a mental cascade effect similar to how the body reacts to allergens. And your strategy for handling it looks very similar as well.

Medications

For example, Xanax is prescribed for many sufferers of anxiety reactions. Xanax has become the mental/emotional equivalent of an allergy patient’s Benadryl. It’s almost a standard for treating mild to moderate cases of anxiety.

Many in the world don’t like the fact that Xanax exists, seeing it as a crutch. However like anything in the world that relieves anything unpleasant, it is not a crutch out of the box but can become one if the person begins to rely on it to escape regularly rather than deal with the things causing the anxious reaction.

There are other, more intense medications for severe anxiety, but they should not be taken lightly or often. Like an allergy patient’s epinephrine injection, these medications act like flipping an electric breaker closed in a house. In an extreme case it is necessary to shut the whole mechanism down to prevent catastrophe. Just as epinephrine can shut down much of the immune reaction process, these medicines can shut down much of the associative reaction process. Good for emergencies, but not to become a common tool.

Get away from them triggers!

If you are allergic to nuts, you learn to read ingredients and avoid nuts.

But if you have environmental allergies, it can be a little trickier.

Let’s say you are allergic to cats. You can find ways to live with it, such as keeping your kitty clean, reducing shed hair all over the house, and so on. But if that doesn’t work, you may have to make a decision: have cats and get used to sneezing, or learn to live without cats.

If you have huge allergy problems with spring, you might have a tough life for part of each year. Pollen from a hundred different sources can help you break world records for sneezing. While certain medicines can help, the strategy tends to be “Stay indoors when possible, and use filtered air conditioning to help alleviate symptoms.”

Environmental triggers are similar with anxiety.

If you are particularly bugged by a co-worker or a classmate, you can try and adjust environmental factors related to that person. Sometimes they are having a tough life themselves, and your unilateral kindness might be just the thing that helps you both. Learning what sets them off can help you mitigate their reactions, which in turn will alleviate yours.

Unfortunately it may be necessary to just stay away from them. Some folks are too toxic when combined with you, and they will never be safe in your world.

Likewise, if the home or workplace is the source of the anxiety, a hundred different triggers might be slamming into you from all directions. In cases like that you may have some hard decisions to make. Moving to another job or home might help, but often we move only to find ourselves besieged again by the same triggers that only look different.

Often it takes the same adjustments we make for allergy season: you can’t entirely avoid the triggers by staying isolated, but you can spend far more time in an “air conditioned environment” by removing as many triggers as possible from the other places you spend time in, or varying the places you spend your other time in.

If your workplace just crushes you with anxiety but you can’t reasonably just quit or change duties, maybe you can employ strategies for making it through so that you can go home and leave that junk behind. You may have to get home and figuratively “decontaminate.”

If home is where the triggers are heaviest, the workplace can become a haven. But rather than try and spend more and more time at work, maybe spending time going for walks, shopping, hobbies, or other diversions can help reduce our contact with our triggers.

De-sensitizing treatment strategy

When you want to really work on overcoming allergies, there are therapies for that, often in the form of allergy shots or other methods.

For example, a shot can be formulated to introduce very small amounts of allergen triggers into your system. This trains the immune system to not totally freak out every time it encounters these things.

The immune system sees the pollen come along one spring and suddenly it’s saying, “Oh, white oak pollen, huh? Yeah, I found out that stuff isn’t as dangerous as I thought.” It reacts less over time until it hardly reacts at all and you stop dreading springtime.

Anxiety triggers can be dealt with the same way. Through mindful acceptance you can co-exist with the triggers by training your mind to have less of a reaction to the stimuli. Small exposures to a trigger can help you see them as being less dangerous as previously thought. Gradually-increased contact with the trigger can help you gauge your reaction improvement.

In the case of both the physical allergy and the mental/emotional anxiety response, we gradually desensitize our systems to the triggers. The less sensitive we are to the things that cause that heartbeat to turn into a gallop or start us sweating even if we aren’t warm, the less anxious our overall lives will be.