Fear of your own brain

Courageous Care-takers! Graham here.

A riddle for sensitive cats:

Which is worse, getting stuck in another doomy rabbit-hole for weeks? Or the *fear* of getting stuck again?

Can you get PTSD for your own big feelings? 

(A quick heads up about today’s issue. The catalyst for this one was a recent road rage situation where I got threatened, so the first bit contains a description of that and some other similar incidents. It’s not graphic, but if you’d rather skip that topic altogether, jump down about halfway to the heading ‘The fear of the fear’.

As a gentle buffer, here is a picture of the opposite of road rage. Bodie driving a car.)

'Hop in?'

Random threats

A man threatened to punch me last week.

A fairly standard road rage incident, from the usual innocuous beginnings. 

He pulled his car up beside mine, yelled and mimed a few threats, then started to get out of his car, as if to follow through on those angry words. I managed to stay outwardly calm. I didn’t yell back. Instead I grabbed my phone and started taking pictures. 

He got back in his car.

Not a pleasant experience, but I’ve definitely had worse. So why can’t I stop thinking about it, days later?

Scary stuff leaves a mark

Partly it just reminds me of scarier things that have happened to me in the past. 

More than once, I’ve been followed and threatened by angry men, usually for similarly random incidents. On one occasion, they were more than just empty threats.  

I don’t imagine these sorts of experiences are all that unusual, but they leave a mark. 

So after the road rage incident last week, I was very careful to make sure this guy didn’t follow me home. So careful, in fact, I was still looking for his car long after I’d got home and unloaded my groceries - checking the window every time a car went past.

I was still looking for his car the next day too, on my morning walk, and again when I went out later that day.

Your unhelpful brain

You notice the kinds of thoughts you have, when something pushes your buttons like this. Even a logical, reassuring thought becomes another reason to be afraid.

Me: ‘It’s been two days. The only way he could find you now is to scour half the city looking for your car.’

My unhelpful brain: ‘Exactly! Imagine how much of a sociopath he’d have to be to do that! Best park my car up the road just in case?’

You know you’re overreacting, but that doesn’t make you any less afraid. In fact, it can actually add to the fear. 

For me, the fact that I’m so hyped up from a seemingly minor threat becomes a source of further fear. But it’s not fear of the road rage guy, it’s fear of my own brain.

When the real threat is in your head (literally)

Because here’s the thing. It’s not just that I’ve been threatened by random men before. It’s that - on some of these occasions - it’s taken me quite a while to get over it. 

Usually it takes a few days - triple-checking locked doors, walking around on even higher alert than usual. 

But sometimes it’s worse. After one incident - a pretty innocuous one, in fact - I went into a months-long spiral where my brain was just stuck on repeat. For the first few weeks, I kept replaying the incident that kicked it off. But before long that had faded into the distance, just a catalyst for the real obsession, the deeper truth that the original incident seemed to represent:

‘You’re too sensitive for this world. Look how badly affected you are by something so simple.’

So goes the spiral. The more intensely you react to something seemingly minor, the more convinced you become of your own vulnerability. The more vulnerable you feel, the more threatening the world appears.

The fear of the fear

Random threats of violence can have an outsized impact on your sense of safety, because you feel like there’s no way to stop them happening again.

In the same way, there’s something particularly hard to reconcile about the randomness of your own internal responses. I’ve had some scary incidents that barely affected me at all, then one seemingly minor thing leaves me reeling for weeks. 

The net result is, you learn to be afraid of your own brain, never sure what it will do next. 

And it becomes self-fulfilling. Things like the road rage incident leave me on edge not just because I’m afraid for my safety, but because I’m afraid of the fear and what it might turn into.

Is this going to be another months-long spiral?

PTSD for your own brain

This is something Honor and I have talked about a bit. She experiences something similar when it comes to depression. 

Honor has been to Doom Town and back multiple times over the years. After those first few trips down the existential plughole, she has naturally become very wary of it happening again. Any tiny sign of it (trouble sleeping, feeling anxious) becomes a reason to be on high alert. This in turn ramps the whole thing up a notch (more trouble sleeping, more feeling anxious).

We’ve talked about how it’s almost like you get PTSD for your own brain. Any sign of those big, scary feelings can become a kind of trigger, which in turn can set the whole thing off.

It can feel like a real trap. So what can you do with that?

‘This fear makes sense’

One thing I’ve found useful is to carve out a bit of space for my fear response. This starts with simply acknowledging that my fear makes sense. 

When you’ve been to some of the scarier places your mind can take you, it makes sense to be scared of that happening again.

The other part of this, for me, is to give myself a timeframe. In the hours after the road rage incident, I said to myself, ‘this feels like at least a 2-day job, maybe longer.’

I’m not trying to predict the future here. The truth is, by this point the fear is already whispering in my ear saying ‘this could last for weeks’. So I’m not trying to argue with that fear. Instead I’m simply trying to remind myself that, even best-case scenario, it makes sense that I’ll feel freaked out for at least the next day or two.   

This reminds me that my current level of fear is not, in itself, a sign that this will go on for a long time. Not yet anyway.

And it helps me stop checking for the fear every minute or two (‘Am I any calmer yet? How about now??’). 

In other words, it helps me stop poking the bruise to see if it still hurts.

Then what?

Back to that first day after the incident. I’m still on high alert - scared on my morning walk, scared of standing near the windows for fear of being seen. And I’m very alert to how alert I am.

I can see the potential for the fear spiral - the fear of the fear.

At this point, all I can really do is a combination of two things. 

Firstly, keep doing the things that seem scary today. Still go on my morning walk, still stand near the windows. And secondly, keep reminding myself that it’s okay that these things feel scary today.

It’s okay. Not comfortable (not by a long shot). But okay.

Allowing uncomfortable feelings

I’m reminded of Tara Brach’s idea of ‘allowing’ uncomfortable feelings. 

She says it’s often useful to ask yourself, ‘what am I unwilling to feel right now?’ Today my answer is clear. Fear. And shame at how much fear there is. 

Brach asks, can you allow these feelings to be there?

At one particularly panicked moment, my answer is ‘I don’t think so!’ But for most of the day my answer is ‘yes, I can allow these feelings’. 

It’s not ‘hell yes!’ It’s not ‘yes please.’ It’s more of an ‘okay, fine. If I have to...’ 

But it is a ‘yes’.

It’s not really about reassuring myself. It’s not saying ‘I’ll get through this, I’ll feel better tomorrow’. It’s more at the gut level than that. 

‘There’s space for these big feelings here, right now at least. This is allowed.’

You’re good at this

Two days on and I’m starting to feel a little calmer. I’m afraid to even write that in case I jinx it, but here I go.

Whatever happens next, I remind myself, I’m good at this. 

Sure, I may have a bigger fear response than most, because my ‘high alert’ baseline is pretty high at the best of times. But this means I’ve also had a lot of practice at dealing with fear. So in a way, I’m actually well-equipped for such things.

I like this thought. I roll it around in my brain for a bit. I’m sensitive, yes, but maybe not ‘too sensitive’. I have big reactions to things, but that also means I’ve had to find space for those big reactions. ('I’m bigger on the inside’, as Honor sings in one of her songs.)

I look at the ways I’ve spent years designing a life that has more room for my big feelings. For instance, finding people who I can tell what’s happening if I need to.

Going through this stuff over and over again can often feel like failure. Why haven’t I figured it out yet?

But from where I’m standing today, I just feel grateful to my past self. For dealing with this stuff time and again and learning how to sit with discomfort.

‘I’m good at this.’

Try saying that to yourself and see how it feels.

‘I’m good at this.’

Tell me your brain-thoughts...

Ever find the fear of your feelings bigger than the feelings themselves? Let me know what you think of this issue here.

(Oh and, I wrote this one a couple months back. Turns out I was right, it was about a 'two dayer'. Now back to my usual high alert baseline. Woop!)