To write this safely, I have had to use a lot of my therapy tools and hand write it out, to slow and focus my mind.
One of my core strengths is my ability to generate a zabilliion and 5 ideas and scenarios in my mind extremely quickly. I'm not saying I'm better at this than anyone else, its just one of the things I do well. My logic and creative mind kicks in and takes my mind whirling through thoughts at speed, its too much too quickly. So a technique I developed is to vocalise my ideas this forces my mind to slow down. It focuses my mind on 1 or 3 ideas which my mind will chase and flip between. Generally from talking to my therapist I think it's fair to say that ideas cause emotional responses. Like thinking about a bungee jump conjures feelings of fear, excitement and so on. These emotional responses cause physical responses. Fear can get the adrenaline pumping and so on. This all helps us identify and respond to risk levels.
My mind is great at generating the ideas, but it a bit addicted to the rush of new ideas and chases each idea as far as it can before jumping to another tangential idea and running with it. Its fun, honestly it is. (If you've spoken to me after I've been painting I'll complain of a head ache, being tired and yet I will talk about lots of ideas that my work will lead on to and where that can lead and where that....... (yawn) but I'm also quite manic in my actions being a lot more active.
Unfortunately my emotional mind is not as quick to keep up I think. All the emotions get pushed to one side and don't get dealt with. This would not be an issue, but for life and it's general demands; I have to react to events, and the emotions from the whirling mind don't get dealt with. (I should point out that my mind does this even when I'm not painting). I guess I use to be able to just push these things away or down and deal with them somehow - I honestly have no idea how I did it. But since the start of 2016(?) 17(?) something has given way. And the thing I did -what ever it was- no longer functions. So instead all the emotions sit there stewing unprocessed, unlabeled, unacknowledged until some stress or event triggers the dam to burst.
This next bit is hard to write. It's how my body reacts. I've had over the past few nights this happen hourly or so - I was really grateful for sleep last night. I'm not sure if they are panic attacks, but that's what I'm going to call them. When it kicks in my right hand starts to shake and twitch. Then I start crying randomly. It stops and starts over the course of 30 minutes or so. Sometimes that's it just uncontrollable crying. Other times it gets more extreme. I curl in to a ball, my anxiety peaks and I lose the ability to form words, both in my mind and physically. In my mind it rages.
I have no idea what it is but it causes at its worst my throat and chest and all muscles to tense. I make a horrible tortured noise and then it reaches its peak where I can't even breathe. I become a tensed up ball of bone and flesh. My thoughts are wordless and too, too fast.
Then my body releases itself and I hyperventilate to get air and the cycle repeats. This can go on for 10 minutes until my body is sore and exhausted. At it worst I was having these for 30 minutes with little break in between( thank fully the rethink team were there for me). My body might be exhausted but the anxiety is still there. This is conjecture, but at this point my logic mind is broken and I'm just reacting, not thinking. Maybe I see my self as a threat I don't know, but it can lead to self harming. I'm impulsively hurting my self. The unwanted thoughts of suicide will crash in again and again. It seems to be the only solution to end the nameless and formless torment. If I fight that urge off I can end up in the panic attack mode again. Then suddenly it stops. I might get lucky and that is it for the day. WOOO!
Mostly it cycles (i'm not sure of the timings) pretty much every hour for whatever length of time.
This is about as much as I can handle right now. My hand is letting me know I need to ground myself. In my next part I'll be using metaphor to get ideas across.