The Black hole

Consider a black hole. A black hole, in astrophysics, is a region of space whose gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. As matter falls in, the black hole grows larger, and its gravity grows stronger. My Anxiety Avoidance is like that, to some degree: it presents a no-go area of Mind and life which grows.

To understand how it grows, consider that:

1. Any path that leads to bad stuff is bad;
2. Any path that leads onto a bad path is bad;
3. This applies recursively, so as paths to bad paths are identified, they themselves become bad paths.

Thus, as paths that lead to bad paths are identified, they also become bad paths, and so the collection of bad paths grows, like a black hole, gradually absorbing more and more.

And to escape this problem too quickly is to induce mania, either induced by anxiety that Anxiety Avoidance can't avoid, or induced by the absence of Anxiety Avoidance. (And to the mental health professionals, it seems there is no difference between these two: they're both mania, work the same way, and are treated in the same way. Whereas to me they're polar opposites.)

The trouble with this is that it is hard to even seek any kind of help. To overcome anxiety avoidance is to invite mania, to become disinhibited, and in so doing, to get drawn into the euphoria of being free from anxiety. In such a situation, all that the mental professionals see is the mania, and they consider that anything I might say when manic is just 'stuff that John says when he is manic', and that once I 'take my medication and calm down', that stuff I was saying disappears. From the professional's perspective, the mania has been treated and the problem is solved. But that is a dangerous illusion created by their lack of information, their very limited time with me, their having spent essentially no time with me except when trying to treat me in an acute phase, and having no direct access to the viewpoint on my life that I have, from the Interior.

The thing is, to seek help, even to write this, runs the risk of being labelled 'bad'. It has taken months to get this content from where I can imagine it, as I have done readily for years, until the point where I can type these words out. Since bypassing Anxiety Avoidance may lead to the 'bad stuff' the Anxiety Avoidance is seeking to avoid, taking action to bypass Anxiety Avoidance is seen as 'bad' by that very Anxiety Avoidance, and so it is hard to make happen. In the past, the only times when I have been able to effectively bypass this mechanism has been when manic. And of course nobody pays any attention to what a manic person says.

In the aftermath of my 2017 episode, when I spent a year in Russell Clinic, I did try to explain this to an art therapy student. She was, in that situation, the only person with sufficient one-to-one contact in a private therapeutic setting. No nurse would ever have sufficient time, nor would any psychiatrist. The only other person I made progress explaining this to was a private counsellor I was seeing in the year before my admission to Russell. So I guess writing this is my next attempt. Maybe somehow I'll eventually find someone and a suitable environment to revisit this. But that comes with its own problems: perhaps revisiting will lead to mania again, as it has the capacity to lift too much anxiety too quickly, as happened in 2017. Perhaps being too close to too many anxious thoughts for too long will lead to an anxiety-induced mania. And the mere uncertainty in all that is sufficient to build a wall preventing me going towards such possibilities.