Anx_Shg_Talk

This is some of what I drew while narrating the thinking. I can't remember that thinking, and have no recording or transcript of what I said, and so I have to do a little decoding, and may make a few errors along the way.

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Now ANX is my usual shorthand for anxiety. The 2MUχ is probably 'too much'. The IMAG is something like 'imagine' or 'image'. The topic of this bit, and the page, is learned avoidance. As for SHG and #WCP I don't know as I write this.

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The topic is learned avoidance, and by extension anxiety avoidance. When bad things happen, anxiety avoidance learns and adapts, marking more and more pathways as 'avoid', essentially building new wall in the Maze.

To override this mechanism is to bypass anxiety. The trouble is, my anxious, inhibited nature, is how I've been all my life: I can't simply switch off my anxiety and behave sensibly, as my capacity to behave sensibly depends upon the many walls of anxiety being there. Without those walls, I have to learn how to live sensibly all over again, and I have neither the time, nor the opportunity, nor the capacity of my brain to learn rapidly as it does in childhood. So bypassing anxiety is a high-risk endeavour, and one that tends not to end well.

The other thing hinted at here is the degree to which anxiety can drive mania. At its extreme, anxiety will suddenly cut out, I will become elated, blissful, and feel free in a way which is hard to put into words. At first that freedom is massively useful: I can do things, change things, change the direction of my life based on many thoughts and ideas present in the run up to the mania. But alas without the inhibitions of my anxiety avoidance, I diverge from what others find acceptable, and I lose capacity to function normally. Hence I become gung ho and carefree in my behaviour, things to wrong, and so as the diagrams says: Bad Stuff Happens. And of course in time Bad Stuff means more Walls in the Maze.

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The word AnxProc is short for 'anxiety process'. When anxiety inhibition kicks in, my mind goes blank, my confidence disappears, and to make progress I need things like reassurance. The trouble is that, in that state, I am incapable of asking for or seeking such reassurance of assistance. So the natural hiding instinct kicks in, and then my Facade will synthesise the bits that are Notched out.

Worry is a source of anxiety; anxiety leads to fear of consequences, including consequences of anxiety avoidance; that fear leads to more anxiety, and this process feeds on itself. Eventually things will spiral into mania.

This sensitivity to sources of anxiety make me fragile in many ways: I can only tolerate so much, and not much, before anxiety levels start to grow.

Now I am not always anxious: sometimes I am free of anxiety, sometimes anxiety levels are low enough not to impede me, but then anxiety avoidance starts to kick in. Various paths are pruned, and various choices notched out.

The trouble, and the point of the last bit, is that people often see anxiety as the problem, rather than the cause of that anxiety as the problem. If others can't easily see those causes, if they can see them at all, it is understandable, even if naive, for people to deal with only what they see: and all they see is the anxiety, or just a quiet reserved person who doesn't want to say or do much. The trouble is that I have to deal with those causes, and dealing with the anxiety itself, as if that was the problem, leaves the underlying causes as they are. And it is those unseen underlying causes which are the major problem.