When the Sirens Wail by @TruthisHers

#MondayBlogs Giveaway April 2015 Mary Kay LeTourneau is Not a Lover, S...

When the Sirens Wail by @TruthisHers

My anxiety has been an unholy beast these last few weeks. It has been ruthlessly on my heels. No matter how fast I run it is chewing on my ankles. Sometimes I can’t run anymore and it catches up to me, shredding me with its snarling, gnashing jaws. My heart races, my skin sweats, my muscles tighten, I can’t breathe and I am too agitated to sit still. The anxiety screams at me, “Move! Do something! Fix this! Now!” like a drill sergeant in overdrive.

I haven’t felt this level of anxiety in a long, long time. And, true to form, I have been trying to figure out the “why.” I cannot experience a mood fluctuation without trying to root out the cause. I am relentlessly analytical of all my thoughts and behaviors. It’s a hangover from my childhood: if something is amiss it must be because I screwed up somewhere. What was I doing wrong? How was I failing this time? After hour upon hour of rumination I figured it out. It isn’t impending failure that is the culprit. It is looming success. Ironic as that is.

My work as a trauma recovery coach has been going so well. This past week one of our Twitter chats had a reach of 2.5 million users. Holy moly! I have an active practice of private clients, a publishing contract for my memoir, and a RokuTV channel that reaches thousands of survivors every week. My business partner and I have even been invited to a gathering of high powered, successful entrepreneurs later this month.

That’s all wonderful. I’m so blessed and very lucky. Considering I have often been told I had no potential due to my mental illness and abuse history, I’m in a place where I should be celebrating. Instead, I’m fighting back depression and anxiety at every turn.

You see, success and I have a pattern of incompatibility. It and I can’t seem to be able to exist in the same space. Success has a history of gobbling me up whole and spitting me out in tiny little pieces which take for-freaking-ever to re-assemble.

Success makes me anxious for two reasons. First, because when one is successful one can’t usually hide. It’s hard to do both at the same time. And I like to hide. Really, really, REALLY like to hide.

I learned that very young. In my child’s mind that searched for some way to control what was happening to me, I reasoned that it was when I drew my Father’s attention that he appeared in my room at night. I thought if I was as motionless as possible he would not notice me, like an animal whose predators can only perceive motion. I did everything I could to not be noticed. I laid low and practiced the fine art of perfection. If I cause no trouble, I thought, I will attract no attention. Heaven knows, in my family there was certainly no danger of attracting attention for doing well.

But I can’t hide if I am successful. Because then people see me. And, my mind says, “When they see you they will see the awful truth: that you are a fraud, damaged, an imposter.” I might appear to the world to be a good person with her shit together. “But,” my mind screams, “You are not good! You are bad, bad, BAD.”

The possibility of being successful is also anxiety provoking because I might screw everything up and, once again, be judged a failure. Being a failure would prove my Father right; that I was good for nothing but whoring. And failure might also summon the attention of the demons I fight fiercely to keep away, like depression and paralyzing despair.

As I talked about this with my psychiatrist, a rare wonder who does both medication management and therapy, she helped me realize that my typical coping pattern of dealing with things that frighten me is to shatter and scatter. I fall to pieces and then each of those pieces runs to hide separately, making it harder for the demons to find and torment me. As a child I shattered and scattered by dissociating. As an adult I scatter and shatter by abandoning a successful path and retreating to anonymity. I have done it multiple times, throwing away a successful career and disappearing into depression or even once moving to another continent. It was, in my mind, better to run away than to fail.

Now that success looms again, my brain is using anxiety to scream at me “Quickly, before someone sees you or you fail: shatter and scatter! Shatter and scatter!” It claws at me. Begs. Pleads. On some level I am absolutely terrified. In my panic, the far better thing to do is abandon ship rather than ride out the storm. It’s a Go To defense mechanism that I have perfected over my 49 years. I am darn good at it.

So the Shatter and Scatter sirens are wailing again. At full strength. Relentlessly.

But this time I understand their meaning. I know that their message is false. And I will NOT heed the sirens. I hear them. I acknowledge them and even thank them for serving me now and in the past. I will take care of myself and not give away all that I am to please and care for others. I will seek a balance between pursuing my goals and maintaining my mental and physical health. I will NOT scatter and shatter this time.

I have no doubt that, despite my understanding of the anxiety and my determination not to give in to the impulse it’s calling forth, the sirens will continue to wail. At full strength. For awhile. It will take some time to convince them they are unnecessary. They are, after all, doing their job. A job I designed them to do. These sirens are a defense mechanism of my own devising. They exist separate from my reason and logic. They neither trust nor rely on those two parts of my mind to trigger or quiet. I built them to be successful and they are. Again, the irony!

But I will am bigger and stronger than the sirens. And this time, for the first time, I will not shatter and scatter in the face of potential success. Not this time.

Broken Places is available from Booktrope. It’s already hit #1 on Women’s Poetry and Hot New Releases on Amazon! Broken Pieces is still going strong, #1 on Amazon’s Women’s (paid) Poetry list and BIG NEWS: The Broken Collection is now available! Both books together in one set.
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All content copyrighted unless otherwise specified. © 2015 by Rachel Thompson, author. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to use short quotes provided a link back to this page and proper attribution is given to me as the original author.
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