My unreliable brain and I

Part one - anxiety

I’ve always been an anxious person. I once joked to someone that I was from a long line of ancestors who were ‘worriers rather than warriors’. My anxiety has always felt very hard-wired into my being.

Salamanca Arts Centre, Hobart

Perhaps I inherited a lot of it from family conditioning. ‘Stop it, my nerves can’t take it another minute,’ Mum was always saying to us when we were young. We watched as she threw back her head and funnelled Vincent’s powder into her mouth. This was usually just before dinner time when there was a crescendo of noise. I’m blaming the three brothers, not us girls! (Mum’s pink ‘powders’ were later taken off the market because they contained a nasty addictive ingredient called Phenacetin.)

Dad was a salesman for an international tyre company and for a lot of our childhood was away travelling around Australia and Papua New Guinea. He was a larger-than-life character and it was so much fun when he came home in between trips away. Now, that I look back, through the lens of my now much older self, I understand that having the responsibility for five children, including one with epilepsy, would have been enormously challenging for my mother. For a lot of the time she was a single parent. I remember waking up in the middle of the night and hearing the deep timbre of Doctor Hock’s voice as he spoke with Mum in the boys’ adjoining bedroom. He was examining my youngest brother, Tom, who was still coming to after a fit.

It is normal for anxiety to ramp up during our teenage years — mine, however, became a particularly debilitating variety of social anxiety, brought on by a teenage pregnancy that saw me being sent away to live with relatives in New Zealand for four months. I returned home minus a baby (my son was put up for adoption) and was expected to slot back into senior high school and carry on as if nothing had ever happened. It was a big ask and affected my mental health for many years afterwards.

Eventually, I worked out that the only way through my sometimes crippling anxiety was — not to avoid social situations or interactions with humanity at large — but to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’. This I did, often with the help of a lot of alcohol. Well, drinking excessively was the norm for most of my generation of baby boomers anyway …

My inability to maintain successful relationships with male partners during my twenties was another negative outcome of the separation from my son. I trembled my way through university, job interviews and a job in publishing in Sydney, whilst also attempting several short-lived and mismatched romantic attachments. I decided to have a baby on my own when I was 31. With the support of Shirley, a wonderful daycare woman, my sister Shauna, and a close friend, Steph, I managed to carry on my career while Lilli was still very young.

Dad’s version of ‘The Scream’ by Edvard Munch

When Lilli was four the two of us moved to Tasmania. I was after a slower life and a whole new beginning. Three years later I received a phone call to tell me that my birth son, John, was searching for me and wanted to reconnect. I was 39 and he was 23 when we finally met at Hobart airport a year later. Lilli, at seven, was delighted to meet her big brother. It was a nerve-racking experience for the three of us but one with a wonderful outcome. There is a Chinese proverb that says, One joy can dispel a hundred cares. For a long period, it did!

However, happy endings don’t necessarily quieten a brain that has an anxiety trigger set too low. My anxiety did become more manageable during my forties and fifties (especially after I met and married Alan — he was well worth the wait) but now that I am older, I find myself overthinking and becoming overly anxious again. Between us, Alan and I have nine grandchildren. So many precious young people to love and worry about. Such a crazy world we live in. Old age also brings health issues, lack of sleep, the loss of family and friends close to us, and the need for many more readjustments to life in general …

I finally decided this year to do something about my anxiety. At the psychologist’s, I fill in the questionnaire on Unhelpful Thinking Styles. Do I have a wonky mental filter, believe I can predict the future, assume I know what others are thinking, am I a compare-and-despair kind of person, or too hard on myself, do I make judgements too quickly, make mountains out of molehills, catastrophise, or indulge in black and white thinking? And on it goes. No surprises, I score highly on catastrophising and overthinking. I’m working on them.

For the last two weeks, we have been concentrating on learning strategies for communicating effectively. The ‘DEAR MAN’ acronym has been surprisingly helpful. I have wanted to write and send a letter on a very tricky issue to someone prominent in my life for a long time. I feel more equipped to do it now.

The acronym goes like this:

Describe - clearly and concisely the facts of the situation, without any judgement.

Express - Use ‘I’ statements to express your emotions.

Assert - Clearly state what you want or need. Be specific.

Reinforce - Talk about the rewards for the other person if they respond well to your request.

Mindfulness - Being mindful of your goal means not getting sidetracked by bringing in other issues.

Appear confident - Show confidence, even if you don’t feel it.

Negotiate - Be willing to compromise.

The U3A Taoist philosophy group I have joined (Go with the flow: ‘When nothing is done, nothing is left undone’), and the Sharon Salzburg Equanimity online course I recently completed (‘I wish you happiness but I cannot make your choices for you’) have proved to be as beneficial as the psychology sessions. I have also decided to spend more time being in nature, and more time exercising, reading books, writing, sewing, doing my dodgy art, and listening to podcasts — with less time spent on googling health complaints and listening to the news. I am choosing to be more reclusive. I try to be helpful when I can. For now, everything is going okay …

Next post I am going to address the big ‘D’ worry - dementia.