Centered in the Mind

"Your parents - anxious, overprotective mother and alcoholic, emotionally absent father—were a classically anxiety-producing combination."

Woo, boy, this quote is a doozy for me.

I'm also fascinated by the phenomenon of a psychosomatic illness.  "Somatic" is an ancient Greek word which means "of the body."  Psycho is a modern word describing people like me, people who are healthy but act like they aren't.  So "psychosomatic" means an ailment or a symptom which centers in the mind.

I'm intrigued that so many illnesses and medical complaints don't have any organic cause.  That is - they exist only in the mind.  This, of course, does not mean that the physical complaints aren't real.  A simple example is anxiety causing muscle tension leading to migraines or a sore neck.  The neck is indeed sore but the problem is what's going on inside the head.

Doesn't everything center in the mind?  It's not like the arm feels anything if you insert a needle into your flesh - a signal goes up to the brain which relays a message back down to the arm along the lines of:"Hey.  Stop that."

I read about a study that attempted to quantify anxiety in infants.  The technique was for a mother to set her baby down in a room full of new toys.  The baby explores while checking in from time to time to make sure mom is still there.  Then, the mother leaves the room.  Some babies cry immediately; some begin to whimper after a while; and some don't seem to give a shit.  The next step in the experiment is to have a stranger enter the room and check the reaction which pretty follow the same trajectory.  So there are some babies that cry when mom leaves and cry when someone new enters, and some babies that keep on playing, impervious to loss and threat.

I think the new toys would have made me anxious.

Again . . . I wonder what benefit I'm getting out of the anxiety?  I'm no longer afraid of feeling foolish in front of someone else - I enjoy looking foolish in public.  I'm not especially afraid of failing.  I've failed and failed and managed to keep on kicking.  The anxiety is feeding into something else that I can't put my finger on.  A call for attention?  Or am I simply feeding back into a call and response that was installed in my long ago?  Another study indicates that one of the most accurate predictors of anxiety in a person is an anxious parent.  Phobias run through families like wildfire.  Suicides, too.

I'm extraordinarily fascinated by my fascination with caffeine.  There are some things in my life - sugar is another good example - that provide me with the briefest of jolts and then provide me with a few hours of crappy symptoms, but I can't get my mind past the jolt.  It reminds me so much of my drinking, certain that I'm going to pay a heavy price for a pleasant effect that was becoming shorter and shorter in duration.  I could never get past the pleasant effect, no matter how fleeting it was.

I'm talking to my anxiety.
I'm open to weeping.

It's going to be a good day.