Tension

How I became calm ▬ 

Source ▬ 

○  Georgios Kakarinos and Theodoros Koutsomitros, “Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP),” July 7, 2019, in EFPT Psychotherapy Guidebook, https://epg.pubpub.org/pub/istdp/release/5 

Transcript

Hi, I’m Wayne Jones. Welcome to Newfoundland Boy, part memoir, part anecdotes, and all about the Canadian province of Newfoundland. This is episode 3: “Tension.”

As I speak this, I am 64 and a half years old. I was born in October 1959 but it wasn’t until about October 2018, less than six years ago, that I became the person I am now. Let me explain.

For the bulk of my life I lived with what I always referred to as tension, but which I think these days people would generally call anxiety. When I say the bulk, I mean from about when I was 30 years old to about when I was 59. That’s almost half my years being alive. I called it tension, especially during the first decades of it—this would have been about the late 1980’s to the late 2000’s—because it was a very specific and locatable feeling. Whenever anyone asked, or whenever I was talking about it, I used the old image of butterflies in your stomach, and I’d often tell people it was exactly like that feeling you get when, say, you have to give a presentation or even just talk in front of a crowd, and public speaking is one of your worst fears. The problem and the difference were that I felt that tension literally 24/7, and in the true meaning of literally. There was no respite. It didn’t matter what I was doing, alone or with someone else, pleasurable or a chore, I always felt that tension. And at the end of the day when I lay down in bed, it was still there, just as it was still there the moment I woke up.

It was draining, but it was something I got used to dealing with. I had to adapt in order just to be a half-normal-seeming person in real life. And also had to adapt so that I could function. I was employed and as the years went by I had progressively more senior positions in the academic and research libraries I worked in during my career. I was a supervisor of people, I was a manager, but I was a nervous wreck inside.

I hid it well, like an alcoholic who has vodka for breakfast and swims in it in the evening, but during the day is able to go to meetings and get work done as if nothing is wrong at all. In fact, people often told me that I was one of the calmest people they had ever met. That’s very sad when I now reflect on it, because my butterflies—it seems like I need a more nasty insect to represent the feeling, like angry wasps or something, because it actually was a pain, a hurt that I could feel—well, those wasps were stinging me continuously but I was apparently able to act like nothing was going on at all.

I mentioned that it was very locatable. It was right in the middle of my torso, about halfway between my belly button and my chest. When I would be involved in this or that activity, I’d kind of forget about it, but when the activity was done and I was nominally still, and especially alone, then I could feel it as a pain, a hurt, a sting.

I used to joke with people that if tension were on a scale from zero to ten, zero being zen and ten being dysfunctionally wracked with it, then I was permanently at about eight. I told people and myself what was probably the truth: the reason I didn’t get nervous about doing things was because my dial was already up on high, and so it would take a lot to make it go to nine, say. I often aced job interviews because I was hyper-prepared for them and because although my tension might reach a kind of crescendo in the lead-up and in the moments before, once I got started I was, or appeared to be anyway, as calm and cool and confident as you could imagine.

Outside of the relatively minor advantage it gave me in interviews though, in the majority of my waking hours it was a burden, something I was carrying that kept me from going as fast or as far as I wanted to, metaphorically speaking of course. I’ve always been ambitious and, as they say in the vernacular, I like to get shit done, but living with this tension took away some of my energy. When I was in about my 40’s or so, I did try some therapies and even medications to try to fix myself. Nothing worked. I remember going to several sessions with a cognitive behavioural therapist in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and after I’d explained exactly what I’ve been talking about here, he had nothing to offer me. I can’t quite remember if he actually said that he didn’t know the cause or the cure of what I was experiencing, but in effect that was the case. A few years later I was living in Toronto as a freelance editor, and I think it was through a clinic that I was able to get a prescription to Paxil, which is a very common medication for anxiety and depression. It had absolutely no healing effect and I frustratingly just stopped using it, which is not what you’re supposed to do. You’re supposed to wean yourself off, with smaller and smaller doses over a period of weeks so that your body gets used to not having it any more. I remember because I got some really weird and uncomfortable-feeling scrunches that seemed to be inside my head. Anyway, I survived.

Fast-forward to 2018 when I was in my late 50’s and the director of Carleton University Library in Ottawa. What still gives me a little chill to this day is how it was such a random and fortunate combination of circumstances that eventually got me the treatment that I needed. I had a good family doctor whom I saw for annual checkups mostly, because generally speaking my body like my head kind-of, sort-of works fairly well most of the time and don’t have much wrong with them. So during one visit I brought up the fact of the tension and asked her if there was anything she could do for me. And here’s the lucky part. She told me that she just happened to have a psychiatrist from one of city’s hospitals who came to my doctor’s office building once a week. She asked me if I’d be interested and willing to meet with her, and I said yes.

That was the beginning. During my appointment with her, she asked me a lot of questions which I can’t quite remember now, but I do remember that there was one answer I gave that caused her to pause a little. When she asked what I was like when I got angry, I told her (truthfully) that I never got angry. The appointment eventually ended and she referred me to another psychiatrist who would carry out the actual therapy on me. It was what I later found out was a controversial form of psychotherapy called the Davanloo method, named after Habib Davanloo who developed it while at McGill University in Montreal (see the show notes). The formal name for it is intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy. Here’s how one source describes what the therapy does:

ISTDP can treat a wide range of psychoneurotic disturbances and personality disorders through access and re-experiencing of unconscious feelings. Those feelings come from emotional traumas during childhood concerning patient's main attachments with significant persons. These unconscious feelings and the concurrent unconscious anxiety lead to guilt and to self-punishing actions that can result to the development of symptoms and disturbances in the behavior of the patient.

In my case, the “significant persons” were my mother and my middle brother, and my self-punishing actions were binge eating, self-hatred, shame, and a few other things that, to say the least, are not good for you. The sessions were intense. Part of the idea was to “break you down,” so to speak, and by the third session I was crying and talking about the past. Apparently I was a tough nut: the psychiatrist told me later that most patients do that at their first session.

I think I had about six or eight sessions with him. And the first psychiatrist prescribed me a combination of meds that, combined with the lessons from the therapy, were life-changing for me. If I were to use that same tension scale from zero to ten, I’d say I’m generally at one now and sometimes at zero. I can live with that (and do!). I’m calmer, happier, more appreciative of people, enjoy their company more, treat them better. I also protect myself in the sense that I have no hesitation about speaking up to defend myself or to give my opinions, with people-pleasing not being the overriding factor anymore. I’m imperfect just like everyone else, but I do like, dare I say love, myself now.

The calm is wonderful. I go to bed peacefully and I often wake up and think of a line from a favourite standup comedian and am laughing my ass off in bed before I even get up. Life is good.

And that’s all for this episode. Thanks so much for listening. And please join me again on Friday.