The Complaining Notes
Everything Is True
Ada Hoffmann's author newsletter
One of the things I'm learning in therapy is how not to panic.
This isn't an explicitly stated goal. I didn't come in saying, "I want help not panicking." (I did come in saying "Okay so I probably have PTSD of some kind," which might or might not be the same thing.) It's not something we spend a lot of time on - we have other things to take up the bulk of our time - but it's something I find myself picking up tools and tricks for on the way.
I'm not talking about panic attacks in the medical sense. I have had those, but they're rare. What I have, regularly and to annoying degree, are things that make me so flustered that I can't actually talk or think or engage with whatever was in front of me. Sometimes these are little things. Sometimes sensory things (but sometimes not). Sometimes things I can't even identify.
I get frustrated sometimes by the language around mental illness-related distress. Do I ever get triggered? Sure. Do I get triggered on an average day? Heck if I know. (You can't shake a stick without running into an article about how the word "trigger" is misused, and how you're not actually triggered unless you're having a full-blown panic attack or meltdown, in which you uncontrollably relive a specific memory in a specific way. Otherwise, it's just a sparkling trauma response.)
The language of autism isn't always much better. Do I get shutdowns or meltdowns? Do I get autistic catatonia? Sometimes! But most of my everyday moments of life-interfering distress aren't quite that, either. Really what I have is weak nerves, volatile moods, and just enough alexythimia to make it confusing.
Anyway, when I was preparing for my conference, I worried about this, because it seemed very likely that I would be in the middle of some conference session and encounter something that annoyed, upset, or worried me in a way that threw me out of the room. So I made safety plans! My therapist is a big fan of safety plans and she’s helping with that, too.
But I ended up barely having to use those plans, because the very first step I’d come up with proved incredibly more useful than I thought it would be.
The step was:
Write down what's upsetting you.
This was easy to arrange since I was taking notes on all the talks anyway. I had some elaborate ideas about it. Once, years ago, I dealt with an especially irritating “women in computing” talk by tweeting it in the style of a Night Vale episode. (This was back in the golden days of Weird Twitter; I miss those days.) I could be creative if I wanted to! I probably should not tweet about it in public, but I could blow off steam by secretly writing down what my fanfic characters would think of someone’s presentation, or what a cosmic horror entity visiting the Earth would think about it, and so on.
Except I didn't actually end up doing any of that, because the first and simplest part of write it down was also the one that worked.
This got tested on the first day. I was at the fictional abstracts workshop. I wasn't sure what the schedule for the day was going to look like, which is never a good thing. One of the organizers started to talk, and although it seemed important, I could only halfway make sense of what she was saying. Anxiety spike! I wrote down, among my other notes:
(panic because auditory processing)
And... that was all i needed to write. By the time I had finished writing it, I had figured out a little more of what was going on. The anxiety stayed in perspective instead of taking over. It wasn’t this amorphous horror, it was simply just the thing I’d written down. I stayed engaged.
I kept concisely writing down what bothered me at intervals throughout the conference, interspersed with my actual, serious notes and my bolts of inspiration.
Why is he duplicating my work :<
For some reason the ears / hair / neck of the guy in front of me are bothering me.
Now he is mansplaining how stories work. Is all CC simply organized and codified mansplaining? Am I a mansplainer? I am probably a mansplainer since I am explaining social issues to people that they already know about.
(These examples are all three different “he”s on different days, by the way. Putting them together like this gives the illusory impression that there was one specific really annoying guy, but that’s not the case.)
As anyone who has done any CBT will know, there’s a danger of ruminating too much on what bothers you, or repeating distorted thoughts to yourself in a spiral. You might think writing down what bothered you would contribute to a spiral like this, but I found it was the opposite. It felt like venting but it also felt like, once I saw the problem in words on the page, I saw it more concretely and at its proper size. The complaints weren’t about nothing, but they were minor conference irritants, not the ominous amorphous inescapable things that they’d been a second before.
I don't want to overstate this. Writing down the things that bothered me wasn't the only reason why I did well - by my standards - at this conference. Some of the other reasons are private, or too complicated to go into in this post. Some are so basic they don't bear discussing: I'm more mature now than in grad school, I'm less burned out, I have a different perspective. (And the writing-it-down trick won’t necessarily work this well for everyone - especially if you aren’t a verbal thinker, for instance.)
But a lot of the work that we do in this therapy is about naming things: body sensations, emotions, things that you saw or heard or smelled. A lot of trauma is literally unspeakable. A lot of trauma gets its power from the inability to express or explain what is hurting you - or from not being heard when you try. To name something, even just to yourself, renders it speakable and - if you think in words - thinkable.
I guess maybe minor conference irritants work in the same way. Or at least, maybe, the writing trick short-circuits the urge to do something unhelpful - like bottling the momentary feeling up, or getting mad at yourself and fixed on how you shouldn’t be feeling it.
So: Last time you felt that itch inside - the feeling that some minor problem was going to absolutely take you over and ruin your brain - what did you do?
Did you write it down?
Did you speak it aloud?
Did you name it?
Did it work?