Self-Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear. Dr. Weekes Claire
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the day may come when, yielding to some extra burden of fear, the sufferer gives up what he thinks is his last ounce of strength, and ‘collapses’, while the alarmed family stand round helplessly. The words heard murmured in the hall, ‘Doctor, he has collapsed,’ close a chapter for him and act as chains to bind him to the bed. If he could not find his way out of breakdown while on his two feet he wonders how he will find it now that he has collapsed. The fight seems too great, the journey too uphill, so he may spend weeks, even months, on his back, or be taken promptly to hospital for shock treatment.
The Constant Pattern of Fear
No doubt you have recognized some of yourself in this person and it may be a revelation to find that the basis of your mysterious symptoms is, like his, fear.
Whether breakdown be mild or severe, the basic cause is fear. Conflict, sorrow, guilt or disgrace may start a breakdown, but it is not long before fear takes command. Even great sorrow at the loss of a loved one is mixed with fear, the fear of facing the future alone. Sexual problems are most likely to cause breakdown when accompanied by fear or guilt. Guilt opens the door to fear. Anxiety, worry, dread are only variants of fear in different guises.
It could be argued that strain, as distinct from fear, may cause breakdown in certain situations. For example, there is much prolonged strain for a middle-aged woman tending an old, sick parent. However, while she copes from day to day, does not look too far ahead and does not think it too important that she is literally chained to her duties, she can sustain months, years, of such strain. She may ‘bend’ and need help from time to time, but she will not ‘break’.
I once commented on the ability of one woman to carry on for so long in such a situation and was told by her brother, ‘Yes, it is a great strain on Ada, but Ada never did think of herself.’ That was the key to Ada’s endurance. Had Ada listened to her sympathizing friends, begun to feel sorry for herself and come to dread the future, she would have sown the seeds of a nervous breakdown.
Strain may cause severe headaches (Ada had migraine) and physical exhaustion, but unless accompanied by fear it will not cause the incapacity known as nervous breakdown. When work threatens to become beyond our physical strength and our responsibilities demand that we keep going, fear usually comes into the picture and any ensuing breakdown is caused not by the exhaustion, as so many believe, but by the fears it brings.
Afraid to Admit Fear
Sometimes it is difficult for a person to admit even to himself that he is afraid. One woman insisted that it was the ‘stomach shakes’, not fear, that caused her nervousness. So I avoided the word ‘fear’ when talking to her and tried to convince her that it was ‘tension’ causing her stomach shakes. Her stomach had ‘shaken’ for six months; she had eaten and slept little and looked the wreck she felt, and yet when she finally accepted that the shakes depended on the excretion of adrenalin through tension, she was able to relax and lose them within a month. However, she continued to insist that she had not been afraid of them.
Is it possible to explain the disappearance of this woman’s symptoms in any other way than that she had lost her fear of them? I asked her for an explanation and she said, ‘I disliked them. I lost my dislike of them.’ She had disliked them so much that she had let them dominate her life for six months. Surely the difference between such strong dislike and fear is only one of degree? At least we have to admit that strong dislike of physical sensations is so close to fear that it can cause the same nervous reactions.
Camouflage your fear as intense dislike if it makes you feel happier. This is of no importance, as long as you understand that the physical reactions in your body to intense dislike and fear are so similar that any difference is negligible.
The Single Pattern
The breakdown described in this chapter was not complicated by a particular problem. It was caused by no more than fear of the very feelings that fear itself had aroused, and as such is the commonest and most straightforward form of breakdown we know. If yours is this type of breakdown, it is a step towards cure to see your various symptoms as part of a single pattern coming from a single cause, fear. These symptoms are not peculiar to you, but are well known to many like you. And yet, however distressing they may be, I assure you that every unwelcome sensation can be banished and you can regain peace of mind and body.
CHAPTER 5 How to Cure the Simpler Form of Nervous Illness
If you have this type of breakdown you will notice that, as already mentioned, you have certain symptoms as a fairly constant background to your day, while others come from time to time. For example, the churning stomach, sweating hands and rapidly beating heart are more or less always with you, while fear-spasms, palpitations, ‘missed’ heartbeats, pains around the heart, trembling turns, breathlessness, giddiness and vomiting come in attacks, at intervals. The constant symptoms are those of sustained fear, hence their chronicity, while the different recurring attacks are the result of varying intensity in sustained fear, hence their periodicity.
The treatment of all symptoms depends on a few simple rules. When you first read them you may think, ‘This is too simple for me. It will take something more drastic to cure me.’ In spite of this, you will need to be shown how to apply this simple treatment and may often have to re-read instructions.
The principle of treatment can be summarized as:
Facing.
Accepting.
Floating.
Letting time pass.
There is nothing mysterious or surprising about this treatment, and yet it is enlightening to see how many people sink deeper into their breakdown by doing the exact opposite.
Let us look again briefly at the person described in the last chapter, the person afraid of the physical feelings aroused by fear, and see if we can pinpoint his own treatment of his breakdown.
First, he became unduly alarmed by his symptoms, examining each as it appeared, ‘listening in’ in apprehension. He tried to free himself of the unwelcome feelings by tensing himself to meet them or by pushing them away, agitatedly seeking occupation to force forgetfulness. In other words, by fighting or running away.
Also, he was bewildered because he could not find cure overnight. He kept looking back and worrying because so much time was passing and he was not yet cured, as if this thing were an evil spirit which could be exorcized if only he, or the doctor, knew the trick. He was impatient with time.
Briefly, he spent his time:
Running away, not facing.
Fighting, not accepting.
Arresting and ‘listening in’, not floating past.
Being impatient with time, not letting time pass.
Now let us consider how you can cure yourself by facing, accepting, floating and letting time pass.
We will first consider cure of the constant symptoms and then of the recurring attacks.
CHAPTER 6 Cure of the More Constant Symptoms
First, look at yourself and notice how you are sitting in your chair. I have no doubt that you are tensely shrinking from the feelings within you and yet, at the same time, are ready to ‘listen in’ in apprehension? I want you to do the exact opposite. I want you to sit as comfortably as you can, relax to the best of your ability by letting your arms and legs sag into the chair as if charged with lead, and take slow, deep breaths through your partly opened mouth. Now examine and do not shrink from the sensations that have been upsetting you. I want you to examine each carefully, to analyse and