Help me end my paranoia

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m asking for everyone’s help in overcoming a case of paranoia. It’s hard to describe what I’m afraid of, but it left me cowering under the covers at 2:30 in the morning, afraid to breathe, so it needs to be nipped in the bud. I think that maybe if I describe what scares me, maybe other people with similar fears can describe what they’ve done to cope/cure, or someone can describe good techniques for this sort of thing. I’d like to avoid medication, if possible - I’m not hurting anyone, just exhausting myself, and I’m not hearing voices, I swear. :stuck_out_tongue:

It started when I was a small child, and it was the weirdest thing. We had cable that went out on occasion, and when it did the cable box, instead of showing the channel number, said “nd” in its little LED box - for no data. That scared me to crying at the age of four, not because I was missing Sesame Street or anything but because the cable box was saying something it usually didn’t, that I couldn’t understand, that didn’t make sense to me (then, anyway).

Then, when I was a little older, my dad got me a shortwave radio. It wasn’t very wide-spectrum and didn’t pick up much besides BBC World and evangelical stations, but it was fun to listen to at night. Fun for a while, anyway, before it started scaring the shit out of me. I listened with all the lights on, scared to sleep in the dark for no reason I could discern - just an instinctive emotional response. The beeps and clicks and people reading random numbers and odd static - it seemed like something I shouldn’t listen to, something I’d get in trouble for listening to.

There are other things, even less sensical than being scared of radio stations. “Revolution 9,” from The Beatles’ White Album, scares me. The screams, the backwards music, the odd muttering, it all scares me. The fear had gone away for a while when other things in my life took priority, but when I was in the library one day I ran across William Poundstone’s Big Secrets, filled with chapters on backwards messages in music, numbers stations, subliminal messaging… it fascinated me, but it scared me too. I tried confronting it head-on - listening for the sentences in Revolution 9, saying “that’s a sound effect, they pulled that off of the radio,” and so on. It didn’t help any - emotionally, I seemed afraid John Lennon was going to come back from the dead and kill me for discovering some secret message no one was supposed to find in the music. I know that’s insane. Logically, I know these are irrational fears and I have nothing to be afraid of. But knowing that doesn’t help.

So, last night. I was on the Beatles Anomalies page, looking through the songs and listening along, and it’s fascinating, but troubling somehow. Then I went into GQ and was reading the “secret death ray” threads (they made those rays in the 1920’s, if I recall correctly), and in-between the jokes, the few serious posts talking about the Tesla experiments and so forth, and looking at a page on Tesla’s work, I got scared again. The hours went by and I avoided going to bed so I wouldn’t have to turn off the lights. Some emotional fear response in me just snowballed out of control, and there I was, cowering under the covers, afraid to leave any part of me exposed for fear of being “caught,” whatever that means. Do you know the Far Side cartoon with the “monster snorkel,” so kids hiding under the covers could still breathe? That was me as a kid, except it wasn’t monsters - it was (is) people, out to get me for knowing something I shouldn’t.

I know this is all horribly irrational. But I find these things amazing, and I don’t want to shirk away from them. We’re about fighting ignorance here, and there’s a part of me that’s horribly ignorant and frightened of things it shouldn’t be, and I want to fight that. So if you think you can help me, please try.

2

Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Sweet dreams! Bwahahaha!

3

dude, get a therapist.

I am one, so believe me when I say you need one.

I’d suggest simple cognitive/behavioral training like breathing in your anxiety, asking yourself “what’s the worst that could happen?” etc.

It’s too complicated to deal with here. You’re most likely to get some pretty good advice but that will only partially do you for a while and you’ll never really deal with the actual problem.

Ignorance isn’t your problem, If you’re scared of things, there may be a really good reason.

get a therapist.

4

See a psychiatrist too,
that bit about people out to get you for something you know concerns me.

how old are you? late teens, early 20’s?

5

i’m picking up the recurring inference that your fears are based on your belief you either possess some “forbidden knowledge” that makes you a target for elimination/retribution, or else that unknown/uninterpretable data or information causes you acute discomfort (to the point of fear and panic).

is there any sort of circumstance in your past, some actual incident, that this could be based upon? might you have seen some activity, or overheard something, that either frightened you so much you just had to conceal it (possibly even from yourself) or where you were threatened with dire consequences if you ever told anyone about it? were you made to swear secrecy by someone else when you learned something they didn’t want made known (your sibling broke a favorite vase; you caught somebody kissing someone they shouldn’t; you were, willingly or not, involved in some activity that you knew/sensed was wrong)?

6
  1. And I promise you, I know no one is out to get me. No one really gives a shit what I’m reading or listening to (okay, maybe Ashcroft does :wink: ). I don’t hear voices, I don’t see things that aren’t there, and I’d like to avoid padded rooms and straitjackets if that’s at all possible.
7

That’s it, exactly, but I can’t think of anything like you’re describing - some event that would fit that. If there ever was, I’ve blocked it out of my memory. The cable box thing started when I was three or four, so this goes way, way back. I don’t know what it could have been, though, but I’ll ask my parents.

8

I should add - my mother and her father have both been hospitalized at various times for severe depression, and I went through a bout of severe depression and suicide attempts around age 12, when my mother suffered a brain hemmorhage and lost use of one side of her body. Her recovery from that was a long-distance process (it happened while we were on vacation in Florida, but we lived in Cincinnati) and by the end of it, I’d changed schools twice and we’d moved to Florida. I was never medicated for my depression, but I did have some (not terribly effective) therapy.

9

You really need to see a psychiatrist and tell him/her exactly what you told us here. You are not the first or last person to experience these types of symptoms. It sounds like a very well documented and treatable disorder. You may want to look on the web and intro psych books for information on paranoid schizophrenia. IANAD but it sounds like you may be developing a classic case of it.

They aren’t going to lock you in a room with a strait jacket on if you do have something like that. It is likely that taking medicine will control these abnormal thoughts and you will be better for the first time in a while.

This advice comes from someone diagnosed with Bipolar disorder earlier this year. The treatments are not bad and really work.

10

if it’s something that was inspired all the way back in near-infancy, the likelihood of recovering (or anyone else being able to identify) the initial trigger could be very, very small. so “classical” therapy to uncover the cause might be a long hard row that still has the potential to uncover nothing useful.

if that’s the case, you might have better luck dealing with it as more of a “phobia”-type condition. desensitizing yourself to the triggering circumstances (or emotions/feelings) may possibly be the best that can be accomplished, rather than finding and rooting out the causal factor (assuming there was one).

some sort of treatment program, like the ones for people who are deathly afraid of flying in airplanes, that gradually helps you confront your fears and work them down to manageable levels might be a quicker path to success. it make not make the fear actually “go away”, but it does keep it from crippling you with the inability to act because it’s there.

(oooo, new information in Preview) :: rubs hands together evilly ::

hmm. well, if clinical depression runs in your family, i’d say it’s entirely possible you could have found a new and interesting way of exhibiting symptoms. originality a big factor for you? :wink:

seriously, the familial depression could be the key right there. say what you will nowadays, in the less enlightened times (as little as 15-20 years ago), the stigma of ANY type of mental illness was not something to be spouted about in public. sometimes even only whispered at inside the family itself. i’d make a WAG that perhaps learning or knowing of this condition in your family may have had some unsettling effects on your very young self. if either Mom or Grandpa was “gone” for a while, with very little discussion/explanation for the absence, or your being told “We aren’t supposed to talk about that”, the confusion and discomfort that might have generated could well equate later to “ANYTHING that confuses or discomforts me is bad and to be feared.”

fears unconfronted, unexamined or unexplained have a tendency to grow larger over time. (one of the classics is the “Get right back on the horse after you fall off” therapy. i can attest to how well that one works myself. there was one time i didn’t/couldn’t remount after an riding accident. i guarantee you, when it finally came to getting back on that horse once i recovered, the fear was pretty damn intense. and this was only after relatively minor injuries, comparatively speaking.)

i could draw a theoretical line from such “hush-hush” episodes when you were an infant to your upset at the unintelligible “ND” message on the cable box. you knew something was up, something wasn’t right. but you didn’t know exactly what, and no one seemed eager to explain it all to you. a couple episodes like this might conceivably start an exaggerated reaction to unexplained information, or data that you couldn’t determine how to process.

STANDARD DISCLAIMER: IANA doctor, psychologist, therapist or otherwise medically qualified. all parlor psychology and analysis should be viewed with justifiable scepticism, even if i am later proved to be absolutely correct. YMMV. keep all hands inside of vehicle while in transit. objects in mirror are closer than they appear.

11

It sounds to me, in my very layman’s opinion, like maybe you have a mild generalized anxiety or panic disorder, which could actually be chemical/neurological, and you’re spending a good deal of bandwidth trying to justify it intellectually, making sense of the free-floating angst through paranoia, trying to figure out just what you’re so freaked out about. I get similar senses when I’ve had way way too much caffeine or dope, where i’ll just suddenly get heart palpitations and frantic and worried, and then it abates and comes back up a few minutes later, and it’s all i can do to calm myself out of complete terror.

12

I just wanted to say, for the record, that Aetna’s physician directory is damn near useless. They’ve referred me to a florist, a disconnected number, and a gynecologist, which really doesn’t do me any good. I’ll keep looking, though.

I called my parents, and they just reconfirmed what I said above re: family history. They said they didn’t remember any particular incident in my childhood that would have triggered this.

13

Ooooh! I think I know where it started!

We had neighbors in Alexandria with an infant/toddler daughter. One day, we were babysitting her, and she woke up screaming as babies are wont to do. So I walked in to the den where her portacrib was set up, and that’s when the cable box showed “nd.” It may not have been the first time it did that, but I’ll bet that the combonation of screaming child plus weird display fused some panic neuron in my brain that’s lasted to this day. Does this sound good?

14

actually, SanibelMan, there doesn’t really have to have been any “incident” to trigger such seemingly vague fears like this.

a reasonable analogy is the “Elephant in the Living Room” phenomena that’s common in dysfunctional families (those with alcoholics, abusive spouses, pick your poison).

a Massive Problem exists. it affects all members of the family to varying degrees. it’s real, it’s there, it’s not going away. BUT NO ONE EVER MENTIONS IT, AND DISCUSSING ITS PRESENCE IS ACTIVELY DISCOURAGED. there’s an on-going element of tension present, particularly when outsiders are around. all members of the family go to great lengths to present a facade of complete normalcy to the outside world. but the Massive Problem still exists, even though they’ll deny it to the high heavens, and come up with every justification plausible (and any number that are exceedingly less-so) as to why the Problem isn’t really a problem.

in family situations like that, young children have no outside frame of reference for measuring what “is” against what is “right and normal”. the only standards they have are the ones that they are living right now. any tensions regarding family dynamics are likely felt and probably internalized – but they are not understood in the least. kids like this believe it’s “normal” for everyone to walk around on eggshells and never make loud noises to disturb Mommy’s headache in the mornings, or that it’s “normal” for Mommy and Daddy to end disagreements by Daddy beating the crap out of Mommy. the children haven’t any other basis to make comparison and judgments… but that doesn’t mean they can’t be anxious or upset about what they see and live.

free-floating anxiety like that needs some manner of explanation or justification in a child’s mind. and since young children tend to see the world as revolving around them at a very young age, it’s quite easy for them to see themselves as being the one who somehow causes or otherwise controls these anxious feelings. things could be uncomfortable because they’ve been “bad”; if they do/don’t do certain things, then everything will be alright. kids can come up with any number of coping mechanisms to explain (and by extension, control) situations or feelings that upset and confuse them.

i postulate that if there was this underlying tension in your family (due to the depression experienced by your mother and grandfather), you might have assumed some manner of “guilt” because you believed you were causing the bad feelings: “If I didn’t know Something Was Wrong, then everything would be alright”, as it were.

given the fact that depression seems to be a family trait (and one that you’ve experienced first-hand already), i don’t see it as being unreasonable that you might have developed overblown fear reactions to seemingly harmless events that managed to trigger anxious feelings on your part.

but your answers and solutions, of course, all reside within you. we can all analyze and interpret until the cows come home. unless you can take whatever actions you need to for dealing with your fears – be it medication, therapy, analysis, or baying at the moon – nothing is going to resolve your issues until you actually work on them yourself.
:: reads Preview again ::

damn, after i did all that analysis… :smack:
:stuck_out_tongue: :wink:

it might well have been a crystalizing event. particularly if you were somehow feeling “responsible” for the baby crying.

last paragraph pre-Preview is still the key, though.

15

My mom is a mental health nurse and there are much crazier people than you who don’t get locked up. I wouldn’t worry about it. Besides, getting help now will prevent an undiagnosed illness from growing to the point of requiring hospitalization.

But look, you shouldn’t have to live that way. Go to a shrink. Therapy is good; but I’d also consider a psychiatrist because no amount of therapy is going to solve a physical problem (if that is what it happens to be).

Keep in mind that hundreds of millions of people have some sort of illness in at least one damn organ, why should the most complicated organ of the body be exempt?! Whatever the cause, physical or psychological, go get professional help with your problem. Do you have a “family doctor”, i.e. a general practitioner? Get an appointment next week. Tell her your problem and ask what you should do and whom you should see. Do it. You shouldn’t have to spend your nights paralyzed by the terror of some ethereal bogey-man hunting you for some Freudian metaphore of the original sin.

16

lachesis, thank you for your insight. I think that at least some of that applies, thought most of it isn’t directly linked to my mother’s depression.

She had a number of physical health problems when I was a child, some of which were life-threatening. My dad e-mailed me this morning with a description of some of them, and while he describes certain things (i.e., seeing my mother nearly bleeding to death in the ER at the age of 6 or 7) I don’t remember them. I didn’t know until this morning the details of many of the problems - I just knew she’d been hospitalized many times for various things. By the time I was 10 or so, I knew about what was happening at that time in more detail. He described how hard it was for the both of them to protect me from being hurt by what was going on. We all went through a lot of stress, but in all honesty I can’t think of a way they could have dealt better with what they were given, and we’ve all been much, much stronger for it.

I’m waiting for a psychiatrist to call me back on Monday and let me know if I’m covered on their insurance, and if not, her assistant said she’d refer me to someone else. So hopefully I’ll get to talk to someone soon. Thank you all and wish me luck.