I love your book and the way you approach teaching others about anxiety.

Keep up the great work!

Cheers,
Steve

OMG! I just saw your interview on CBS this morning. I have never ever feel more identified with the words you just spoken, about how can something maybe so little for somebody can trigger all that chain of tragic thoughts in the mind of a person suffering from anxiety. I’m 31 years old now and I’ve been having panic attacks for about 10 years! I got to a point so bad in my life that I couldn’t eat because I thought I would choke with the food, I couldnt read the newspaper because I thought the ink would get trough my fingers and get me intoxicated. It was a really bad period in my life. I had to take antidepressant and anxiety meds. I’m doing better now but every once in a while when I’m under a lot of stress or hormonal changes I still get pretty bad panic attacks. I’m so definitely going to read your book. Thanks for sharing your history with the world and opening the eyes to this life changing disorder with a touch of humor :)

I came across the article again tonight while Googling “journalist anxiety disorder” — yep, I’m in the field as well, and am wondering if it’s a terrible fit for a chronic worrier. I would love to hear your thoughts on this (forgive me if it’s already in your book, which I will read very soon, I promise).

Thank you Daniel Smith for a seriously playful approach to your anxiety. You are, with a liberating sympathetic attitude to your suffering, giving an intelligent description of a mental pain that a growing number of people thinks of as incurable. The unfortunate consequence is that you, and a too-large portion of our fellow human beings, become the high-paying victims and livelihood of the cognitive psychotherapy and the pharmaceutical industry.

The fatal thing of being an “anxious idiot” is that the treatment providers, the cognitive therapists, are themselves “anxious idiots”, constantly on the run from any hint and confrontation that would remind them of their anxiety. The cognitive approach is, despite an apparent verbal flexibility, basically stereotype and seeks to eliminate the thoughts that lead to your anxiety and repression, and they hope to create “a positive substitute”. What they really are trying to do, literally and figuratively, is intellectually to convince both, themselves and you to reason away the pain behind your anxiety and repress it further. Which basically means, for a brief time, then the pain / anxiety shows up on the point, in mind and body, where you are currently weakest. Just as you say: “I have been experiencing this pattern for nearly 20 years now, so that my anxiety has come to seem, at times, ineviteble and unassailable – a fait accompli. My anxiety, I’d conclude, is what I am. There is no escape”.

Is there really no escape? After 40 years of searching and testing, I have learned that it is a tedious but far from impossible task. The kind of “perpetual mobile” that you have drawn up in your nice, close to emotional, description, of how the anxiety returns, can be broken if you learn to understand what it is about your emotional and intellectual processes that make you a prisoner in your own pain / anxiety. You can eventually learn to understand what it is that makes it necessary for you to seek help from professional cognitive therapists who themselves, unconsciously, suffer from the same repression / pain / anxiety, which in your case means that the pain is leaking anxiety with an almost predictable regularity.

To treat a patient successfully it is imperative to take into account his/her psychological history that might contain abandonment, neglect, and experiences close to death. Most importantly, a skilled therapist must consider an individual’s early physical and psychological development, and examine that critical period from gestation through the first three years of life, which science is just now beginning to recognize has so much to do with problems later in life. It is necessary to look at the person as a whole and consider the patient’s early history, taking into account physiological as well as psychological factors.

To quote my friend Dr. Art Janov:

“Symptoms are the expression of imprinted memory /memories of experiences we had in our earliest moments that have been laid down neurochemically within our brain and nervous system. That is what lies in the primal universe—monumental emotions of imprinted memories that have been sequestered in the far reaches of the brain. For a patient to get well, it is necessary to access those memories in a safe way, bring them to conscious-awareness and finally to integrate them. When that happens the individual’s entire system is harmonized, key hormones are normalized, and the system is finally righted. After a connection is made between feeling-sensations and the thinking mind, perceptions are more accurate and a sense of calm and relaxation never before known is finally experienced.”

Yes, there is an escape!

Jan Johnsson

http://epilepticjourney.blogspot.com.es/2012/07/why-do-i-mistrust-intuition-by.html

I guess i need to read your book!