Posted by sal on June 4, 2000, at 18:56:19
In reply to I'm back with a new post., posted by Ima Lamer on June 3, 2000, at 13:55:31
Ima,
This post won't offer you much advice on meds or not, but maybe it will offer
some insight about anxiety, religious delusions, certainty, and how they might
be related.When we get sensory input - say we see something, this signal races down to
our limbic system before it gets a chance to spread out around our cerebral
cortex. The question of the limbic system is one we share with our most
primitive animal cousins - Is the source of this stimulation going to hurt me or
help me?Our advanced human cerebral cortex provides us with a very detailed virtual encyclopedia of things that have helped us before - things that we have learned will help us. But this encyclopedia is not assembled in alphabetical order, like Britanica - there is a little bit of information here and a little bit there. If something is familiar, it will match up with enough "chapters" in enough "volumes" to send a signal back to the mid-brain that says "I know what this is - it's okay."
Any animal with any kind of cerebral cortex has this same encylopedia of life experience, but ours is far more complex, and apparently much more capable of checking itself, to see if what we think we know is really true or not.
The trouble is, we don't really know that anything is the same as what we last
saw. Most of our thinking is confabulation - educated guesses. Scientific
American, in a recent article about the unlikelihood of practical teleportation,
recently explained how, when we go out to our car in the morning, we don't
really know if it is the same car we parked last night. There are lots of red fords.
But there are not many with our exact CD collection in the back seat, and our
license plates on the back. But still, this could be a whole new set of molecules,
just assembled to look like our car. Ridiculous, maybe, but the point is, we act
on faith.Even your immediate visual environment is mostly the product of confabulation.
You moved your eyes a little to the left or right a few seconds ago, so you
presume the details there are what they were last time you checked, but the only part of your visual field you are actually perceiving at any given moment is a very narrow arch in the front of your eyeballs. The rest is sort of filled in.The rub then is, where do we set the limits of faith? What do we need to know for sure? Religion helps a lot of people because it seems to expand the proper boundaries of faith, allowing our cerebral cortex to tell our limbic system "this is good" even though we are not sure what "this" is.
I wanted to share this because you express concern both about anxiety associated with uncertainty, with hearing "voices," and with religious imagination.
I can't begin to suggest the individual reason you might have an anxiety crisis over things about which you are not certain. But I can take your word for it that it is something you have noticed about yourself.
Now the religious ideation, maybe it is not so unusual that, sitting in church, you would feel free to imagine yourself floating around the room. I mean, the guy up front is talking about walking on water and being raised from the dead, and telling you that to believe in these things will not only make you feel better, but also save your soul for all eternity. That is some heavy stuff, especially if you trust him. And if its true that you want to be really sure about things, maybe you really want to trust him.
But once you embrace these apparently absurd ideas he is offering to be true, where do you draw the limit about what absurd things might be true? Maybe that car out front is not really the same one you left there? Maybe God can lift you up ("God will lift you up" is a common phrase in some religious practice).
My point is, once you start expanding the boundary of what you will accept on faith, your reality boundary can become fluid.
Now, the voices you hear, I suspect that they really are coming from inside your head. See, almost anything we do, before we do it, we think it.
Most things we think, we don't do. Before we swing a baseball bat, our motor neurons start what are called "anticipatory firings." Your brain goes through the motions to some extent, even if you don’t perform the act.
Maybe you can recall when you were about to put a piece of candy in your mouth, and you could almost taste it. That is because you had previously learned how it tastes, and the same networks of brain cells that were about to experience the taste were already going off about how it will taste, based on visual and maybe olfactory cues.
So these voices, I suggest they are what are called sub-vocalizations. They involve the pathways in your brain that are involved in speech, but they are being driven by something in your unconscious. They are real enough, like a dream is real. You really have a dream, and the content is really from your memory, but you did not actually experience with your body the things you were dreaming - it was coming from inside you, and not necessarily in an orderly fashion.
The voices you hear might not make sense, as if you were talking to yourself - they are more like something out of a movie, like you are imagining what someone else is doing. you might imagine someone else saying something.
In fact, I should correct myself - they are not necessarily sub-vocalizations, they might also or exclusively involve internally motivated firings of your auditory perceptions, with the motivation coming from inside you, rather than outside.
Back to how you got this way, it might be genetic, or it might be something that resulted from drugs or fatigue or some experience you have forgotten about. In many cases, it can come from what your parents taught you to expect. Maybe
(MAYBE) they taught you to be really sure of yourself. But as you grew up, in
an effort to separate yourself from your parents, you said, "I don't have to be all
that sure. I can go a long way on imagination or speculation, or working from
the seat of my pants." But then later, when you wanted to believe yourself
mature, you said, I should be what my parents told me to be. But by then, you
had created a part of yourself that was the antithesis of what your parents
created. But now that part is repressed and not allowed to realized itself,
because your "mature" self that wants to be really certain is controlling your life,
and this sort of rebellious (and probably wise) kid is buried in there saying "hell
with 102 percent sure, 98 percent is fine, and fifty percent is okay sometimes."Psychopharmacologists offer some meds to deal with the anxiety. I won't
impose my opinion about whether they will work for you. Sometimes knowing
about ourselves as a biological machine helps us better understand how we are
programmed, as biological machines.With the current focus on manipulation of neurotransmitters, we can easily
miss some thinking about of the fundamental functions our brain, so this perspective might seem foreign to some people, but I wanted to share it with you, for what it is worth.Good luck.
(By the way, some widely accepted spiritual methods teach that we are indeed God. I don't endorse them, but I understand some of what those groups are
trying to say, too.)
> Ok, here I am again.
>
> I was the Rapid Cycler from B4
>
> My question still stands, but has changed.
>
> Can't I live with out the meds?
>
> Really, I do well with out meds for BiPD, but should I look into an anxiety medication? This is my real problem. Ever since I've been a kid (still kinda am) everyone has said that I was shy, and I am.
>
> But I'm not shy in a normal shy way. It's going into any situation where I'm not 102% sure of the results. It IS anxiety, it's panic attacks, it's fear. (cold sweats, then the mania feeling sets in-but it's not mania, just my heart racing etc.)
>
> And a second question, what should I do about this:
>
> I never told a doctor or really anyone of other problems I have because I was afraid no one would take me serious really. When I was about 12, it was a big thing for people to act 'crazy' and people always joke about hearing voices and what not. And that made me think that if I say these things, I'd be ignored like I ignored them. And something I wish I could have changed - I didn't share this information with anyone around me, so I'm afraid that if I tell someone about this now, they just won't believe me, flat out.
>
> I have delusional thoughts (which rarely do I realize the false thoughts which I have are not real) like the classic God examples. (which has happened since before I read one thing about this-people tell me that I only have these thoughts because I read about this stuff to much-well what about before that?)
>
> Funny story, when I was about 15 I thought God would come down and make me raise up in the church, almost like I was Jesus. I completely played this out in my head and oblivious to everything around me. Now this isn't really a normal thought for me, because I believe that anyone saying they are Jesus, God, etc. is wrong (in more ways than one).
>
> So, just comment and I'll listen.
>
> Any tips on how to tell people about this kinda stuff would help.
poster:sal
thread:35871
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000603/msgs/36028.html