During the middle of the worst of it,
while I was on a three month emergency medical leave, I put words to
a feeling I'd had for weeks.
About four and a half months after my
last .5 milligram tablet of valium, I was facing a weekly battery of
intensively probing questions about my childhood and the person
responsible for conditioning me to suppress expressions of anger. It
was intense psychodynamic therapy with the underlying premise that my
current emotional lability, depression and anxiety stemmed from a
childhood experience of shaming. That someone important in my life
taught me to suppress any outward sign of anger, predicated on the
famous adage that depression is anger turned inward.
“But how did that make you feel?”
“Can you express what your primary
reaction to (whatever life event we were discussing) was?”
“No, that is a rationalization, I
want to know how you REALLY felt?”
“Of course you felt sadness at your
father's death, but what ELSE? “
“There's something more you felt,
wasn't there? Can you access it? This is important.”
“I want you to notice your body
language right now. Why can't you look me in the eye? Who taught you
that you weren't good enough?”
During the last of the weekly
debriefings with my wife after a particularly fruitless and intensive
session, I finally found the strength to say how I REALLY felt: “It's
like being accused of a crime I didn't commit.”
And that is the crux of what so many
people experience when they seek professional help for the
overwhelming subjective hell of a brain off its hinges from
benzodiazepine withdrawal. Especially if you're more than a month
from discontinuation and your taper was a judicious 10% cut a month
as mine was. The therapist I saw humored me to the point of accepting
that the withdrawal was making things worse. But his approach was
firmly rooted in a belief that my problems were fundamentally
psychological.
I was supposed to be doing
neurofeedback with him. But during the intake he latched on to my
emotional insecurity and started digging. Which led to regular talk
therapy. It's difficult for me to confess how susceptible I was to
treatment suggestions that I knew deep down weren't going to take
this pain away. The few who experience traumatic, prolonged misery
from discontinuation of benzodiazepines slowly learn to accept that
the only salve is time.
But I doubted my own mind, my own own
experience, because my already shaky self-esteem was magnified ten
fold from withdrawal. I even convinced myself that some good could
come out of it. For one, it would show loved ones that I was taking
the problem seriously, I was getting treatment. Not just sitting on
my hands while fear, paranoia and hysteria festered within. I even
felt that it might help me find insights on the cause of the rapidly
blossoming self-hatred I felt every day I sat at home not working.
So I went to the therapist for about a
month and a half. Throughout, I felt like a naked child talking to an
adult who knew things about me that I didn't. I even played a sick
game of expressing anger about things that didn't anger me because I
knew that's the only way I could make “progress.” The more we
talked, the worse I felt, the more I blamed myself for my problems
and the more powerless I felt to defend that self-attack. At one
point, he accused me of backing away and distancing myself from my
real emotions. That was it. No more of this.
As I said earlier, I KNEW what was (and
is) wrong with me. Those who have gone through this know. They know
because there can be no more profound, yet existentially horrifying,
experience. And I say that with 100% certainty despite my relatively
inexperienced life.
It's like in Lord of the Rings, when
Gandalf the Grey is replaced by Gandalf the White. He tries to
explain what has happened to him after falling down into the abyss
past Khazed-dum with the ancient Balrog beast. He says, “Time is
short. But if there were a year to spend, I would not tell you all.”
So much had he been through since he had seen his companions last
that he had forgotten his name. His time transformed him into a
wholly different person inside yet, by all appearances, he was the
same. To the others, only a few weeks had passed, to Gandalf “each
day was as long as a life age of the Earth.”
And in a sense, that's how profound of
an experience each day at its worst of benzodiazepine withdrawal is
for me. On the days the fog of symptoms clear and the mysteriously
fickle windows of clarity re-emerge, I am aware just how much I've
silently felt and experienced. And sometimes when I see someone I
haven't seen while in the throes of withdrawal, it's as if ages have
passed since we last spoke, that I must have much to tell them. You
just can't go through that and think your own psychology and the
burden of the worst of your life experiences could cause your brain
to act that way. Not without help.
So here it is more than nine months
after my last dose of Valium and I have made incredible progress. As
the fabric of my self slowly gets knitted back together, I feel a
moral obligation to try to explain that this is a real phenomenon.
That, despite the implausibility of such an experience being due to
the withdrawal of a prescribed medication (always taken as prescribed
and at a low dose); despite the fact that by all accounts, a very,
very small number of people experience the mental degradation and
existential annihilation of consciousness that I have going off this
drug; despite the fact that there is not any clear and conclusive
physical evidence that something has gone radically awry in the
brain; despite the fact that almost any doctor or psychiatrist you
encounter will deny profound symptoms like that could be attributed
to a medication; despite everything that my therapist tried to pin as
the cause of my problems; despite all of that – I know that my
problem was the drug.
One day during a window of normality a
while back, I wrote the following message to myself to read when
going through a wave of neurological symptoms:
“It's not your fault. It is not your
self-esteem issue. It's not your dad's death. It's not your
upbringing or your past anxiety. It's the effect from the drug.
Believe it. No one can feel like that on their own. It's impossible.”
It's now my turn to try to convince you
the reader and hopefully others in the mental health community of the
same. The depth of the problem is not in the numbers of people who
suffer this (and there are many, many others who do) but the depth of
the suffering and the dearth of resources and knowledgeable people
out there to help.
So that's why I say this is “clearing
my name.” I don't mean that literally – what I mean is that I'm
trying to prove that this happened to me from a medication and not
from a psychological failing of my own making. That despite the fact
that I “have a past record”of mental health issues that include
depression and anxiety, I am cleared of culpability for the past 19
months of suffering.
My far-reaching (and far-fetched) hope
is that this case could be put before an actual jury of the general
public for consideration so that this issue will not continue to
create small, out of the way enclaves of benzo withdrawal sufferers
forced to communicate with people they don't know for support. These
support groups which I have spent time in are both much-needed
affirmation of the experience and electric magnifiers of fear. So
little consensus on the nature of the process exists that the void
often gets filled with misinformation, half truths, and rubbish.
So I hope you find this interesting and
I hope you can see the currently unseen – those poor souls trying
to survive day to day with a broken mind not of their making. They
need help, they need acceptance and they need the jury to rule in
their favor.
