Читать книгу Self-Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear - Dr. Weekes Claire - Страница 14

The sufferer from nervous breakdown is neither fool nor coward, but often a remarkably brave person who fights his breakdown to the best of his ability with commendable although often misdirected courage. He may fight through almost every waking moment, with sweating hands and tensed muscles, agitatedly trying to force forgetfulness of his desperate state by consciously concentrating on other things. Or he may pace the floor of his mind, anxiously searching for a way out of his miserable prison, only to meet one closed door after another.

At night he falls into bed exhausted, to sleep the fretful sleep of nervous agitation, the heavy sleep of nervous exhaustion, the drugged sleep of the barbiturate swallower, or, worse still, to find no sleep in spite of heavy sedation.

At times the early part of the evening may not seem so bad. He may feel almost normal and think he has conquered this ‘thing’ at last, and may go to bed saying, ‘Now, that’s the finish. Tomorrow I will be my old self again,’ only to wake and find the spasms and the churning worse than ever. He cannot understand why, having felt so much better by evening, he should wake the next morning feeling as ill as ever, perhaps even worse. He certainly feels more hopeless, if that be possible. He is either convinced that there is some short quick road to recovery which continually eludes him or that there is not, and never could be, a way back to peace from such suffering as his.

He looks back with longing at the person he used to be, the person who could sit peacefully and enjoy a good book, or happily watch television, and he apprehensively counts the weeks, months, even years, since he was that person. He reasons that if he cannot become himself again by fighting, how else can he? Fighting is his natural defence, the only weapon he knows, so he fights even harder. But the harder he fights, the worse he becomes. Naturally – for fighting means more tension, tension more adrenalin and further stimulation of the adrenalin-releasing nerves, and so the continuation of symptoms. To make matters worse, his friends do not hesitate to advise him to fight it. Even his doctor may say, ‘You’ll have to fight this thing old man. You mustn’t let it get the better of you!’

What has happened to him he cannot understand. He is like a man possessed. He does not realize that there is no devil sitting on his shoulder and that he is simply doing this to himself with fear, fight, and flight from fear.

It is at this stage that he may develop severe headache which he likens to an iron band encircling his head, or to a weight pressing on top of it. He may be giddy, nauseated, have difficulty in expanding his chest to take in a deep breath, feel a heavy soreness around his heart or a sharp pain under it which he sometimes refers to as ‘the dagger’. He may also have recurring ‘funny turns’ such as spells of abnormally slowly beating heart, ‘missed’ heart-beats and weak, trembling turns. He loses interest in everything and in everybody, and mounting tension makes him easily upset by trifles. As one young mother put it, ‘I take it out on the poor kids’.