Julia and Erin, two UE writers who have asked that their names be changed to allow for a completely honest conversation, sat down to discuss how Erin has used viewing her anxiety and OCD as an addiction to help her to find mental freedom.

Julia: A week or so ago, you referenced using Alcoholics Anonymous’ 12 Step Program as a method for fighting your anxiety, can I ask how you do that?

Erin: I don’t really use the exact 12 Step Program, but more the ideas behind it put in terms of battling an “addiction” that I see as my anxiety/OCD. So, it is sort of the backbone to my approach. It’s as much about being powerless to the presence of my anxious thoughts (the same way an alcoholic feels powerless to their craving for alcohol) and the choice as to whether or not I listen and/or react to them (like refraining from a drink).

Julia: That’s a good comparison. “How to deal with things out of your control.”

Erin: Exactly. For so long, I thought listening to my anxiety was the only way to feel like I was in “control” of my world. Then I realized I was missing out on all of these things, because the solution to feeling in control was actually letting go of the idea that I could ever be in control. A very hard lesson for a control freak to learn. The Buddhists have been teaching this idea of accepting the groundlessness of life and our situations for thousands of years. They teach that if we can learn to sit with and embrace, rather than try to run away from or control, the inherent discomfort of life, and the discomfort of our fears, we will stop fearing them.

Julia: That does not sound easy.

Erin: Nope, haha. But in her book, Living Beautifully, the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön talks about how the chemical response that happens in our brains during an emotional situation only lasts for 90 seconds. Any pain longer than those 90 seconds is because we are choosing to hold on to it—so while I can’t control the chemicals in my brain, I can control how I choose to react to them. Of course, it’s not as simple as just waiting 90 seconds. For me, all I want to do is react, react, react, so I have to spend the whole time trying to convince myself that (1) this will only last for 90 seconds, (2) that this whole 90 seconds thing is not bullshit, and (3) that I will actually be capable of letting go of this pain at the end of the 90 seconds.

Julia: So like, “I am experiencing an anxiety attack, and when it is over then I can be productive again?”

Erin: In a way, yes. Amy Mina did a really good job of capturing this in her article about dealing with depression and anxiety. For me, it’s more like being in a dark room, with no lights, no doors–let’s actually make into more of a “dark abyss.” And I’m just sitting there, in the middle of this perceived infinite blackness, and my brain is basically saying, “There are no doors, there is no hope: you will never get out of this; you will always be here. You should just curl up in a ball and cry, because you are a failure, and you will never be free from the clutches of this panic. Ever.” Buying into that idea, by letting myself become the victim or by acting out compulsions to make it better, just perpetuates the situation. So, now, I try to sit with the fear, feel it, embrace, bathe in the discomfort of it, and try my hardest not to react to it. Then I try to let it go with the knowledge that I will be okay, no matter what happens. The stumbling block, of course, is that it’s hard not to believe my brain when it’s in an anxiety state, because it sounds so rational: “There are no doors.”  And even though I know that I am panicking, I look around, and I can’t see any doors, so it seems like my brain is right. My anxiety is part of me, it gets me, and we’ve been together for over 25 years, so of course it knows all the right things to say to try and get me to believe it. But if I can get myself to push past that, and  believe that I am in a room full of doors, and I would be able to see them all if I just stood up and stopped wallowing in this fear/sadness/self-pity/etc., then it’s like finding the light switch, and suddenly all the lights come back on and I can see all of these doors all around me and then my brain and I both can’t believe we ever thought any differently.

Julia: A catch-22.

Erin: Very much so.

Julia: So how does the method of the 12 Step Program help in the midst of an attack? Is it something actionable in-the-moment, or is it more of a perspective for you when you’re not in an attack?

Erin: Again, it’s really less about the 12 Step Program specifically, and more about the viewpoint that my anxiety and the compulsions associated with it and my OCD are an addiction. I’ve never viewed my anxiety as an “attack” or a “panic attack,” I usually call them “spirals,” because sometimes it can happen slowly, even over several days, but once my anxiety grabs hold, it starts pulling me down, and down, and eventually something really sets it off and I’m into that dark abyss. So it’s important that I try and address my anxiety, before I get sucked into a really bad “thought spiral.” It’s at that crossroads, when I have the choice to follow my anxiety or not–when I can feel the panic luring me in, tapping on my brain–that it’s the most important time to employ all the techniques, like the 90 second wait. Because as it gets harder and harder to fight it, I have to do whatever it takes to not give in to a compulsion even though my relief response is telling me, “This is the only way you’re going to get any relief. It’s the only way to make yourself feel better.”

That’s the “addiction,” that short-term pleasure of giving into a compulsion or a fear, instead of striving for the long-term pleasure of living an anxiety-free life. Like taking a drink even though you don’t want to be an alcoholic. So I use that methodology to enforce this idea that I can’t give into any fears or compulsions, because that just opens the door to scarier fears and bigger compulsions.  For example, I have a compulsion to pop pimples. It seems innocent, but if I let myself pop a nice juicy pimple, then it’s like a gateway drug to inspecting the rest of my face and causing more damage.  To allow the “innocent” compulsions is like swearing off hard alcohol but still drinking “just one beer”: it doesn’t work.

Julia: You have to commit to it, and not let your guard down.

Erin: Yes. Because the “little fears” pop up everywhere—like throwing out an onion because it looks a little too yellow and might make me sick—and then I’ve opened the door and suddenly I’m throwing out all the leftovers because they sat out on the stove for a couple hours. Since I’ve lived with anxiety my whole life, it was the lens through which I saw the world. So I just thought it was normal to just be panicked all. the. time. I had to learn to pay attention to what was motivated by fear and what wasn’t. Thinking, “I’m just going to double check pictures of yellow onions on Google,” when I know the onion is fine, is motivated by fear. That’s acting out a compulsion to silence a little seed of obsessive doubt in my head. Instead, I have to be confident in my belief that the onion is fine, in my choice to eat it despite the risk that it might make me sick, and in my knowledge that whatever happens, I will be able to handle it.

Julia: With all of this, you’re really self-aware.

Erin: I am now, but I didn’t used to be. My instinct was avoid, avoid, ignore, avoid, rush to continue avoiding. And, for a long time, I found my anxiety to be really effective. I channeled it into being a perfectionist and it led me to a lot of career success. But I was a complete workaholic and I ran into a concrete wall—as one is apt to do when they are constantly living in fear.  It was just unlivable. But I wasn’t depressed, I was just like “Ahhhhh, brain, why do you hate me?!” It took me a long time to learn the tools to even start to rewire it. A huge part of that was putting myself in a completely new place (because the environments we build when we are in an anxiety mindset can be a big part of what perpetuates that mindset) and paying attention to every action and habit—from the way I processed information, to the way I interacted with people, to where I found self-worth, to how I felt safe—so I could root out all the things I did that were motivated by fear and individually rewiring them. That’s when I learned to be self-aware, and it meant facing a lot of things I didn’t want to face, but it was the only way to root out the real problems. It took a lot of help though, and I can’t stress the importance of a good therapist enough.

Julia: As a friend, is there anything that I can do for someone with anxiety?

Erin: The thing is, even with a great therapist and a wonderful support network and, if helpful, anti-anxiety medication, the only person who can really help someone with anxiety is him- or herself. And believe me, it’s the last thing I wanted to hear and, sometimes still, want to hear. I hate telling myself, in the midst of anxiety spiral, that no one except me is going to make this better. In that moment, it seems impossible—too hard, too scary, too out of control, too everything. And I just want to look around and find something or someone that is going to make me feel better. But, that’s attacking the branches, not the roots.

Julia: What happens when you can’t?

Erin: That’s what I’ve been struggling with the most lately. If I’m in a good place, it’s easy to stay “good,” but once I slip, get stressed out, and start reacting, I can fall back into a spiral and suddenly, all of these old fears pop right back up and seem just as scary as they were when I started. It’s really hard not to look at this and let it shake my confidence and I start thinking, “All of my work has been for naught. I’ve failed and I’ll never be free.” To go back to the addiction methodology (this is another reason I like that metaphor so much), this is my version of “relapsing.” (Macklemore wrote a great song about “Starting Over” with his sobriety, that I find really helpful when I’ve “fallen off the wagon” with my anxiety or OCD.) I hate that place. It’s actually one of my bigger remaining fears.

Julia: You used that same phrase earlier.  What do you mean when you say “fall off the wagon”? How is that more than just an individual panic spiral?

Erin: When I’m having panic spirals consistently, or when my whole mindset has changed and my perspective on the world has turned back into fear, or victimization, or avoidance, I know I’ve “fallen off the wagon.” Often I find myself here because I’ve been too stressed or too tired to sit with the discomfort of my anxiety so I’ve been giving into fears or compulsions and now I’m subsisting on the “drug hits” found in those rushes of relief or from other distracting pleasures. I can usually tell because I’m feeling very anxious, or wired, and I don’t have this sort of warm, sense of patience and calm, that I have when I’m “on the wagon.” That’s really the best way I can think to describe it because it’s something I’m still working on keeping around consistently. It has to come from a sense of self, and not from outside sources (like the drug hits), and that’s really hard. Especially because that takes a while to build up, and every time you “relapse,” it feels like it’s going to be impossible to do it again. But you sum up the will to do it again and soon you find that warm feeling again, usually it sneaks up on me when I stop craving it, and it’s very similar to the moment in the dark, when all the lights come on, it’s just this pure, lasting, relief. It’s freedom. So, that’s my goal, that’s what I strive for every day.

Photo by Sara Slattery