Is it Mental Illness? Or is Your Body Trying to Communicate

Sympathetic Activation.

My heart is racing, as his yelling becomes a faint echo in the distance. I watch my body open the door and walk out to the street. I scan the street for anyone that might want to talk to me. I don’t have time to talk. I don’t have energy, I am agitated, sweating, and frantic. I can hardly feel my body, I get in my car and begin driving quickly, aggressively, everyone is an object in my way.

Dorsal Vagal Shutdown.

I slowly open my eyes, with every ounce of energy I have I propel myself out of bed. I stumble into the kitchen to pound some coffee. My thoughts are sluggish, I feel overwhelmed and the day hasn’t even begun.

The brain fog comes over my mind like a heavy mist making it hard to focus on anything. I can barely feel my limbs, they feel like distant objects in the room around me. I think at one point I had name, dreams, drive, and a sense of purpose. All of that feels distant from me now. I just want to sleep, but I can’t. I have to go to work, I have to play my roles, I have to be a human.

I want more than anything just to close my eyes again and not to be human. I am just so exhausted. All I have the energy for is sleep.

From the first glance at the story above, the main character may seem to be reacting quiet intensely or even possibly disproportionate to the situation at hand. In the first state, you may have concluded that the person had anger problems, severe anxiety, and or mental instability with the extreme plans to escape everything in their life.

However there was some indication that they may not be in a safe situation, or even if it was safe, they once were asa child not able to manage or defend themselves in their childhood home, causing the threats their nervous system detected to be too overwhelming to fight, so they created plans in their mind to flee. So what they may have been reacting to was not only the conflict at hand, but a number of events collected over their lifetime that their body was unable to process through. There for these experiences were stored in their procedural memory, and they reacted accordingly.

If we look deeper at the individuals reaction, we could safely assume instead of the label of anxious or unstable, that they perhaps are suffering from a cluster of complex-post traumatic stress symptoms.

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