The Dread and The Dude

An overactive flux capacitor with too many fucks to give

Unless I am deliberately focused on the present, on the fact that at this moment I am ok and safe, I spend a lot of my life experiencing unease ranging from low-grade anxiety or feeling like I need to cry all the way to a full-on panic attack.

The unease almost never goes away. Like the breath that involuntary moves in and out of my body, it is always there. I try to ignore it and move on with my day, but like the deliciously terrifying Glenn Close in the 80s classic, Fatal Attraction, the anxiety is not gonna be ignored, Dan.

It’s not really a ‘fake it til you make it’ scenario so pretending like I’m not feeling what I’m feeling usually makes it worse. Kinda like how you feel when things at work go sideways but you’re sitting at a desk surrounded by co-workers so you just keep staring really hard at your monitor, pretend-typing, willing yourself not to cry until you can make a stealthy escape to the nearest bathroom stall.

I call this thing, this feeling, that has always been with me, The Dread. Capital T, Capital D.

My flux capacitor is often fluxing at 1.21 jigawatts, is what I’m trying to say. And it is incapacitating. My body feels all jiggedy, like a pressure cooker as someone slowly turns up the heat. It’s happening now as I write this. But if I try to pinpoint exactly why I am experiencing The Dread everything becomes vague and swirly, like trying to focus on one thing while spinning on a merry-go-round as a kid, and just like I did then, I feel dizzy and need to lie down.

The Dread is a grizzled gargoyle hunkering heavily on my chest. It is a snake that slithers around my rib cage, wriggling hotly through my guts igniting the fiery sense that something terrible is about to happen/I’ve inadvertently offended someone who is now very angry with me/I have fucked up massively at work, and will be fired soon/someone is going to die.

Sometimes my body feels so jacked by the task of experiencing and regulating The Dread that it shuts down. I become numb. Exhausted. I disconnect from my body and dissociate with beer and shit TV. If Cory finds me in bed at 4 pm or on my 10th consecutive episode of Trailer Park Boys he knows The Dread has taken me hostage.

But Dread suppression is not the same as nervous system regulation. Disassociating from The Dread is only temporary relief. It just cuts me off from my body and my feelings and I end up even more anxious later. The shutdowns can also trigger social anxiety so intense I can’t bear the smallest interactions with humans. Sending an overdue text or even ordering food over the phone becomes a herculean task.

I’ve always had social anxiety but didn’t know what it was. I just knew that interacting with people often proved exhausting and required extensive recovery time. Attending gatherings and parties is and always has been business, never pleasure. I have worked at my current job for a decade and have not attended a single company party. I’d rather show up for a full day of work than mingle with co-workers over cocktails.

I have perfected the French Exit, the Irish Goodbye, the Dutch Leave, or my new favorite term: absquatulate. An American word from the 1800s meaning to stealthily leaving a party without saying goodbye. From my vantage, absquatulating is the only way to leave a party if you had to go in the first place and the term has the added bonus of not impugning an entire nation.

Next time you’re ready to leave a party and don’t want the hassle of a goodbye, people telling you to stay and calling you old for leaving early, etc. Just turn to your friend/partner and say, “Let’s absquatulate this motherfucker.” You know you like it.

I know exactly where my social anxiety comes from. We were The Bad Family on a street filled with devout Mormons. As a result, I always felt like I was being watched and judged. Because I was, it’s the Mormon way! A great number of Mormons excel at judgment, condescension, and competition.

Mom was single and sexy in a sea of Stepford wives whose life goals were procreation, keeping up with the Joneses, and ascending to the Celestial Kingdom after death for eternal marriage with their husbands.

When I was in junior high Mom bought a shiny turquoise Ninja 400 bullet bike that could be heard screaming down the road from miles away. The entire neighborhood knew when Mom got home. You could hear the engine revving long before she pulled into the driveway, gears rasping like an old man with emphysema trying to clear his throat.

“Mom’s home,” one of us would yell like a Night’s Watch soldier warning of White Walkers when those first faint engine whines tickled our practiced ear holes.

Shaun would straighten the tipped-over swivel rocker he’d been rocking and riding around the living room as he watched an episode of Alf. Jordan and his friends would take last jumps from the roof onto the trampoline they had maneuvered beneath it. Teenagers buying pot from Brandon would whip aside the blanket that served as a curtain and pour out his basement bedroom window like clowns exiting a small car, skateboard wheels rattling across the pavement just before Mom turned onto our street.

There she was, engine whining full blast as she throttled down the street sans helmet, bleached blonde hair whipping like a modern Medusa around a face deeply tanned from hours of laying out in our backyard greased in oil. She’d rev the engine unapologetically as she flew by Sister Hadlock watering her geraniums, back pointed belligerently in Mom’s direction as she roared past.

I always experienced an uncomfortable mixture of embarrassment and pride when Mom rolled up on her motorcycle or in her bright blue Camaro. She wasn’t like the other moms and it sucked. She wasn’t like the other moms and it was awesome. Badass in ways they couldn’t fathom only judge relentlessly.

“Your mom’s a slut!” was yelled at one or more of the Butler kids not infrequently.

Mom trained us from a young age to dread the chime of a doorbell or a knock on the door. When church leaders would send various folks to our house for a “social visit” (subtext: Why haven’t you been to church lately?) the whole family went into a lockdown mode that rivals an active shooter plan.

You’d be chilling on the living room couch burning the fuck out of your mouth with a much-anticipated hot pocket, tapping your toe to the Married With Children theme song, and think you heard something. Was that a knock?

Your spine would tingle in fear and even though she was dead asleep after a shift at what we then called the State Mental Hospital, Mom would be up in a flash, high-stepping down the hall on quietly violent tiptoes to hover just out of sight of the front door to make sure none of us kids foolishly answered. Brandon, always second in command, would emerge from his unfinished basement bedroom and peer up from the stairs. Jordan would freeze mid-Kool-aid stir in the kitchen (his second pitcher of the day) and shuffle silently across the dirty linoleum, dragging his tattered blanket like Linus to stand near Mom.

“Turn off the TV,” Mom would hiss as if our lives depended on it. And it felt like they did. We were not fucking around.

“Nobody move!” She’d flash Mom Face at us. You know the one. Eyes wide, jaw clenched, lips thinned to non-existent. The expression that says do as I say or I. Will. END. You.

There we’d be, still as mannequins, goggling at each other with saucer eyes, willing each other not to move as the assault continued and whoever it was knocked a second and even third time.

“Helloooo. Anybody hooome?”

Fuck. No. Nothing to see here. Move it along, Brother Johnson. Go wax poetic about Joseph Smith somewhere else.

This hit-the-deck maneuver was our modus operandi for missionaries, home teachers, visiting teachers, and anyone else of the Mormon variety as well as all solicitors, some relatives, and, of course, Christmas carolers.

Christmas carolers on my doorstep are a special version of hell I don’t even like to think about. I actually prefer the Mormon missionaries. If carolers even look at my porch I will hit the TV, lights, and the floor before most people register what’s happening and worm my body away from the door, down the hall to the safety of my bedroom. I will crouch there against the closed door, panting in the dark for an eternity before I will stand in my doorway, a fake grin plastered to my face as people sing joyfully at me.

Last week our sweet-as-pie elderly neighbors stopped by unannounced with a bag of peaches to say hello and Cory stared after me in raised brow bemusement as I absquatulated from the living room before he even realized anyone had knocked, covered myself in our bedspread, and left him to engage in small talk about the weather and how good the recent rain has been for our lawns. Good luck with that, bruh. I just can’t.

Lucky for me, he’s an affable fella who can talk lawn care, weather, pets, and sports with the best of ‘em while I lurk in the background pretending to take an important phone call.

Stories about who you are, what other people are like, and what kind of place the world is, are built on the foundation of your physiology.
Using the body as a portal to change automatic responses helps to remove the filters of the past and allows you to see present-moment reality.
It brings freedom to live in the here and now. This is what helps you to flourish and thrive. - Jessica Maguire

Therapist says The Dread is probably because I spend most of my life operating in survival mode and I need to work on lowering my emotional baseline. Your baseline emotion is the emotional state to which you are most accustomed. The place you return to over and over again. It’s the temperature and movement of the waters you move through. Are your waters typically warm and calm as a glassy mountain lake? A pleasant river with a few rapids here and there? Or violent ocean waves whipped around by hurricane-force winds?

Your childhood experiences formed a blueprint for the way you respond to situations as an adult. Those experiences set your emotional baseline, which is why it’s so hard to reset your system as an adult after a shitload of therapy clearly reveals your dysfunction, leaving you gaping at how much of your life you have inadvertently wasted living in survival mode, repeating unnecessary drama/pain/trauma because you didn’t know better, you just thought this was the way things are.

Your childhood emotional state got repeatedly reinforced year after year, forming your perceptions, emotions, and personality. It becomes the foundation for almost every way of thinking, feeling, and acting a person does. Those stress patterns in your mind-body system have been stored there for decades and they activate without you even being aware of it when you encounter similar dangers in the future, like someone knocking on your front door.

How do you think your way out of something like that? How can you think your way out of your default perception of the world? Something as much a part of who you are as the blood in your veins?

I have learned that people diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder are “emotionally sensitive,” have a higher emotional baseline, and take a longer time to return to a lower baseline than those without the disorder. In other words, we can be exhausting to be around but take heart! We exhaust ourselves far more than we exhaust you.

If most people’s emotional baseline is 20 on a 0 to 100 scale, then people with BPD are continuously at 80…People with BPD also have a hard time calming down and stay upset longer than others without the disorder. And there’s interesting evidence to back this up. In a person with average emotional intensity, an emotion fires in the brain for around 12 seconds. There is evidence that in people with BPD emotions fire for 20 percent longer. Individuals with BPD aren’t just genetically vulnerable to emotions; they’ve also grown up in an “invalidating environment.” Some experts believe that emotional invalidation may be one factor that increases a child’s risk of developing BPD in adolescence or adulthood. Emotional invalidation is when someone communicates to you that your emotions are not valid, are unreasonable or irrational, or should be hidden or concealed. So they might’ve never learned how to regulate their emotions or their emotions were continuously ignored or dismissed. - PsychCentral.com

I shit you not, it wasn’t until my thirties that I actually realized I can and should control my responses to the various scenarios life throws at all of us. Like, I don’t have to be offended by that thing or upset by this thing. I can choose to let it go. What a discovery! Nobody in my family ever let anything go. We screamed and cried and called names and pulled hair and hit and kicked then retreated to our corners behind slammed doors before round two. And three.

And it wasn’t until this goddamn year that I learned about the vagus nerve which is apparently considered to be the “cornerstone of your emotional health.” If it’s so cornerstone-y, how have I never heard of it before now? Do you know about your vagus nerve? You do because you’re a more put-together person than me, probably. But if you don’t know you should learn! It will change your life!

Also known as vagal nerves, these are the main nerves of your parasympathetic nervous system. This system, about the same size as your spinal cord, runs all through your body, from your brain to your large intestine. You’ve got left and right vagus nerves that move down your esophagus. Nerves are all over your neck and throat and chest and into your belly.

The nerves control specific body functions such as digestion, heart rate, and immune system.

Well, shit. The junction of my dysfunction. No wonder anxiety manifests as a tight throat, heavy chest, and stomachaches.

According to nervous system expert Jessica Maguire, “Chronic and traumatic stress tells your nervous system to activate and leave stress responses turned on when there may only be a challenge, not a threat. Symptoms of dysregulation can include prolonged anxiety, racing thoughts, overworking, overdoing, starting arguments, and an inability to switch off.”

Ahhh, yes. The Dread that never dies.

“This is how nervous system dysregulation can arise,” Maguire continues. The vagus nerve is interrupted from regulating your nervous system. On the other hand, symptoms could also include chronic fatigue, procrastination, avoidance, withdrawing, burn-out, and a lack of motivation.”

Yep, yep. TV, beer disassociation, and social anxiety.

The thing is, we are not consciously choosing to move between these emotional states. It takes place outside of our awareness, in our amygdala - the survival part of our brain. The vagus nerve and amygdala are key elements associated with chronic stress, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and trauma. These aspects of our nervous system connect how we think, feel, and relate to experiences within and around us.

In short, these things control how we initially perceive just about everything.

The amygdala is the reason I panic when someone knocks on the door. It activates whenever we experience anything through our senses that reminds us of past trauma. Past experiences dictate reactions to current events and form repeat patterns. The brain is biased toward what it knows and will follow the path of least resistance e.g. my cute neighbors bring over peaches and knock on the door and my body responds to the knock the way it did when I was ten and the Mormon neighbors came calling.

The name of the game is retraining my nervous system by rewiring those neural pathways. Learning to recognize my automatic reflexive responses helps undo what was conditioned in my childhood and other previous times of traumatic stress. Maguire says, “Using the body as a portal to change automatic responses helps remove the filters of the past, and allows you to see present moment reality. It brings freedom to live in the here and now.”

Lately, although it feels counterintuitive, I’ve been leaning into the intense anxiety I regularly experience. I acknowledge what I am feeling and analyze how the feeling is physically and emotionally affecting me by talking myself through what’s happening physiologically in real-time.

“Shit, Monica, we’re hovering at a 7 today. Your amygdala is on high alert, as per us(ual). Your vagus nerve is fucking with your nervous system for sure! Flux capacitor is fluxing! There’s a knot in your stomach/your throat is tight/your chest is heavy. What are you anxious about? Why are you anxious about that? Are you worrying about future events? Does it make sense to worry about that? Is your period due? Pause. Breathe. The kids are ok. Work is cool. You’re sitting on your couch drinking a Seltzer so why do you feel so nervous and unsafe?”

Instead of dousing the fire in my chest with a beer or two (which only adds more anxiety later), I am trying to deconstruct the shadow gnawing at my gut, the sped-up heartbeat thundering in my too-tight chest, and convince my body that survival mode is not necessary right now. “I’m glad to see you’re working, survival mode, but you are not needed now. Come back when we’ve totally fucked the Earth and we are Mad Max-ing for water, but for now, I’m all set, bud.”

It’s intense work and feels hopeless, sometimes. In many ways, it’s harder than anything I’ve done. But it is also such a relief to understand exactly what’s happening and realize that so much of my emotional dysregulation comes unconsciously from my body and my past, not my mind. I spend a lot of time hating on myself so it’s nice to know the way I perceive the world and the emotional dysregulation isn’t totally my fault, just the obvious outcome of my particular past.

Managing my emotions isn’t necessarily something I can think myself out of. It’s healing my body from childhood experiences as silly as running from the doorbell to the more severe stuff like the verbal and physical abuse that still lives inside of me and informs my behaviors decades later. Just as we can strength train our muscles, you can learn to train your nervous system to make it more flexible, adaptable, and resilient.

Not only can we retrain our nervous systems, but recovery from Borderline Personality Disorder is possible. Of all the disorders, BPD has the highest rate of mindfulness and is marked as having the ability to fully recover. Emotional regulation is a huge part of that process.

To combat The Dread I often summon the Dude. He, and people like him, are antidotes to The Dread. Probably, because I give way too many fucks, I find so much relief in people who don’t give a fuck à la the Dude.

My entire life is giving all the fucks. I have too many fucks to give about everything. I’m tired of giving so many fucks. But I don’t want to give zero fucks either. Like the Dude, I want to give essential fucks. Fucks are a delicate balance. One can also give too many fucks about not giving a fuck and then you’re fucked.

What would the Dude do? Well, the Dude abides, no matter what. But what does that even mean? Can we learn something from the philosophy of The Dude?

According to dudeism.com, a website dedicated to dispensing Dude wisdom, Dudeism is a religion with the following creed:

Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others – that is to say, abide.

I just wanna abide, man. To deal with the bullshit life serves up with Dude-like patience and humor. He is emotionally unflappable. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to fully repair my emotional baseline, it’s too ingrained in who I am. I mean, I think I am resigned to the possibility that I am always going to hit the deck, heart pounding when Christmas carolers knock on my door. Frankly, that feels like the smartest thing to do in that particular scenario BPD or not. But maybe I can learn to mitigate my responses to other things that spike my adrenaline on the regular?

The older I get the more I look forward to a time in the very near future when I am in BPD remission, and spend the majority of my life embodying a Dude-like chill in the face of bullshit of all kinds from all people.

Just take a deep breath and say “Fuck it, Dude. Let’s go bowling.”

IWNDWYT - Day 15