Anxiety

Anguish is very common in our society. It is a feeling of intense pain, whether physical or emotional. In the midst of difficulty and anguish it can be difficult to perceive what to do. But anguish does not come from nothing, there is a reason for it to appear. How can we handle anguish?

David was a shepherd who became a king in Israel in Old Testament times, but he screwed up a lot. I’ve heard preachers say that even when David committed adultery and murder, he was a man after God’s own heart. The truth is that David became a man after God’s own heart after he deeply regretted his sins, especially adultery and murder. Up to a certain point he tried to stifle his anguish over the mistakes he had made. Let’s think now about what we do with anguish. Do we run away from it, or are we able to face it in the strength of God?

The Bible is a wonderful book because it shows the truth of human history, without putting a lid on anyone. David was carried away by emotion, by sensuality, and abusively he wanted to have the wife of one of his army chiefs, Uriah. He ordered to put Uriah – his faithful soldier – at the head of the battle and to leave him there alone, so he was slain in battle.

It was cowardice on the part of David and his officers who carried out this order. David wanted to stay with Uriah’s wife, Bathsheba. He adulterated and murdered one of their military leaders. He didn’t think about it anymore, he fled into denial, into self-deception. Many do this, they escape into a mental attitude of unconsciousness of guilt, in the cruel, unpleasant, rude way of being. Running away from yourself can be the worst escape to do.

Then the Prophet Nathan, sent by God, went to David and told him a parable that portrayed injustice. When David heard the story of the parable, he immediately said that the unjust character must be punished. Nathan then said that he, David, was the unjust man, for what he had done to Bathsheba and Uriah. Suddenly the penny dropped and David came out of denial and admitted his mistakes, facing his anguish head on.

It seems difficult for certain people to admit their mistakes in behavior. Sometimes they are authoritarian, bossy, boastful, arrogant people. It’s hard to get along with people like that who, like David, are in denial almost all the time, always making an excuse for their abusive behavior.

There are people who do not feel anguish, because they have a strong ego and a good ability to manage their emotions. But a person with an impoverished emotional make-up, or someone alienated, may not complain of anguish.

Another type of person who seems to lack conscious distress is one who lacks self-observation. They can be defensive people, who don’t open up, they think they are powerful because they are more affluent, or with some relevant political, business or social position, or because they are people soaked with emotions, and with that they believe they have the power to love. Mature love involves feeling, but a strong feeling alone is not love.

Why do some deny having behavioral problems? Why don’t they observe themself and admit it? Maybe because they didn’t want to face their anguish. One way to avoid thinking about your anguish is to criticize, wanting to control others and having an attitude of ordering as if others were your stewards. Nor does one feel anguish who suffers from a decrease in morals. Corrupt people are like that. Some corrupt people may have a personality disorder, because they lack remorse, lack the feeling of guilt, lack true repentance. Those who say they don’t have anguish, may not have symptoms, but the way they live, trampling on ethics, exploiting people, dominated by material greed, aren’t these the symptoms of a character deficiency?

Another way to escape the perception of anguish has to do with psychosomatic illnesses, which are the manifestations of anguish through the body. This is where autoimmune diseases and other symptoms in the body come in, for which there is no diagnosis of some organic clinical disease. Is the absence of perceiving anguish the same as the absence of symptoms? Who doesn’t feel anguish consciously doesn’t have symptoms of emotional suffering?

Some symptoms may not be so evident, that they are expressing the presence of anguish or exaggerated anxiety. For example, stuttering, the presence of a tic, nocturnal enuresis that makes the person wet the bed again, obesity, verbal aggression, consumerism, a sex craving, an addiction to work, among others.

Anguish affects the entire human race. A baby is already born with it. Anguish is a general malaise, an unpleasant feeling of emptiness, of missing something that you don’t know what it is. It feels like a hole in the chest, sometimes a feeling of tightness, oppression in the chest, a lump in the throat, with or without sadness. Sometimes, and perhaps most of the time, anguish comes in disguise, or hides itself in physical symptoms, or even in mental symptoms such as panic attacks, bulimia, self-mutilation, obsessive compulsive disorder, drug addiction, among other problems.

Dealing with anguish is not easy. We all want pleasure, well-being, and that’s a normal desire. But is it possible not to have anguish in this existence? Is there any medication that eliminates the anguish inherent to existing? Any drug, licit or illicit, only promises resolution of anguish, but does not fulfill it, unless temporarily, and depending on the drug in a very fleeting way. The pain comes back.

To better deal with your anguish, it is important to observe what types of thoughts you cultivate the most in your mind. Imagine a car with four wheels. The front wheels are the most important because they get you where you want to go. The rear wheels follow the front ones. The ones at the front are thought, cognition, choice, volition. The ones behind are feelings and physiology; that is, how your body reacts depending on what you think, what you feel and what you do.

To deal with anguish and depression it is important to consider the front wheels: thinking, choice. People who let their thoughts focus on tragedies, pessimism, and personal suffering can develop a variety of mental disorders. Studies of depression reveal that distorted and hopeless thoughts contribute and worsen depression.

The rear wheels are still important. Without them, the front ones can’t handle the path you want to go. Feelings are important for the functioning of the brain and other organs. Most people tend to be either at the extreme of being dominated by feelings – the front wheel of thought comes to the back, and the back wheel of feeling comes to the front – or they repress emotions too much, taking off a rear wheel.

There are not many who manage their thoughts and feelings well. It depends on learning, which I call psychoeducation. That’s where you learn to think better by correcting your distorted thoughts, to focus your attention on what works in your life instead of what doesn’t, to cultivate hope, to strive to be optimistic, to have and express gratitude, to overcome authoritarianism and to cultivate meekness, stop complaining about people, about life, about everything; this is psychoeducation.

When you let thought go to the back wheel and allow the back wheel of emotion to come forward, choices, behavior, your family and social relationships can become problematic. Not because feelings are a mistake, but because common sense, serenity, mental balance, are not produced by feeling; this is not their job. It is cognition, thought, one of the front wheels that is enabled to do this. Taking medication for anguish and depression and not learning to think better is like wanting the back wheel to guide the car of your mind.

Do something to learn how to better deal with your emotions, with your anguish or sadness. Psychotherapy, good reading, lectures, counseling, spiritual retreats, support groups, Bible reading, life can help. Once you learn to control your thoughts, emotions and everything else, you’ll move on more easily.

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Obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD is a very unpleasant mental suffering, that can have a drastic impact on somebody’s life. What is OCD, and what can somebody do to deal with it?

OCD affects 0.7 to 2.5% of the population. So, for example, in a city with 100,000 inhabitants, there should be between 700 to 2500 people with this mental disorder. It is a suffering which bothers a lot, and can become so serious in certain situations, that it disturbs the studies, professional, social and family life of the person.

Famous and rich people also have OCD. For example, a Brazilian singer of popular romantic music, Roberto Carlos has obsessive-compulsive disorder. If you go to his official website, he published information about this suffering. Another example is actress Luciana Vendramini, who also suffers from OCD. Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who played the role of Harry Potter, discovered that he had OCD at the age of five. He said: “I had to repeat every sentence I said quietly again. And I would like to encourage everyone with this problem to go through therapy. That doesn’t mean you’re crazy or weak.”

Also David Beckham, famous English football player has always admitted that he suffers from OCD, and that in his life this mental illness manifests itself in the constant need for cleanliness and perfection of everything around him. Anything out of order produces tension in him, everything for him has to be in pairs. If there are three glasses in the sink, you have to add one more to make two pairs, or you have to remove one to make only one pair. There can’t be three pairs of soccer boots in his closet. He has to have either two pairs or four pairs, always an even number, that’s an example of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Another famous person with OCD was the singer Michael Jackson. In addition, it seems that he also suffered from a disorder called BDD body dysmorphic disorder, which is a mental illness that is characterized by disturbing the person’s perception of their own body image, leading to irrational concerns about defects in some part of their body, and this would then explain the countless plastic surgeries he had in his short life. His ex-wife Lisa Presley said he never took off makeup. Many who suffer from this suffering from body dysmorphic disorder are at greater risk of becoming addicted to plastic surgery.

What is OCD?

The name of this disease called OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder already says: obsession and compulsion. A person with this mental suffering has intrusive thoughts, which he doesn’t want to have and are disturbing his conscience. Examples of these thoughts could be like: Did I lock the door at home? Or: Did I germs from touching that object? Those are thoughts that don’t stop, don’t give peace, and the person feels a compulsion to do what the thoughts say.

In the first case I mentioned, in which obsessive thoughts are questioning if he really closed the door, this person has the compulsion to check several times if he really did lock the door. In the second case where thoughts obsessively say that he may have been contaminated, he will compulsively wash his hands over and over again, ten, fifteen or twenty times.

Compulsive thoughts keep telling the person with OCD to practice the compulsive acts, because if they don’t do it, anxiety arises that disturbs a lot, and if the person doesn’t practice what obsession says, he will be very restless. So, obsession in the case of obsessive-compulsive disease, obsession has to do with repetitive thoughts in the individual’s consciousness, and compulsion has to do with the repetition of attitudes, of acts that have the purpose of alleviating those disturbing thoughts. So obsession is thinking, compulsion is doing.

Former model and actress Luciana Vendramini, in an interview she gave to the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, she spoke about the problem, saying that she had what I call synchronized intrusive thoughts, that is, she needed to imagine something good along with an action. For example, while washing hands she needed to think about nice things. When she had a bad thought, she had to wash her hand again, so she commented that she spent 24 hours repeating quirks. She used to spend 8 hours taking a bath. What suffering, right?

There are various types of obsessive thoughts, such as the thought that the person has committed an unforgivable sin, or that they have to tidy their closet perfectly, or that they have to fix a picture on the wall that is a little crooked, or that they have to do three-taps on the wall whenever they think of a word, or have to skip the lines on a sidewalk and other things of this nature. In fact, in the film: “As Good as It Gets”, actor Jack Nicholson plays the role of a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Normal people can have thoughts that repeat themselves in the mind, but it’s temporary and it’s not chronic, it passes, it ends, but in individuals with OCD thoughts become recurrent or obsessive, they persist and it becomes the pattern of thinking. This causes a lot of anxiety, and a lot of anxiety makes things to appear worse.

In OCD, the attempt to alleviate the anxiety produced by obsessive thoughts is to practice compulsive acts. For example, if in the mind of a person with OCD, obsessive thinking is about contamination, he may try to alleviate this through the ritual of washing his hands exaggeratedly dozens of times a day. If the obsessive thinking is about whether he really turned off the light in a room at home or at work, he can check if he did it dozens of times, one after another.

How to treat OCD?

Some scientists believe that OCD has to do with brain changes and that it’s necessary to use medication to treat it, but it’s not just that. There are other emotional complications that create a lot of anxiety, and the mind uses obsessive thoughts and compulsive acts as a defense against deep emotional pain. So in the cause of OCD there are physical factors, emotional factors, and even spiritual factors.

It helps to fight OCD by telling yourself that obsessive thoughts have no moral value but are the result of neurochemical changes, perhaps due to excess anxiety. That’s why the person with OCD needs to devalue obsessive thoughts as much as they can and tell themselves that they don’t have to do what they say.

It’s also important to struggle to think of something else to replace obsessive thinking. This is difficult at first, it’s true, but with time a person may be able to avoid concentrating on obsessive thoughts, choosing to think about other things. This will be difficult at first because there is a strong anxiety that drives the person to these thoughts, and they in turn lead to repetitive compulsive acts. This means that when a person struggles to prevent obsessive thoughts from continuing in their mind to disturb them, they may feel more anxiety, they may be restless, distressed, but with time this anxiety may begin to diminish, without the person needing to practice compulsion to get relief from those obsessive thoughts.

So an exercise that can help, is when obsessive thoughts come, instead of just practicing the compulsive act, say to yourself: I will wait about 20 minutes without getting carried away by the need to act compulsively. After a few days or weeks, this waiting time can increase a little more. If somebody has the compulsion to wash hands for several minutes, the person can reduce the time spent washing their hands. He might decide to wash it using less time, instead of spending 15 minutes washing his hands, he might decide maybe it’ll be just ten minutes. Then further shorten this time and get busy with another task.

Don’t be ashamed to talk about this suffering to anyone. If you are unable to gradually stop compulsive acts, even trying hard to do so, then seek professional help with a psychiatrist or psychologist. It is because when obsessive-compulsive disorder becomes severe enough to disrupt the person’s social and work life, temporary medication prescribed by the psychiatrist may be necessary, in addition to psychotherapy with a clinical psychologist.

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