journal - day 1

i am trying to deal with the fallout from the past. i have been trying on and off to do this for most of my adult life but there is a new incentive for me now. not only is the anxiety and self-doubt affecting my own functioning but it is spilling over and affecting my son. among the other things he has to negotiate, he has now developed generalised anxiety disorder. people have been saying to me for years that i am too protective of him, too afraid of things happening, and that i have to start letting him go out into the world. his autism has given me the ideal excuse for being over-protective; he took a long time to develop road sense, and where we used to live had dangerous roads.

lately, after a particularly stressful couple of years, my son's anxiety has moved into new realms and he has become anxious about more and more of life. added to this is a physiological problem which has yet to be stabilised, which causes motion sickness, making car travel really hard for him. so his world has shrunk. we have been trying to get some help with developing his independence skills for some time. my husband and i are not the best people to do this with him; me because of my anxiety, my husband because of his impatience. but so far it is down to us, so i need to work hard to put the anxiety back in its box, for my son's sake as well as my own.

part of this process is to record what makes me anxious, so i can face it. this in itself is quite a job. most things seem to make me anxious. because it is so all-pervading i am going to try and record what gets to me. in particular, i am going to try and take note of when i indulge in displacement behaviour.

for me, displacement behaviour seems to take two forms. the most obvious one is that whenever i am stressed i will start doing things, usually in an effort to bring order to my environment. but rather than the more usual tidying or cleaning, i will get out my toolbox and start fixing up shelves, putting things on walls, mending doors. very early in life i developed a sort of home-making tendency. i scrounged things from the neighbours in our flat to put in my bedroom, brought things in from the dustbin area to add to my collections, made dens in the shrubbery in the communal garden. i must have been the only 14 year old to buy a sofa.

(in fact the story of the sofa is quite a funny one, involving my friend and i pushing it up the road until the castors fell off, whereupon we sat on it in a layby trying to work out what to do. luckily a truck came by occupied by some men from the water board. they put the sofa in the back and transported us the 5 miles or so to my house. how we ever thought we could push a sofa 5 miles i have no idea but this episode gives some idea of the extent to which displacement behaviour can go.)

the other thing i do, if it is too late to start drilling holes in walls, is to open a bottle of wine and shut my anxiety up that way. of the two sorts of behaviour this one is probably the least healthy. it takes quite a bit of wine to squash down serious anxiety, which is not so good for the body, or indeed for the mind in the long run.

so the plan is that when i feel the need to indulge in either sort of behaviour, i will instead sit myself down and try and write about what thoughts and feelings i am trying to avoid. this doesn't mean that i will stop putting up shelves or drinking wine, but i will be aiming to do those things in a more healthy way, rather than a pathological sort of way.

so here goes...