Perceived threats, news, hyper vigilance
It's not possible to escape the news this morning. I've had a recurring, and sometimes vivid nightmare since I was a child about something like what happened in Las Vegas. I don't want links or to dwell on LV specifically, it's my lifelong ideation toward threats and my propensity toward hyper vigilance that's my focus. That news triggers it. It triggers the memory of that nightmare. It's all part of going forward in therapy.
I am talking rationally, but in the pit of my gut sits the truest form of this ideation. My mind doesn't get to reform the body response that's automatic. Writing this is for therapy, for inward reflection, to converse about this problem I have and do it because it's always been, and needs to subside. The tension is unhealthy, the adrenaline and cortisol that wends through my body hurts me. It's a lifetime thing... so damage is done.
A lot of why I isolate, avoid doing things alone, and enjoying those things I do in public, are from this body effect. The tension wears me out, and my mind has to shut down to deal with it; dissociate to get relief. I'm not present, I don't focus on happy things and have to work my way back... It happened at some music I watched at the State Fair this year... my mind was unsettled and I really wanted to enjoy it... I felt depressed when it was over. The same at the Pride Festival, my first, this year. I don't identify as gay, and I went alone to hear music. I did, but felt very lonely, very alone and depressed about that.
One thing that gets me down... I love the garden parks in near me, but going alone, I feel out of sorts. There's a very large cemetery on the way to those perfect gardens... and I just drive in there and walk among tomb stones instead of the gardens. It is garden like, but, I'm zoned out, dissociated and then later... knowing I was alone... depressed.
I'm almost always alone... museum, garden, walks, most things...
So, to know that being in public is a random chance for harm... my mind goes to that awful nightmare and relives it. I get fixated on how others have had control over me, by NOT enacting laws to ban some types of very deadly guns, and high capacity magazines. Now they're voting to approve silencers?! It's maddening to me. I do fixate on these things, and I do feel the harm of all the shootings, it triggers my sense of helplessness and any amount of rational talk that it's not in my control is maddening as well. It is in the tiniest way, infinitesimally micro, part of my choosing to fight this. I can keep contacting law makers and influencers and keep trying to persuade them to never stop fighting for my right to live free of fear from these weapons and magazines, or that damn silencer. It's my right to be free of that fear, and no one else's right to have those weapons trumps my right to be free of fear. Them being in their mind, equal, the default is to consider the best for all, and the majority, when taken seriously, demand an end to such weapons, magazines and now the damn silencer.
This is a very touchy subject... and because it triggers me so greatly, and is part of my ongoing sense of tortured perception of threats, maddeningly inciting the flashback of my nightmare, etc... I post this topic today.
I am talking rationally, but in the pit of my gut sits the truest form of this ideation. My mind doesn't get to reform the body response that's automatic. Writing this is for therapy, for inward reflection, to converse about this problem I have and do it because it's always been, and needs to subside. The tension is unhealthy, the adrenaline and cortisol that wends through my body hurts me. It's a lifetime thing... so damage is done.
A lot of why I isolate, avoid doing things alone, and enjoying those things I do in public, are from this body effect. The tension wears me out, and my mind has to shut down to deal with it; dissociate to get relief. I'm not present, I don't focus on happy things and have to work my way back... It happened at some music I watched at the State Fair this year... my mind was unsettled and I really wanted to enjoy it... I felt depressed when it was over. The same at the Pride Festival, my first, this year. I don't identify as gay, and I went alone to hear music. I did, but felt very lonely, very alone and depressed about that.
One thing that gets me down... I love the garden parks in near me, but going alone, I feel out of sorts. There's a very large cemetery on the way to those perfect gardens... and I just drive in there and walk among tomb stones instead of the gardens. It is garden like, but, I'm zoned out, dissociated and then later... knowing I was alone... depressed.
I'm almost always alone... museum, garden, walks, most things...
So, to know that being in public is a random chance for harm... my mind goes to that awful nightmare and relives it. I get fixated on how others have had control over me, by NOT enacting laws to ban some types of very deadly guns, and high capacity magazines. Now they're voting to approve silencers?! It's maddening to me. I do fixate on these things, and I do feel the harm of all the shootings, it triggers my sense of helplessness and any amount of rational talk that it's not in my control is maddening as well. It is in the tiniest way, infinitesimally micro, part of my choosing to fight this. I can keep contacting law makers and influencers and keep trying to persuade them to never stop fighting for my right to live free of fear from these weapons and magazines, or that damn silencer. It's my right to be free of that fear, and no one else's right to have those weapons trumps my right to be free of fear. Them being in their mind, equal, the default is to consider the best for all, and the majority, when taken seriously, demand an end to such weapons, magazines and now the damn silencer.
This is a very touchy subject... and because it triggers me so greatly, and is part of my ongoing sense of tortured perception of threats, maddeningly inciting the flashback of my nightmare, etc... I post this topic today.
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