Running with scissors, disrespect, and paranoia

[EGL]

This has been turning over in my mind for quite some time. I can see all this happening but I feel powerless to stop it. I feel like I have no power over certain things in my life, and that really, really makes me feel like I'm going crazy.

When most people were children, they were taught to not run while carrying scissors because they might fall and stab themselves. Why can't I follow any common sense cautions like this? The other day I was driving home from work on a curvy road and found myself behind someone doing 35 in a 45 zone. I followed them for several miles like this (actually I was the 3rd vehicle in this cortege). Finally, I could take it no more and passed the two cars in front of me on a double yellow line, just as another car appeared around the curve. I made it o.k., but this is an oh, so common thing with me. I run with scissors, so to speak. I don't have common sense about my own safety.

And then I got home, consumed with paranoia. Will the police come take me away? I pull all the drapes closed in the house. I sit an ponder over it all, wondering why I'm like this and waiting for the doorbell. Finally, I ended up taking a Xanax to calm my nerves. The police never came.

This is a common pattern with me. If I do things that I know are wrong, in my mind they balloon to capital offences. I get tons of spam in my e-mail. If I open one that contains, shall we say "women who ought to be ashamed of themselves", I'm so disgusted and ashamed of myself for having looked at that. And then I wonder, who is going to know that I looked at that. What if everyone in the world found out that I did, and then I imagine that they did find out. And I vow to never do it again, and become paranoid again that the police will come and get me for having looked at something like that. That in turn tends to freeze me in a state of inactivity because I can't think of what to do and think it will be for naught anyway since they're probably going to come get me and put me away or whatever. Then the same pattern begins to evolve, where I take a Xanax, calm my nerves, function again.

I used to be on a hobby forum for several years, but recently contributed to a frivolous thread and was banned for 3 days as a result. I politely offered my view of this action to that moderator, to which he responded kindly that basically he was making an example of me and 3 others. After the ban was lifted, I immediately deleted every post I had ever made there. Basically, I had felt disrespected and went the nuclear option. I find that I tend to burn bridges like when I could have just as easily blown it off and remained, or just quietly gone into the abyss. Yet I spent the effort of several hours deleting posts.

Why am I like this? Why do I seem normal and stable to those at work and in social settings, but behind the scenes I feel like a maniac on the loose? I can't reconcile the two.

I have a pituitary tumor (benign) that was diagnosed a year ago, which caused a decrease level of Leutenizing Hormone (LH), which is what tells our bodies to create testosterone. So I've been on testosterone replacement therapy for about a little over a year now. Replacement levels are either 2.5, 5, 7.5, or 10 being the max. I started on 5, but told my doctor I didn't think that was helping enough sexually, so he raised it to 7.5 a couple of months ago. I'm wondering if this has anything to do with all this. I know it's warnings say it can cause irrational, agressive behavior. I don't know. I just know that I didn't used to feel this idiotic, or have these bouts of paranoia, and feel so emotionally unstable at times.

 

[FLRich]

Eddie,

Talk to your doctor about the testosterone medication. It's been proven that this can sometimes cause aggressive behaviors like the ones you described. Did you have these feelings before?

I sometimes get that way. Comes and goes in cycles, it seems. Especially road rage! My God, I can actually scare myself shitless with the completely dumbass things I do in order to pass someone who in most cases is doing the speed limit. Funny thing is, I never do this whenever a family member is in the car. So why do I take risk when alone?

I find I think too much when I'm in the car alone. I remember things and even after all these years, I still have so much pent up hostility against my perps. This comes out when ever I'm alone. I can't even mow my lawn without thinking these things and then I become a royal pain in the butt to live with the rest of the day.

Maybe the same thing happens to you, Eddie. Maybe when you're alone you "think too much" and you become irritable.

The paranoia thing hits home, too. I think that any time I do anything wrong, all hell is going to break loose. Days later, I wonder, why I was so afraid. The things I did, although wrong, were not illegal, and no one would know about it if I didn't tell them.

The same goes for health issues. Don't let me have a pain for more than 3 days. It has to be FULL BLOWN CANCER!!! I have a sore rib cage now and I have been thinking it must be lung cancer until my dumb self realized that I have been teaching adults a very physical crisis management course used to stabilize out of control adults in a crisis situation. I just have sore muscles, not cancer.

While I really can't blame everything on my SA, I do believe that a lot of these feeling of doom and paranoia are a result of it. Think of how many times we were hurt and had to endure the pain alone. Think how many years or even decades that we internalized all of this stuff alone. Is it any wonder we aren't rational at times, Eddie? I think whenever we are alone with ourselves, whether it's in the car, the house, yard, or anywhere, we may revert back to the times we were alone, had to deal with this abuse alone, and we become irritable and irrational. I know I do.

God, I need a therapist soon! LOL

Take care Eddie, and hopefully someone can give you better advice. Do check with your physician, though.

I love you, Bro.

 

[Bobby]

You know, every time I think something couldn't have anything to do with SA, it does. I'm calling it the "holy shit" syndrome. I'm fairly new here and every time somebody writes something that is just exactly like me and I thought I was the only one in the world who was like that I say, "Holy shit." I've been saying that about five times a day since I started reading things here.
I think another thing about this place is that we are that unusual group of men who actually let down our guard and let others see us as we really are. Most of us are way past any kind of pretense. We're too tired for pretense. So we see that everybody has problems and many of the problems we thought were our very private ones really are shared by nearly everyone.
I hesitate to give advice here, because I have absolutely no background or training in giving advice, but it does sound like some of your stuff is genuinely intense. I do those same things, so I certainly understand them. I worry so much about little things I've said or done that the people I've said them to or done them to didn't even notice, and I've been worrying for days about whether or not I've offended them. It drives me (and my wife) nuts.
One of the things I've noticed about this SA healing journey is that those emotions were the first in me to start to lessen, and they have continued to do so right along. I still do it, but to a much lesser degree. I used to have horrible times worrying about things like that, and now they're not so horrible any more. I can put them in perspective.
I think you should at least check with your doctor about your medicine, especially since this intensity seems new to you. That could well be what is causing it. I was walking around the house crying on Thursday in like 20 second outbursts for seemingly no reason at all. There was no emtotion there. I was having some SA issues, but that didn't seem to be what was bringing it on. My wife suggested that it was probably because it wasn't Kerry who was taking the oath of office. But finally we figured out that it must have been medicine related. I'm on about every medicine known to man for my bi-polar condition and have had some insurance problems...so I cut back on the dosage of one of the prescriptions until I could get the problem worked out. That was evidently throwing me off just enough to cause the crying. Sometimes I play around with the dosage on my own, and that is a very bad thing. You didn't do that, but I do think any time you change the combination of chemicals you're taking in, it has the potential to have a much bigger impact than you were expecting.
Now, as long as you understand that I have no training in my background to be saying these things, I won't worry that I said them. I do hope that you start feeling better. I have enough of what you're talking about to be able to imagine how upsetting what you're going through must be.

 

[EGL]

Thanks, Rich and Bobby, for the input. I really appreciate it. I think it's probably a combination of things, too much hormones combined with thinking too much at times about the past. Can be a bad combination.

All my life growing up I heard what I had done wrong, and I knew there were consequences for that. That's a hard thought process to break out of, worrying constantly about consequences for everything I do that's wrong. But still I do. Raised in fear, I think these episodes of "rebelliousness" are just that - rebelling against all the past to do things I know I shouldn't be doing. But, like you Rich, I'm always alone when doing the auto craziness.

Rich, it's kinda funny you said "Maybe when you're alone you 'think too much'". When I first went to see my family doctor about this back in June, I was talking to him about possibly being depressed and told him "Sometimes, I just think too much about the past". That's when he asked if I'd had any kind of trauma in my childhood. I just started crying.

I think I have a follow-up appointment with my endocrinologist scheduled for February. I looked while ago but couldn't find the appointment card, so will call his office next week to make sure. I think the jump from 5.0 to 7.5 was just too much, combined with the other junk rattling around in my brain. Tomorrow, I'm going to go ahead and cut it back to 5.0.

Something else I've been thinking about is therapy. I declared myself "cured" back in November and told my therapist "So long!", but I know I'm not. I've felt a gradual slide the last few weeks, back to where I was months and months ago. I don't know if it's the overload of hormones, the holidays and family that drove me crazy, or a combination of all of the above. But I'm thinking I need to get back into therapy again to work on some more things. That's shit to have to admit, because since November I've been trying to kid myself that I'm "cured", and now I feel like I've failed. I need to talk to my wife about it and see what she thinks. She seems to know me pretty much better than anyone.