Date: Wed Jan 19, 2000 11:50 pm

Subject: Irrational thoughts

Thanks xxxxxx down under,

for all the useful information you've been posting lately. And it is so courageous to share such very personal information.I remember when you first posted about having the dog put down. It must be very healing for you to be able to express yourself and get the garbage out.

And to Carol in the U.K. Those irrational thoughts. They are definitely very hard to cope with.

When I quit Valium in 1978 it was in large part because of the irrational thoughts that had become so prominent I could no longer function in the every day world. Work, driving, doing the laundry, everything became impossible because the irrational thoughts were constantly telling me to kill myself. In addition, very old, and I thought forgotten, memories were coming to the surface and interfering with the present.

I simply couldn't stand it any more, so went to treatment. Ah, a safe, controlled environment was exactly what I needed for a while. A good long while, 58 days as it turned out, and I would have stayed longer if they'd let me.

Thanks too, Kathy for reminding me of the Johari window. I didn't really understand it while in treatment, and barely understand some of it now.

However, I do believe the hidden and unknown areas are the subconscious. All sorts of garbage and stuff has been stored in there since our earliest days in the womb. Yes, babies perceive things and are affected even before being born. Then as we are growing up we continue to store all sorts of things in there, many things we may not even realize have been put there.If you stop to think that everything we've experienced, every movie we've seen, every book we've read, every bit of scenery we've seen just walking down the street is stored somewhere in our wonderful brains, that's an overwhelming amount of information.

So our brains must act something like filing cabinets to store all this information in various places, some places we need to access when needed, like being able to do simple math to pay for dinner.But then there's tons of other, mostly useless information, that's still stored deep in there somewhere in the bottom filing cabinets and mostly forgotten. We'd never be able to function unless the brain worked that way. We'd be overwhelmed with all the flow of information and unable to function otherwise, which was what happened to me during withdrawal.

So there's a real physical reason why this happens. Alcohol and our benzos anesthetize the upper file cabinet, the controlling part of the brain, releasing the subconscious or lower levels to erupt as irrational thinking. Irrational in the sense that the thoughts aren't relevant to current reality.

The last few months I was taking Valium whenever I was home, the drapes were drawn, doors locked and I was terrified that "they" were coming to get me. There really weren't any "they" coming to get me, but the drugs had made me so paranoid I was afraid they were.So we start to taper off drugs, or stop completely and whamo. All those irrational thoughts erupt with a vengeance and have no relationship to our current reality.

So what to do? Keep busy. Keep reminding yourself that these thoughts aren't based in reality. It might be helpful to wear a rubber band around the wrist and when these thoughts attack, flick the rubber band to help focus on the present. Pinch yourself. Look around and say out loud everything you see to focus attention "out there" and away from inside the head. Look for the ducks. If someone's at work or around other people, it's probably not a good idea to talk out loud, so do it quietly. (LOL) Experiment and you may come up with a better way, some way to focus attention outside of self. And keep repeating this just isn't real.

Keep putting useful, positive information in your head. Read poetry, read biographies, read spiritual books, read anything positive. Don't be surprised to have some really vivid, awesome dreams, that's the brain healing. Write down as much as possible, it helps get it out of your head. And some things can be saved that way to refer back to later, when withdrawal is over and you're feeling more normal.And keep repeating that these thoughts aren't reality. Keep repeating that these irrational thoughts are just a symptom of what the drugs have done and that you can still function and they will go away.

They WILL go away. It may take more time than anybody likes, but they will stop. Oh, I don't have a psychology degree and don't want one. But I have a doctorate in surviving the worst that benzos dish out. It does get better.

love to all,

Rosemarie