The Scars of a Child · 11:31pm Oct 23rd, 2016
I said nothing since the weekend half because I've been a bit ill and half because I really haven't been able to work out what it was I wanted to say. I knew within the first ten minutes of this week's treatment what was so profound about it, but if it was easy to encapsulate such profound sentiments in words, people would be doing it regularly. They are not, much to the chagrin of many. Luckily, I have experience with words, philosophical thinking, and evolutionary psychology, but even so, I will not pretend for one moment that this is more than an educated guess. Nevertheless...
It seems natural that I would ponder at some length the long-term implications of this course of treatment. In my position, who wouldn't? Once the first ketamine infusion opened my eyes to an entirely different way of thinking and being, the next point of concern was to make the most of it, which is a hard thing to do without a clear idea of what that would look like. It is equally natural for me, specifically, to collate as much empirical data as possible while it was available as a path to useful knowledge. It never really occurred to me that I had already collected most of the data I would need, years before even knowing how and when it might be useful to me. Such is the advantage to never being happy just knowing what works and taking things apart until I know why.
To the best of my knowledge, I have healed a scar – or perhaps I should say I healed a wound and gained a scar. I have no illusions of erasing the damage completely, hence the scar, but something changed in the most profound way possible.
For all too brief a time, I was still. In those precious moments, a lot of things I'd always thought were probably true became unquestionably obvious. I have always been afraid of being still because I have always been afraid of giving up control. To still the mind is to allow it to drift wherever it wanted, and there were corners of my mind too tumultuous to bear willingly: the wounds of a child, probably memorised before language had even manifested. Although I imagine everyone has such scars, I have always known beyond question that one particular scar existed that affected me in a catastrophic way, and I do not choose that word as hyperbole. There are certain levels of thinking that just aren't plausible (though not strictly impossible) while caught in the gravity well of such a scar. What I have learned in the last two weeks about confidence, motivation, anxiety, and fear are based in seeing how they are perverted by one overwhelming force that bends everything within its reach.
Last week I said that I mind had been truly empty for the first time in memory, but after a while I worked out that that wasn't entirely true. More accurately, my thinking was so comparatively easy to manage that it seemed like my mind was devoid of thought, like pouring a small amount of water into a vessel that can drain three times as much with ease. I could not get a grasp of the mechanics of it until that capacity waned, and that's where the learning happened.
Okay, enough with the vague stuff. Let me get into the details.
During last week, I decided that I had to focus on relaxing into the mind-altering effects of my next treatment session. I've always been a bit of a control freak, and I've always known that the closer I got to calming my mind, the more something that seemed impossibly deep would churn out a tsunami of pain and misery. Just one word spoken in the right context could, and often did, bring me to tears. What made it interesting is that it didn't necessarily make me feel upset – mostly it was more like going through the mechanics of it. So my panic at losing my clarity of perception is perfectly fitting, and my desire to challenge it equally so.
All of five minutes into Monday's infusion, my vision started to swim a little (like the early stages of intoxication) and I had falling sensation. Having thought about things well in advance, I made the connection almost instantly: falling dreams are anxiety dreams. The falling sensation was my anxiety kicking off because I knew what came later. But falling isn't really an issue when there is no ground to hit, so I embraced the feeling wholly and waited to see where it went. Where it went was away. The falling slowed and stopped and I felt the sense of joy I had been feeling a week previously. Considering that the infusion was barely underway, this seemed like a psychological interaction, not a chemical one. I kept my eyes closed and let myself get swept away in the feeling, aware that I was grinning like a loon on the outside. Twice more (that I remember), my anxiety spiked and I embraced the falling sensation until calm again. Both times, the sensation of warmth and joy vanished more-or-less instantly at onsent, then came back powerfully in its wake.
It seemed very much apparent that anxiety and joy are functionally, if not actually, mutually exclusive. That may seem obvious on the surface, but given my current understanding of exactly how much anxiety and stress I have been holding for years without ever being able to perceive, this is, in fact, a major perspective shift.
It wasn't just that I wasn't experiencing anxiety at the time, it was that I was okay with anxiety being there, so it evaporated. And after all that, I hit a space that a friend of mind tells me that users call 'equilibrium': the point at which everything zeros out. No particular thoughts or feelings. Even the flashing of synapses behind closed eyes dulled to a blackness almost indistinguishable from actual oblivion.
And that was fine. The previous week, I had been terrified. Such a thing seemed inconceivable until it happened.
I presume that how it felt was actually a construct of my conscious mind, since it seems to specific and in compliance with exactly what I would want to be happening, but it is the only way I can describe it, so take it as you will: it felt like my conscious and subconscious minds peeled back carefully, straightened themselves out, them meshed back together in a more orderly fashion. I recovered from the infusion in half the time of the previous week, and while I didn't feel the distinct, if subtle, sense of joy that I did previously, I did feel incredibly chilled out. If it wasn't for the fact that the feeling has stayed with me since, I would have assumed I was still mildly anaesthetised.
But I wasn't, and I'm not. Metaphor or not, something changed. An open wound was closed. Now, I can think of that place where the wound was, and I can feel the scar. I can cry and feel joy at the same time because of it because the anxiety is gone. I could tell you that it was because I was stranded in an incubator for a week or so after being born jaundiced, and it makes for a nice story that fits the facts, but I'll never know. And even if that's true, there is still a lifetime of secondary trauma to address and correct for.
The only thing I am absolutely certain of is that this one is for keeps. Yet, I didn't really feel much benefit from the physiological side of the treatment. On Tuesday, I noticed I had quite the sore throat. Turned out these things were not unrelated.
I have this knack for experiencing illness one symptom at a time. I can't imagine how or why this is the case, it just generally is. So having picked up the lurg that was going around, I was experiencing a deficit of cognitive capability. By Thursday, my head felt like it was stuffed full of wool and I could hardly think. At that point, I realised why I had always shrugged my way through colds and such with little more than mild disinterest: I'd never had the full capability of my brain to actually lose. What had always been a mild loss of clarity and cognitive power was suddenly more like trying to juggle underwater. Perspective is, after all, everything. Only yesterday morning did I find the fog cleared and I re-experienced the kind of boundless confidence that I recalled from the week before.
Which is odd, being as I'm pretty sure the chemical effect of the treatment already wore off. the way I can tell is that my unending hunger springs back up in its wake. Last week that was Wednesday and this week it was Thursday/Friday. About twice the duration seems to fit what I'd been told to expect. And I can't summon that feeling of joy as easily as I can when I'm under the full effect.
As far as I can see, that's kind of a good thing. The more it is about perspective, the more control I can exert over it and the more naturally it will come with a reduction in anxiety.
I have a good deal more to say about what I have learned regards the kinds of anxiety and behaviour that the wound was provoking, but I need to sleep before tomorrow's trip up to Oxford for my final session. For now, all seems as good as it could possibly be hoped for.
-M
It's great to hear the treatment has such lasting effects, along with the fundamental POV shifts. Thanks again for taking your time to write this down!
4269117 Ditto
4271750 Pry away, I love talking about it, to be honest :)
I've been doing psychodynamic counselling since 2007, and beyond that I have tried/learned many ideas, systems, groups, and read a great deal about a broad variety of topics. Child development and attachment theory are my favourite topics, but I have enjoyed taking a philosophical view to just about anything, especially all the stuff I've dismissed as pseudoscience – that stuff always has useful information that I have to dig out without assistance from the source material.