Being a human, and dealing with emotions in WD

 

Emotions are a normal part of the human experience. Mechanisms built into us, perfectly tuned, a design feature, not a fault. Whilst some emotions can be distressing such as anxiety and depression, others can offer relief like crying or positive feelings, such as joy and laughter. Emotions are not a sign of a human being broken, as is so often portrayed, often they are a sign or signal to us that something is wrong or danger is lurking. Trauma, diet, stress, difficult times at work or in our personal lives’, can all be causes of these emotions. Learning to address the root cause of the problem is the way to deal with these feelings, rather than seek to numb ourselves with drugs that often lead to harm. Good or bad, emotions are part of the human experience, we should learn to embrace them rather than fear them, or even worse, start to consider them as signs of a damaged/broken person.

 

Neuro-Emotions

In WD or when suffering harm/injury from a psychoactive drug such as an antidepressant or benzodiazepine, we can feel all kinds of heightened emotions. Some of the most common WD symptoms are anxiety, depression, panic, DPDR (Depersonalisation/Derealisation), fear/terror, suicidal ideation & looping thoughts/thought rumination, just to name a few.

 

Often these feelings will seem very extreme and overwhelming, can be described as chemical or chemically induced. They will come out of seemingly nowhere, experienced at levels that seem as though the volume has been turned up to 11! They will have no apparent explanation for them, not correlate to life events, as emotions would previously be experienced before. They can come out of the blue, often in waves between periods of calm, can be ever changing and evolving and leave a person feeling scared, bewildered and confused! This is understandable, it is a very distressing experience.

 

Often when these emotions show up family, friends and, more concerningly perhaps, the medical profession interpret them as a worsening of a ‘mental health’ condition and suggest additional drugs or dose changes to help resolve them. Very often this will lead to further problems.

 

Neuro-emotions are not actual emotions. Actual emotions are the bodies response to an alert, like the fire alarm. When a fire is detected in a building through a series of sensors, wired up to a fire alarm unit, the system will trigger a command and set the siren off to alert of the problem and imminent danger. Neuro-emotions are the alarm sounding without a cause, a fault in the wiring, a glitch in the software. There is nothing you can do stop them from happening in the moment, they are not within your control as there is no cause in the first place to address, other than WD/Injury, which time will fix. They are simply a symptom of a dysregulated/injured nervous system.

 

Neuro-emotions can present in many ways, sometimes with many feelings coming at once. They could be described as a bag of liquorice all sorts, each one very distinct and different to the next, you never know which one will be pulled out of the bag next!

 

Relapse or WD/Injury

It can be very confusing for those suffering and everyone around them to understand, if what they are experiencing are neuro-emotions or just a reoccurrence and worsening of their ‘original condition’. The first way to tell is the timing. If you have just made a cut, stopped your drug abruptly or adding in a new drug, then there is a good chance that this extreme change in emotional response is down to your nervous system being dysregulated and you haven’t suddenly gotten a whole more anxious or ‘sick’ out of the blue! Occam's razor suggests the simplest explanation is the right one!

 

We often experience WD though the lens of our own minds, it can be confusing sometimes whether what we are experiencing is our own emotions or that of a dysregulated nervous system.

Looping thoughts/thought rumination is a good example of this. We can find our minds suddenly uncontrollably latching on to thoughts, now as our thoughts and experiences are still our own, they can feel very familiar. The brain starts to look for things to process, it goes rummaging through the memory banks looking for things to fixate on.

 

I myself noticed this early on in WD, I found myself thinking obsessively over a problem that I had not thought about for 20 years! I just couldn’t let it go! Why would it be, after all this time, I would think of this event out of blue in such an obsessive way! I would then find my mind would think of just about anything, sometimes not negative things just, well anything that had happened in the past, like a tour of my life, similar to a very drawn-out version of your ‘life flashing before your eyes’.

 

I also found these emotions would come out of the blue but sometimes they would be triggered by an event in the day such as eating. I would be absolutely fine, having a walk with my family, we would stop for lunch then 15 minutes later I would be overcome with the most intense, heavy fog/mood, even today I cannot explain it or liken it to anything I have experienced in life before, it would sit with me for hours after. All I could do was distract myself from it, not give it too much attention and eventually it would pass. It is not surprising that eating might trigger something when we know how linked our gut and brain are!

 

I had another occasion where I received a delivery which took some time to unload, the conversation with the driver was pretty positive but intense and, once he had left, I came over with this incredible sense of anxiety, similar to what I would experience before WD but turned up to 11, it wouldn’t leave even once he had. It sat with me the rest of the afternoon. This isn’t a normal response to a life event. It may have been in the past I would feel a little anxious in a moment like this, but I never responded in such an extreme way.

 

Other times I would be overcome, out of the blue, with a deep depression for a day or two, then it would lift. Life was good, I had no previous experience of depression, so this was very obviously just WD. During my first 8 months of WD I experienced a whole list of neuro-emotions, all of them very extreme, often unrelated to life around me and none of them like I had ever experienced before.

 

So, it is clear that, it can be confusing what is ‘you’ and what is WD/injury. However, as with the looping thoughts/thought rumination symptom, we can experience all neuro-emotions through the lens of our own mind. This can make them feel very real!

 

Second fear and coping with Neuro-Emotions

Firstly, we must learn to accept the neuro-emotions, not fight them, understand they are WD/injury and not something we created. We must accept, float, distract, not resist and not give too much attention to them. They are simply there; they are not dangerous and there is nothing we have done to cause them.

 

Next, as with all WD symptoms, we should avoid adding any secondary fear to the situation. We are not immune in WD to having our own emotional response to a situation and trying to react or control neuro-emotions just amplifies them and makes them worse.

 

There are ways to help minimise the frequency or severity of neuro-emotions.

 

- Avoiding stress and stressful situations/people

- Cut the intake of substances such as Caffeine, Sugar, Alcohol. All good advice in life, but particularly important in WD/Injury.

- In WD we can become histamine intolerant so low histamine diets can help reduce anxiety.

- Exercise can help burn off anxiety, just a gentle walk can help a lot.

- Distraction is key in getting through the difficult days. Finding tasks and a routine that keeps the nervous system calm and helps the time pass.

- Cold showers, Epsom salt baths, meditation, yoga and breathing exercises, all can help regulate the CNS.

Thank you so much for opening a topic on neuroemotions @Chippy 🙏

This indeed can be very confusing and cause people to start diagnosing themselves or being diagnosed with all kinds of "disorders" in which is actually an integral part of the wd process.

Edited April 25Apr 25 by Fullhealing

Good topic. Ruminating thoughts are brutal but WD ones are one that don't pertain to current life situations? Like for example, a break up with an ex that happened 2 months ago, that you were totally content with, popped back up in your mind and it's all that can be thought about it borderline obsession. To the point you feel like you are going nuts from akathisia. Would that be considered a neuro-emotion?

4 hours ago, Kahran said:

Would that be considered a neuro-emotion?

Potentially yes. There are no hard and fast rules here. The main thing is think about how you would deal/experience your thoughts before wd and what’s different now. We have to take responsibility not for the emotion itself but for how we respond to it. If we accept what it is, don’t resist it, or be angry at ourselves, just float, we stop adding to it, that’s the most important thing.

21 hours ago, Chippy said:

Being a human, and dealing with emotions in WD

 

Emotions are a normal part of the human experience. Mechanisms built into us, perfectly tuned, a design feature, not a fault. Whilst some emotions can be distressing such as anxiety and depression, others can offer relief like crying or positive feelings, such as joy and laughter. Emotions are not a sign of a human being broken, as is so often portrayed, often they are a sign or signal to us that something is wrong or danger is lurking. Trauma, diet, stress, difficult times at work or in our personal lives’, can all be causes of these emotions. Learning to address the root cause of the problem is the way to deal with these feelings, rather than seek to numb ourselves with drugs that often lead to harm. Good or bad, emotions are part of the human experience, we should learn to embrace them rather than fear them, or even worse, start to consider them as signs of a damaged/broken person.

 

Neuro-Emotions

In WD or when suffering harm/injury from a psychoactive drug such as an antidepressant or benzodiazepine, we can feel all kinds of heightened emotions. Some of the most common WD symptoms are anxiety, depression, panic, DPDR (Depersonalisation/Derealisation), fear/terror, suicidal ideation & looping thoughts/thought rumination, just to name a few.

 

Often these feelings will seem very extreme and overwhelming, can be described as chemical or chemically induced. They will come out of seemingly nowhere, experienced at levels that seem as though the volume has been turned up to 11! They will have no apparent explanation for them, not correlate to life events, as emotions would previously be experienced before. They can come out of the blue, often in waves between periods of calm, can be ever changing and evolving and leave a person feeling scared, bewildered and confused! This is understandable, it is a very distressing experience.

 

Often when these emotions show up family, friends and, more concerningly perhaps, the medical profession interpret them as a worsening of a ‘mental health’ condition and suggest additional drugs or dose changes to help resolve them. Very often this will lead to further problems.

 

Neuro-emotions are not actual emotions. Actual emotions are the bodies response to an alert, like the fire alarm. When a fire is detected in a building through a series of sensors, wired up to a fire alarm unit, the system will trigger a command and set the siren off to alert of the problem and imminent danger. Neuro-emotions are the alarm sounding without a cause, a fault in the wiring, a glitch in the software. There is nothing you can do stop them from happening in the moment, they are not within your control as there is no cause in the first place to address, other than WD/Injury, which time will fix. They are simply a symptom of a dysregulated/injured nervous system.

 

Neuro-emotions can present in many ways, sometimes with many feelings coming at once. They could be described as a bag of liquorice all sorts, each one very distinct and different to the next, you never know which one will be pulled out of the bag next!

 

Relapse or WD/Injury

It can be very confusing for those suffering and everyone around them to understand, if what they are experiencing are neuro-emotions or just a reoccurrence and worsening of their ‘original condition’. The first way to tell is the timing. If you have just made a cut, stopped your drug abruptly or adding in a new drug, then there is a good chance that this extreme change in emotional response is down to your nervous system being dysregulated and you haven’t suddenly gotten a whole more anxious or ‘sick’ out of the blue! Occam's razor suggests the simplest explanation is the right one!

 

We often experience WD though the lens of our own minds, it can be confusing sometimes whether what we are experiencing is our own emotions or that of a dysregulated nervous system.

Looping thoughts/thought rumination is a good example of this. We can find our minds suddenly uncontrollably latching on to thoughts, now as our thoughts and experiences are still our own, they can feel very familiar. The brain starts to look for things to process, it goes rummaging through the memory banks looking for things to fixate on.

 

I myself noticed this early on in WD, I found myself thinking obsessively over a problem that I had not thought about for 20 years! I just couldn’t let it go! Why would it be, after all this time, I would think of this event out of blue in such an obsessive way! I would then find my mind would think of just about anything, sometimes not negative things just, well anything that had happened in the past, like a tour of my life, similar to a very drawn-out version of your ‘life flashing before your eyes’.

 

I also found these emotions would come out of the blue but sometimes they would be triggered by an event in the day such as eating. I would be absolutely fine, having a walk with my family, we would stop for lunch then 15 minutes later I would be overcome with the most intense, heavy fog/mood, even today I cannot explain it or liken it to anything I have experienced in life before, it would sit with me for hours after. All I could do was distract myself from it, not give it too much attention and eventually it would pass. It is not surprising that eating might trigger something when we know how linked our gut and brain are!

 

I had another occasion where I received a delivery which took some time to unload, the conversation with the driver was pretty positive but intense and, once he had left, I came over with this incredible sense of anxiety, similar to what I would experience before WD but turned up to 11, it wouldn’t leave even once he had. It sat with me the rest of the afternoon. This isn’t a normal response to a life event. It may have been in the past I would feel a little anxious in a moment like this, but I never responded in such an extreme way.

 

Other times I would be overcome, out of the blue, with a deep depression for a day or two, then it would lift. Life was good, I had no previous experience of depression, so this was very obviously just WD. During my first 8 months of WD I experienced a whole list of neuro-emotions, all of them very extreme, often unrelated to life around me and none of them like I had ever experienced before.

 

So, it is clear that, it can be confusing what is ‘you’ and what is WD/injury. However, as with the looping thoughts/thought rumination symptom, we can experience all neuro-emotions through the lens of our own mind. This can make them feel very real!

 

Second fear and coping with Neuro-Emotions

Firstly, we must learn to accept the neuro-emotions, not fight them, understand they are WD/injury and not something we created. We must accept, float, distract, not resist and not give too much attention to them. They are simply there; they are not dangerous and there is nothing we have done to cause them.

 

Next, as with all WD symptoms, we should avoid adding any secondary fear to the situation. We are not immune in WD to having our own emotional response to a situation and trying to react or control neuro-emotions just amplifies them and makes them worse.

 

There are ways to help minimise the frequency or severity of neuro-emotions.

 

- Avoiding stress and stressful situations/people

- Cut the intake of substances such as Caffeine, Sugar, Alcohol. All good advice in life, but particularly important in WD/Injury.

- In WD we can become histamine intolerant so low histamine diets can help reduce anxiety.

- Exercise can help burn off anxiety, just a gentle walk can help a lot.

- Distraction is key in getting through the difficult days. Finding tasks and a routine that keeps the nervous system calm and helps the time pass.

- Cold showers, Epsom salt baths, meditation, yoga and breathing exercises, all can help regulate the CNS.

I Love this @Chippy thanks for sharing the link with me . I think I may need to

Copy and paste it to my forehead to remind myself that I'm not going crazy when I feel all these emotions 😀

4 hours ago, cheeky said:

Copy and paste it to my forehead

What ever works @cheeky 😁

But honestly, my pleasure, glad it helps to read.

@Chippy the analogy to a faulty alarm is a great one. I have a car on my street whose alarm goes on randomly with no reason. Just like neuroemotions. Does it react to a bird flying by? Or nothing? Both are possibilities :)

.

5 hours ago, Onmyway said:

@Chippy the analogy to a faulty alarm is a great one. I have a car on my street whose alarm goes on randomly with no reason. Just like neuroemotions. Does it react to a bird flying by? Or nothing? Both are possibilities :)

.

@Onmyway the car alarm works too! Although that would be so frustrating in real life, especially with WD sleep!

Chippy this is so helpful and basically me right now in this wave. Hoping it resolves quickly and isn’t a long one.

Thankyou for your kind words

Just now, Its-me-Rosie said:

Chippy this is so helpful and basically me right now in this wave. Hoping it resolves quickly and isn’t a long one.

Thankyou for your kind words

Pleasure Rosie, hope it helps. I think people get confused about emotions in WD. Im hoping this post helps people make sense of it and starts a good conversation about it all. xxx

I don’t get the concept of neuro emotions. Having C-PTSD means I can get triggered by anything, even if I’m not consciously aware of the source. I’m noticing my emotions a lot more, I think I used to suppress them before I started tapering. Isn’t dealing with emotions the same regardless? - acknowledge, allow and decide whether the act on the emotion. The numbing effect of the psych meds combined with trauma has left me feeling like an emotional cripple. I know I feel emotions, but have difficulty naming or describing them let alone processing them.

8 hours ago, Catbird said:

I don’t get the concept of neuro emotions. Having C-PTSD means I can get triggered by anything, even if I’m not consciously aware of the source. I’m noticing my emotions a lot more, I think I used to suppress them before I started tapering. Isn’t dealing with emotions the same regardless? - acknowledge, allow and decide whether the act on the emotion. The numbing effect of the psych meds combined with trauma has left me feeling like an emotional cripple. I know I feel emotions, but have difficulty naming or describing them let alone processing them.

Neuro Emotions are very powerful. How we experience them can vary from person to person. For me they had no relationship to how I was feeling. They were simply like the brain switched them on using an override switch, to full power completely out of the blue. They would often go as quickly.

The hardest thing about them for those who have been on these drugs for many years, is that they can feel kinda real as we can experience them through the eyes of our own mind. For example I had looping thoughts (common WD symptom) and still do sometimes, it's not me doing it, but the looping is about things that have happened in the day, or things that have happened in the past, so it feels like it is me, except it is not. Often my looping is not negative, and all of it is out of Character for me, not something I would have done before WD. I know this as I have not been on the drugs for years so it is easy for me to understand the difference between the real me and the injured me.

Recognising them as chemically induded is really important imo. How you deal with them is the same as any other WD symptom, accept, float, don't add second fear.

Personally I suspect alot of what you are going through are actually neuro emotions, but they feel so real as your past experiences feed into the chemical soup. Obviously this is for you to decide, just my thoughts.

@Chippy It's the chemical aspect I don't relate to. I'm uncovering lots of emotions as I taper. I suppressed a lot about my childhood and these are surfacing. I see them as genuine emotions.

12 minutes ago, Catbird said:

@Chippy It's the chemical aspect I don't relate to. I'm uncovering lots of emotions as I taper. I suppressed a lot about my childhood and these are surfacing. I see them as genuine emotions.

That’s fair enough. It could be as you taper the emotions are starting to come back as you said. Having said this it’s also possible that you have built quite a bit of tolerance to the drug and so it’s wasn’t providing the numbing you thought it was. Perhaps the symptoms you are experiencing as you taper are wd symptoms, just they feel quite real. Maybe that is in part why things are tough for you now as you’ve perhaps been thinking these emotions are you when they are wd symptoms, and tapering through them without realizing. I mean maybe not. It’s down to you decide as I said. But it’s very common for people to have these kind of neuro emotions in wd/tapering. I think it would be very unusual if yours were not at least in part due to this.

I can relate to this. When my WD started I went back to all my traumas and started making them bigger that I ever did and the next day I stopped thinking about it. One day I wake up thinking I’m lost and I had a terrible life and the next day I am ok. I now understand how it works but when it hits you it feels like the reality.

Unfortunately they come when I have a wave with my depression

5 minutes ago, Saar8srl said:

but when it hits you it feels like the reality.

I know, this is so cruel! Leads to Gas Lighting.