Posted by zeugma on December 14, 2003, at 20:39:35
In reply to Re: people with SA have trouble with relationships?, posted by linkadge on December 14, 2003, at 20:09:48
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> People who are socially anxious tend to have imballences in gaba transmission. That is why Nardil seems to be an amazing drug for them, because it increases gaba as well as other things. On the other hand people who are more
> prone to psychic anxiety, overwhealmed with thoughts of disease and death tend to have primarily norepinephrine and serotonin imballences. (of course there is some overlap)
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> This could be why beer does nothing for me. Socially, I am more outgoing off beer. Beer depresses my mood and tends to worsen my thoughs about death.
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> Good Luck
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> Linkadge
>I've always had alcohol-responsive social anxiety. The problem i always had with alcohol, besides its devastating side effects, was its treacherously short duration of action: I would be drunk, happy, and interacting with others unself-consciously, only to become aware that the effect was fading, and the anxieties were returning, as the interactions went on. I literally would have to drink to the point of falling down in order to maintain the freedom from self-consciousness that alcohol offered me. Needless to say lying on the floor, or on the sidewalk, usually brought any social interaction to an embarrassing and premature end :)
I am convinced that I have serious GABA problems. But KLONOPIN has been remarkable. People's faces actually look less threatening to me, and so saying hello to someone in the elevator isn't the emotionally draining experience it always was in the past, where I had to practically scream at myself that nothing terrible had happened. During CBT I learned a great deal about how to analyze an interaction into its component parts, and the dogma of CBT is that you have a certain expectation, say, that things will turn out badly, and then you interact in a way that makes this a self-fulfilling prophecy. I noticed however that my discomfort with interactions had NO relation to whether they turned out well or badly. I still felt that people were suffering my presence even when their words or actions indicated otherwise, and until i started klonopin I had no idea why this was.
Now i can look at people's faces and not freak out. Even my own reflection in the mirror causes less distress. I remember being obsessed with the idea that I was ugly when a child, and i remember my first therapist (at age twelve)asking me why i thought this, and I had no answer. It makes sense now!
As I've said elsewhere, my pdoc does not like this med, and and I literally had to exhaust every other option in order to get him to let me try it. He was convinced that my problems with anxiety were 'psychological', as he put it, and he thought CBT was the appropriate treatment for me. No doubt my therapist when i was a child believed i just had 'psychological' problems: i.e. I was 'poorly adjusted' or something. As for myself;
I am glad I dumped my CBT therapist;
I know I have had a GABA system dysfunction since early childhood at the latest.
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poster:zeugma
thread:289026
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20031213/msgs/289837.html