The beast with many heads

I described anxiety before as a many-headed beast.  For a long time I was virtually free of symptoms, but then they came back in a totally unexpected way.

I've always been someone who was confident in situations that made other people nervous - it's just the way I am.  I've been doing public speaking since I was 11; I always rather enjoyed things like exams and interviews; I'm not intimidated by walking into a room full of people I don't know.  But in my final year of ministerial formation, when I was going through the unsettling process whereby ministers are matched with churches, I started to find that things which had been easy for me before began to be very, very difficult.

I remember sitting in a Christmas service at my sending church in Chelmsford waiting to do a Bible reading.  This was a church full of people who knew and loved me, and I'd been asked to do one simple reading in a Christmas service - not a tall order for a trainee minister.  But I was freaking out.  I turned to my husband and asked him in a whisper whether he would do the reading if I had to run out. For the next few months, whenever I had to preach or lead a service, I suffered from anxiety attacks.  Not panic attacks exactly - I've had friends describe them to me and they sound horrendous - but acute episodes of being scared for no reason, accompanied by physical symptoms of fear.  Going for interviews with churches during that time was torture.  Even interviewing people one to one for my dissertation research was difficult.  

I went to my GP, and she was sympathetic.  She prescribed beta-blockers, which (if I understood her correctly), lower your heart rate and thus kid your body into thinking you're not scared.  They don't actually treat the anxiety itself, but they sort of interrupt the panic cycle.  Unfortunately, they didn't work.  Then I was referred to the IAPT team - Improving Access to Psychological Therapies.  I was given a series of telephone appointments with someone who tried to talk me through techniques for controlling anxiety over the phone.  As far as I could tell, this was a way of farming off the mild cases to someone who was cheaper than a psychiatrist.  Again, despite the fact that my symptoms were distressing and were interfering with my ability to do the job I was training for, I was not considered a serious case.  I dread to think what agonies people with moderate to severe anxiety must go through.  Telephone advice was not for me, and I stopped it after two sessions.  I decided to control my symptoms with over the counter medication and to wait for my life to settle down (by then I knew I was coming to Leigh on Sea).  I suspected, correctly as it turned out, that once life got back on an even keel my symptoms would disappear.  They did - but not permanently, it turns out.  A couple of months ago the symptoms returned, and I have had to accept that anxiety is something that once more I will have to live with.

I am blessed - or perhaps cursed - with the fact that my anxiety doesn't really show on the outside.  I tend to come across as a confident person, and people don't know I'm feeling anxious unless I tell them.  I read a brilliant book last year about leadership which argued that we all have a 'frontstage' and a 'backstage'.  The frontstage is the performance we show the world; the backstage is what only those closest to us see.  The book argued that, in order to be healthy, we need to allow some of our backstage vulnerability to show on the frontstage.  I have come to wonder whether, in order to beat my own particular brand of anxiety, I need to let other people see it.