As a child, I would get overwhelmed when it seemed that too much was “coming at me at once”. I became “inconsolable”; I couldn’t be reached until I was ready, which didn’t fit their time schedules. I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder but instead of medicine, which was standard, my mother opted for an experimental (at the time) biofeedback and guided meditation by a psychiatrist who was doing studies. The biofeedback technique was known as QR or “Quieting Reflex”.
I leaned to “breathe through my feet”, control a computer with my feelings and this was in the early 1980s. What this did was give me a sense of “I can do something about this” when I felt overwhelmed. For years, it was cigarette smoking, which was an excuse to leave stressful situations, or trips to the bathroom. Other times it was finding something to hyper-focus on and give all of my attention to and creating a wall around everything else. Mostly, scanning my body state, giving names to sensations, self-talk to bring myself down before anxiety rises up, glancing off into the distance for a moment to ‘snap back’ into the present; little mini meditations of a few seconds; all of these little tricks are various coping mechanisms for managing a lifetime of some internal control mechanisms that are always a little topsy-turvy.
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