Foggy pots

 

I frequently regret that I don’t read enough in psychology, therapy and psychosomatic process. But then I realize, based on what I do read, that I can conceive similarly vaporous and largely non-practical theories in my own head. One thing is for sure: Pile several hundred acade­mia.edu psych articles on top of one another and the result will be zero ounces of meat and a bunch of statistics of utter uselessness.

A client came in with the problem of “brain fog.” As that’s one of those conditions that can seem to have physical causes but which remains mostly in the guess zone, her doctors ushered her off to coun­seling. Brain fog manifests as “memory problems, lack of mental clarity, poor concentra­tion, inability to focus.”* Or, “difficulty processing infor­ma­tion, trouble problem-solving, having a hard time calculating, diminished visual and spatial skills, trouble finding words.** Causes are assumed to include: stress, anxiety, depres­sion; lack of sleep, menopause or other hormone changes, medications, under­active thyroid, low vitamin B12, chronic fatigue syndrome, fibro­myalgia.*** Or, “you are eating the wrong foods,” “toxins in your home,” “underlying health conditions.”**** Or lupus or pregnancy. Or possibly when the moon is in the Seventh House and Jupiter aligns with Mars, especially on those fractious days when Tuesday lands on Thursday.

She had it. A sign of the condition’s obscurity is evident in two of the listed causes: fibro­myalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome. These two are generally accepted to be psycho­somatic ailments. So an analogy to these causal attributions would be to say that anxiety is caused by depression, depression by low self-esteem, and low self-esteem by anxiety.

My theory, possibly as valid as any you’d pay for, was that this forty-five-year-old woman was so lifelong emotionally repressed that the chemistry of her powerful buried feelings was fogging her brain. A little extra imagination could bolster the theory, as a new, potentially calamitous problem emerged after seven weeks of sessions. She developed POTS (Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syn­drome). Her blood would “sink to my feet” while standing, sitting, walking, and she would faint or have to lie down immediately. Blood pressure would rise then fall, fall then rise, without known cause. Here is the Cleveland Clinic’s list of related symptoms:

High/low blood pressure. High/low heart rate; racing heart rate. Chest pain. Dizziness/lightheadedness, especially in standing up, prolonged standing in one position, or long walks. Fainting or near-fainting. Exhaustion/fatigue. Abdominal pain and bloating, nausea. Temperature deregulation (hot or cold). Nervous, jittery feeling. Forgetfulness and trouble focusing (brain fog). Blurred vision. Headaches and body pain/aches (may feel flu-like); neck pain. Insomnia and frequent awakenings from sleep, chest pain and racing heart rate during sleep, excessive sweating. Shakiness/tremors especially with adrenaline surges. Discoloration of feet and hands. Exercise intolerance. Excessive or lack of sweating. Diarrhea and/or constipation.*****

The adjunct theory: My client qualified for the “alexithymia” construct and for dysthymic depression – the immutable “blahs.” She had reportedly sauntered by terrible traumas in her childhood: mother’s abandonment and callous return, sexual abuse, seeing pets sliced up, one boyfriend of mother’s after another “trying” to be sexual with her. No emotion then, as she recalls, and none now. Then therapy came along and pointed her to feel into her true self, her child. Arthur Janov described how the various physiological measurements of clients ascending to a “primal” (the full experience and discharge of pent-up childhood pain) would become life-threat­ening dangerously high as the feeling approached consciousness, but then would subside to orig­inal or even lower – healthier – levels after the full expression (possibly a “primal scream”) had occurred. I was not fully qualified to bring my client to primal depths, nor would she have been able to reach such a blind­ing epiphany without a prior massive attitude adjustment (nobody just wanders into Primal Therapy). With a little therapy the door had cracked open, she was a little closer to her interred continent of trauma. And her whole life of safe repression and alexithymia and dysthymia required that she press that crack as closed as possible.

Wouldn’t it make sense that the push and pull of cataclysmic feeling and its denial would mani­fest in some electric, autonomic storms?******

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* https://www.healthline.com/health/brain-fog.

** https://www.amenclinics.com/blog/when-does-brain-fog-become-a-concern/.

*** https://www.medicinenet.com/brain_fog/article.htm.

**** https://synergyhealthassociates.com/blog/eliminate-brain-fog/.

***** https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/16560-postural-orthostatic-tachycardia-syndrome-pots.

****** “The female to male ratio is 5:1.” https://rarediseases.info.nih.gov/diseases/9597/postural-orthostatic-tachycardia-syndrome.