frankiesmum
12-01-10, 08:38
Can I firstly start by saying that I don't expect many people to read my story - its too long. I apologise in advance! I just really needed a reason to write it down and tell people.
Where do I start? I have suffered with this problem for what seems like all my life but in fact it isn't because there surely was a time when I was to innocent to have thought so deeply about things. I too have a fear of death that has impacted hugely on my ability to live life.
My first memory of feeling this way was when I was 11, my great grandmother died around that time (so I am sure that must have been what triggered it) and I suddenly had the realisation that one day everybody would die. It terrified me. The thought of my parents dying especially my mother gave me the feeling of fear beyond that I have ever experience from anything else in my life and then the thought of myself dying was equally as bad. The fear of their being nothing. Of me being alone. It felt like a nightmare that would not go away which consumed my every thought for maybe weeks or months, I can't remember how long it was. I felt like I needed proof from someone that there was life after death and then this would take the fear away but nobody could give me proof only beliefs and that wasn't reassuring enough. The fear was so intense I can only describe it as almost paralysing. I remember at that time telling my dad that I was very frightened of dying. He answered "you are only young you don't need to think about that now". But then I worked out that even if I lived to my great grandmothers age (she lived 'til she was 100) then I was already through a tenth of my life already. This developed an obsession in my mind with pieces of time, if anyone would mention anything to do with time (they obviously did constantly) I would hear it in a different way now - in a terrified way. If somebody said "next year", "next week", "tomorrow" all concepts of time appeared to be a power which I couldn't control and were ultimately forcing me towards the death of those I loved and myself. I became frightened of time and not just death. Time would have been OK if it didn't lead me to death but it was going to. Even if I was going to live for a very long time I was definitely going to die. I felt like the only thing that would make me feel better was if somebody could tell me that life after death definitely existed or that time would stand still. Nothing else could possibly make me feel safe. Nothing human could make me feel safe because that would eventually change.
These episodes of constant terror have repeated themselves many many times in my life, particularly since my early 20s (I am now 33) and I have been so determined and desperate to get rid of this feeling that I have tried what seems like everything. I am not always like it, it seems to come and go. Not on a day to day basis but over a period my thought process is one which is obsesses with death and time (its exactly the same thought process as when I was 11) but then sometimes I can go for periods where I feel fine 100% of the time, I feel I am lucky that I have these periods. In these good periods which can last for about a year I can talk about life and time and death and although I can feel sad about some mentioning of death (as anyone would) I don't feel the terror that I feel when I am in my depressed state of mind. Normally my depressive periods are triggered by news of the death of someone or something linked to death (eg terminal illness).
When I was 20 I was in such a bad way with these thoughts after a friend of mine killed himself and it triggered me to be in a complete state. My sister took me to the doctors after I told her that I couldn't stop thinking about death and I was diagnosed with depression. It effected the results of the degree I was studying at the time, I lost a lot of weight and it almost cost me my relationship with my boyfriend. Thankfully it didn't though, my boyfriend stuck by me and is now my husband but this condition has caused us many problems throughout our relationship. I have tried to talk to my husband about it many times but he has seen how I become a different person during these periods and how he couldn't help me he is now terrified himself about me being depressed. So now I have learnt that the best way for me to deal with it is to not tell him when I am going through it and I have become very skilled at feeling terrified within but acting very normal to the outside world. Amazingly it is possible to convince even those closest to you that you are ok and be suffering such torment inside your own mind.
The first time I had the depressive episode in my adult life (when I was 20) I didn't take anti depressents but the second time and subseqently I always did. I found they helped but they definately did not stop it from returning. I have now been taking citalopram for about 5 years almost continuously.
Although the anti depressants helped, they didn't make the problem go away completely, just numb the fear a bit so I still wanted to try to go further than this. I wanted to learn to be at peace with the fact that people die! OK I know its never going to be something you feel happy about but most other people seem to be able to get on with their lives without feeling utterly terrified of the prospect. I read somebody on this forum saying something that rang so true to me. They said that they would walk around looking at people and thinking "arn't you terrified? We are all going to die!" During my depressed periods I would think exactly the same as this - how can people possibly act normal when they know what I know?!!!!
I tried to tell a few people about this because I was so desperate but everybody told me "don't think about it" which was impossible and from this point onwards my depression became a secret problem that I knew nobody was going to help me with apart from maybe professionals. The only person who I ever talk about it with now is my sister. She understands it very well as she suffers from it herself but her fears are different.
I received several different types of counselling, all of which were useless at helping me with this problem although they were sometimes helpful with increasing my self confidence and learning more about myself. I was paying for counselling privately most of the time and I have folked out a fortune over the past 12 years.
When I got married in 2001 I went through a bad period just before this. I can't remember what had triggered this particular episode, there have been so many but for sure it would have been finding out that someone I knew had died. I remember thinking that when I was going to take my vows I was going to have to say "til death do us part" and I had a real problem with this. If I was going to say "til death do us part" then that in death we did part. That made me feel so terrified and I hated it that it had to be that way.
In 2003 my grandfather died and the terror struck again. All of my family were going to visit him in the funeral parlor and asked me if I would like to go. I was horrified but decided that maybe I should go because when somebody has a fear they are always told to expose themselves to it. So I did, I visited my grandfathers body and the sight was not horrific at all. But it didn't help. I obsessed over the issue and was very depressed for several months. This time I took anti depressents again.
In 2006 my grandmother died and this time I was at her bedside when she actually died. Once again the sight was not horrific but I couldn't cope with the terror that struck me, I sunk into another deep depression. Everyone who was at my grandmothers bedside was grief struck and completely devasted but I don't think they were terrified like I was - that was my main emotion because it was so strong I was almost unable to feel the others.
This time my doctor suggested I saw a psychotherapist and received cognative behaviour therapy which again I paid for privately. It was expensive costing £60 per hour but I did feel like for the first time I started to learn more about my problems. I learnt that the problems had obviously started when I was a child and they were a childhood fear. When I am "out" of the depression I am a confident and happy woman who is independent, loves her family but doesn't live in fear everyday. When something triggers the episodes of depression then I sink back to my subconcious mind (from when I was a child) and I can't cope because as a child I couldn't cope.
This made perfect sense to me after many many sessions of this treatment I learnt much more about it and accepted it to be true. This perfectly explained two things a) when I am in this depressive state I feel like a frightened and terrified little girl and feel like I need my mum to tell me its gonna be ok and its just a bad dream - I am not gonna die eventually and neither is anybody else! and b) I feel like I cannot get my head around death. Its not just a fear but its a lack of ability to understand the concept of life and death and time. I feel like nothing makes sense anymore - everyone is walking around acting like things which are perfectly normal are fine but I can't get my head around it - it made sense that this was a child-like understanding.
I really thought after around 18 months of this therapy that I must be cured! I learnt so so much about my depression and went through a long period of wellness.
Then in 2007 when I was pregnant with our first child it struck again. At this time I was having a break from the citalopram due to being pregnant and I fell into a deep state as bad as any I had been in in the past. It was awful because, as with all my previous episodes, I lost my appeitie and was loosing weight, feeling faint due to not eating. I was absolutely devastaed too that after all the progress, I thought I had made with the Cognative behaviousal therapy I could go back to feeling like this. My concious mind took over to try to get help (as it usually does and I think I had definately learnt to recongnise it much more) and I contacted a psychiatrist (recommended by my phycologyst) who told me I should go back on the citalopram even during pregnancy and it would be ok.
The depression lifted after about 6 weeks and I was back to normal life, looking forward to becoming a mum.
Then disaster struck me. In June 2007 our baby died on the day she was born due to complications during the birth. It was a tragedy which hit me and my husband like a ton of bricks. We were devasted. However slowly slowly we began to accept the reality of the situation and deal with the grief and rebuild our lives which were left with a huge void in them.
During this time I was very low but I was definately not in my child-like depressed state! Amazing! I had had an utter tragedy hit my life which I was dealing with, with my adult mind. I was crying every day and feeling so so sad but I was not terrified! Why? It almost felt like I had confronted my ultimate fear - could there be anything worse than a baby dying on the day she was born? It almost felt like it helped me rationalise things. Here I was being frightened about how I will get older, with time and loose people I loved and also die but surely that is better than what I had seen with my poor daughter's fate? Poor darling had never been home from hospital and met her family.
As time went on I gradually learned to cope with the loss of my daughter, became pregnant 6 months later and now I have a gorgeous son who is 18 months old. He is just adorable, I can't even begin to describe the love that I have for him. We never ever forget our daughter and this is how we have dealt with the loss. It might sound mad but we mention her everyday. Me and my husband think of her as part of our family in everything we do. Of course we know she is not with us in the physical sense but we talk about her as an angel. She certainly lives on in our hearts. We also talk about her to our son (he is too young to understand at the moment) and tell him he has a big sister in heaven.
I struggle with the heaven thing and also the afterlife thing, because I am a very logical person and I find it very hard to believe in something that I don't have proof it exists. However my husband does believe. He guided me in my grief of our daughter - well to be fair we guided each other because I think that I was so strong and brave and very often I was his rock - but he guided me on how to believe in her existance. I go along with the believing she is still part of our family because like I say - she still defaintely exists in our hearts and minds but I struggle to believe that she exists somewhere in another dimension - and wish that I knew for sure that she did. How ever my husand is happy with his belief that she does. My husband is an extremely intelligent man with a job which is highly mathmatical, scientific and logical - so my theory of why I find it hard to believe in afterlife (because I have a very logical mind) is not the same for him.
After the loss of our daughter I received some psycotherapy. This time it was dealing with a specific issue but she identified very quickly that I had a huge fear of being alone. We moved on from the grief counselling eventually (when I was over the worst of the grief) and started to home in on my problems. She was a very good phycotherapyst and she came to the conclusion that my condition was one of a phobia of death. In all the time I had received counselling, phychotherapy etc nobody had ever called my condition a Phobia and I think she hit the nail on the head! I think my phobia then leads to depression and obbsessive behaviour but the start of it all is the phobia.
So great, I have a label for it now but is it going to make me get over the phobia? Well that her answer was possibly no. Not the answer I wanted to hear. She and the previous psycotherapyst said that it was important to recognise my symptoms as part of my fear and this helps me to deal with it.
So where am I now. Well I am not great at the moment, I have been going through several months of obsessing but I am much more able to deal with it than I have been previously. I am able to think - I am like this because I have a phobia and this is the child inside me who is thinking like this - not me! It doesn't make me feel 100% but I certainly can function ok. I also can push myself to get out of the house and try to fight the depression I can look after my little boy ok and although my mind wanders so much that it makes me very clumsy it is much easier to hide my dark thoughts from others. Unfortunately though, inwardly I can't just be happy with my beautiful life though because of my fears which is such a shame because when I am feeling well I feel so happy with what I have.
I want to end this by desribing myself a little bit more because now I have written this all down and read it back to myself I think that I sound like a complete nutcase. I want to tell you that although this problem takes over my life to a large extent - it is a secret problem. I have many friends who think I am a happy, optimistic , bubbly person who loves life and her family. I am very independent, now living in a different country to my mum and dad and my 2 sisters. Before my husbands job took us abroad I had a very good career. I did go through episodes where I found it very hard to carry out my job when my depression was bad but my employer never found out about it and I was able to keep it hidden. I never missed a days work due to my depression which was extremely hard on some days.
I often have people saying to me that they like me because I am such a positive person and I think to myself "if only you knew" but I cannot bring myself to confess to my fears, I don't know why but it is impossible for me to be openly so negative, dark and grusome! Sometimes I wonder if I am outwardly so positive to mask how I am really feeling inside. I am also so scared of hearing other people say that they fear death.
I never used forums before, until our daughter died and then I used them, and found them so helpful, to talk with other mums who had lost babies. It helped me immensely. I suddenly thought the other day about my last phycologst describing my condition as a phobia of death and thought I wonder if there are any websites for people with Phobias - after all the years of having this and all the money spent on therapy you would really think I would have done this before but I never had! Well I found the forum and the thread "Fear of death" was at the top of the list!! I thought my problem was one which was very rare - my therapyst never told me that it was a common problem. I started to read the threads and I couldn't believe it with many of you describing my fears exactly. It felt like an amazing relief - all this time and I have never discussed with anyone, other than a therapyst, how I feel.
I am so sorry that my post is so long. I realise that many of you will not have read it and I don't blame you. My purpose of writing it was for those who maybe did want to read parts of it and also I did it because it is the first time ever I have written down how I feel. My therapysts have suggested that I did this before but I couldn't bring myself to because I was too frightened to read back what I had written. When I saw that other people were the same as me I wanted to write everything down.
Right you will be pleased to know I have finished now!
Where do I start? I have suffered with this problem for what seems like all my life but in fact it isn't because there surely was a time when I was to innocent to have thought so deeply about things. I too have a fear of death that has impacted hugely on my ability to live life.
My first memory of feeling this way was when I was 11, my great grandmother died around that time (so I am sure that must have been what triggered it) and I suddenly had the realisation that one day everybody would die. It terrified me. The thought of my parents dying especially my mother gave me the feeling of fear beyond that I have ever experience from anything else in my life and then the thought of myself dying was equally as bad. The fear of their being nothing. Of me being alone. It felt like a nightmare that would not go away which consumed my every thought for maybe weeks or months, I can't remember how long it was. I felt like I needed proof from someone that there was life after death and then this would take the fear away but nobody could give me proof only beliefs and that wasn't reassuring enough. The fear was so intense I can only describe it as almost paralysing. I remember at that time telling my dad that I was very frightened of dying. He answered "you are only young you don't need to think about that now". But then I worked out that even if I lived to my great grandmothers age (she lived 'til she was 100) then I was already through a tenth of my life already. This developed an obsession in my mind with pieces of time, if anyone would mention anything to do with time (they obviously did constantly) I would hear it in a different way now - in a terrified way. If somebody said "next year", "next week", "tomorrow" all concepts of time appeared to be a power which I couldn't control and were ultimately forcing me towards the death of those I loved and myself. I became frightened of time and not just death. Time would have been OK if it didn't lead me to death but it was going to. Even if I was going to live for a very long time I was definitely going to die. I felt like the only thing that would make me feel better was if somebody could tell me that life after death definitely existed or that time would stand still. Nothing else could possibly make me feel safe. Nothing human could make me feel safe because that would eventually change.
These episodes of constant terror have repeated themselves many many times in my life, particularly since my early 20s (I am now 33) and I have been so determined and desperate to get rid of this feeling that I have tried what seems like everything. I am not always like it, it seems to come and go. Not on a day to day basis but over a period my thought process is one which is obsesses with death and time (its exactly the same thought process as when I was 11) but then sometimes I can go for periods where I feel fine 100% of the time, I feel I am lucky that I have these periods. In these good periods which can last for about a year I can talk about life and time and death and although I can feel sad about some mentioning of death (as anyone would) I don't feel the terror that I feel when I am in my depressed state of mind. Normally my depressive periods are triggered by news of the death of someone or something linked to death (eg terminal illness).
When I was 20 I was in such a bad way with these thoughts after a friend of mine killed himself and it triggered me to be in a complete state. My sister took me to the doctors after I told her that I couldn't stop thinking about death and I was diagnosed with depression. It effected the results of the degree I was studying at the time, I lost a lot of weight and it almost cost me my relationship with my boyfriend. Thankfully it didn't though, my boyfriend stuck by me and is now my husband but this condition has caused us many problems throughout our relationship. I have tried to talk to my husband about it many times but he has seen how I become a different person during these periods and how he couldn't help me he is now terrified himself about me being depressed. So now I have learnt that the best way for me to deal with it is to not tell him when I am going through it and I have become very skilled at feeling terrified within but acting very normal to the outside world. Amazingly it is possible to convince even those closest to you that you are ok and be suffering such torment inside your own mind.
The first time I had the depressive episode in my adult life (when I was 20) I didn't take anti depressents but the second time and subseqently I always did. I found they helped but they definately did not stop it from returning. I have now been taking citalopram for about 5 years almost continuously.
Although the anti depressants helped, they didn't make the problem go away completely, just numb the fear a bit so I still wanted to try to go further than this. I wanted to learn to be at peace with the fact that people die! OK I know its never going to be something you feel happy about but most other people seem to be able to get on with their lives without feeling utterly terrified of the prospect. I read somebody on this forum saying something that rang so true to me. They said that they would walk around looking at people and thinking "arn't you terrified? We are all going to die!" During my depressed periods I would think exactly the same as this - how can people possibly act normal when they know what I know?!!!!
I tried to tell a few people about this because I was so desperate but everybody told me "don't think about it" which was impossible and from this point onwards my depression became a secret problem that I knew nobody was going to help me with apart from maybe professionals. The only person who I ever talk about it with now is my sister. She understands it very well as she suffers from it herself but her fears are different.
I received several different types of counselling, all of which were useless at helping me with this problem although they were sometimes helpful with increasing my self confidence and learning more about myself. I was paying for counselling privately most of the time and I have folked out a fortune over the past 12 years.
When I got married in 2001 I went through a bad period just before this. I can't remember what had triggered this particular episode, there have been so many but for sure it would have been finding out that someone I knew had died. I remember thinking that when I was going to take my vows I was going to have to say "til death do us part" and I had a real problem with this. If I was going to say "til death do us part" then that in death we did part. That made me feel so terrified and I hated it that it had to be that way.
In 2003 my grandfather died and the terror struck again. All of my family were going to visit him in the funeral parlor and asked me if I would like to go. I was horrified but decided that maybe I should go because when somebody has a fear they are always told to expose themselves to it. So I did, I visited my grandfathers body and the sight was not horrific at all. But it didn't help. I obsessed over the issue and was very depressed for several months. This time I took anti depressents again.
In 2006 my grandmother died and this time I was at her bedside when she actually died. Once again the sight was not horrific but I couldn't cope with the terror that struck me, I sunk into another deep depression. Everyone who was at my grandmothers bedside was grief struck and completely devasted but I don't think they were terrified like I was - that was my main emotion because it was so strong I was almost unable to feel the others.
This time my doctor suggested I saw a psychotherapist and received cognative behaviour therapy which again I paid for privately. It was expensive costing £60 per hour but I did feel like for the first time I started to learn more about my problems. I learnt that the problems had obviously started when I was a child and they were a childhood fear. When I am "out" of the depression I am a confident and happy woman who is independent, loves her family but doesn't live in fear everyday. When something triggers the episodes of depression then I sink back to my subconcious mind (from when I was a child) and I can't cope because as a child I couldn't cope.
This made perfect sense to me after many many sessions of this treatment I learnt much more about it and accepted it to be true. This perfectly explained two things a) when I am in this depressive state I feel like a frightened and terrified little girl and feel like I need my mum to tell me its gonna be ok and its just a bad dream - I am not gonna die eventually and neither is anybody else! and b) I feel like I cannot get my head around death. Its not just a fear but its a lack of ability to understand the concept of life and death and time. I feel like nothing makes sense anymore - everyone is walking around acting like things which are perfectly normal are fine but I can't get my head around it - it made sense that this was a child-like understanding.
I really thought after around 18 months of this therapy that I must be cured! I learnt so so much about my depression and went through a long period of wellness.
Then in 2007 when I was pregnant with our first child it struck again. At this time I was having a break from the citalopram due to being pregnant and I fell into a deep state as bad as any I had been in in the past. It was awful because, as with all my previous episodes, I lost my appeitie and was loosing weight, feeling faint due to not eating. I was absolutely devastaed too that after all the progress, I thought I had made with the Cognative behaviousal therapy I could go back to feeling like this. My concious mind took over to try to get help (as it usually does and I think I had definately learnt to recongnise it much more) and I contacted a psychiatrist (recommended by my phycologyst) who told me I should go back on the citalopram even during pregnancy and it would be ok.
The depression lifted after about 6 weeks and I was back to normal life, looking forward to becoming a mum.
Then disaster struck me. In June 2007 our baby died on the day she was born due to complications during the birth. It was a tragedy which hit me and my husband like a ton of bricks. We were devasted. However slowly slowly we began to accept the reality of the situation and deal with the grief and rebuild our lives which were left with a huge void in them.
During this time I was very low but I was definately not in my child-like depressed state! Amazing! I had had an utter tragedy hit my life which I was dealing with, with my adult mind. I was crying every day and feeling so so sad but I was not terrified! Why? It almost felt like I had confronted my ultimate fear - could there be anything worse than a baby dying on the day she was born? It almost felt like it helped me rationalise things. Here I was being frightened about how I will get older, with time and loose people I loved and also die but surely that is better than what I had seen with my poor daughter's fate? Poor darling had never been home from hospital and met her family.
As time went on I gradually learned to cope with the loss of my daughter, became pregnant 6 months later and now I have a gorgeous son who is 18 months old. He is just adorable, I can't even begin to describe the love that I have for him. We never ever forget our daughter and this is how we have dealt with the loss. It might sound mad but we mention her everyday. Me and my husband think of her as part of our family in everything we do. Of course we know she is not with us in the physical sense but we talk about her as an angel. She certainly lives on in our hearts. We also talk about her to our son (he is too young to understand at the moment) and tell him he has a big sister in heaven.
I struggle with the heaven thing and also the afterlife thing, because I am a very logical person and I find it very hard to believe in something that I don't have proof it exists. However my husband does believe. He guided me in my grief of our daughter - well to be fair we guided each other because I think that I was so strong and brave and very often I was his rock - but he guided me on how to believe in her existance. I go along with the believing she is still part of our family because like I say - she still defaintely exists in our hearts and minds but I struggle to believe that she exists somewhere in another dimension - and wish that I knew for sure that she did. How ever my husand is happy with his belief that she does. My husband is an extremely intelligent man with a job which is highly mathmatical, scientific and logical - so my theory of why I find it hard to believe in afterlife (because I have a very logical mind) is not the same for him.
After the loss of our daughter I received some psycotherapy. This time it was dealing with a specific issue but she identified very quickly that I had a huge fear of being alone. We moved on from the grief counselling eventually (when I was over the worst of the grief) and started to home in on my problems. She was a very good phycotherapyst and she came to the conclusion that my condition was one of a phobia of death. In all the time I had received counselling, phychotherapy etc nobody had ever called my condition a Phobia and I think she hit the nail on the head! I think my phobia then leads to depression and obbsessive behaviour but the start of it all is the phobia.
So great, I have a label for it now but is it going to make me get over the phobia? Well that her answer was possibly no. Not the answer I wanted to hear. She and the previous psycotherapyst said that it was important to recognise my symptoms as part of my fear and this helps me to deal with it.
So where am I now. Well I am not great at the moment, I have been going through several months of obsessing but I am much more able to deal with it than I have been previously. I am able to think - I am like this because I have a phobia and this is the child inside me who is thinking like this - not me! It doesn't make me feel 100% but I certainly can function ok. I also can push myself to get out of the house and try to fight the depression I can look after my little boy ok and although my mind wanders so much that it makes me very clumsy it is much easier to hide my dark thoughts from others. Unfortunately though, inwardly I can't just be happy with my beautiful life though because of my fears which is such a shame because when I am feeling well I feel so happy with what I have.
I want to end this by desribing myself a little bit more because now I have written this all down and read it back to myself I think that I sound like a complete nutcase. I want to tell you that although this problem takes over my life to a large extent - it is a secret problem. I have many friends who think I am a happy, optimistic , bubbly person who loves life and her family. I am very independent, now living in a different country to my mum and dad and my 2 sisters. Before my husbands job took us abroad I had a very good career. I did go through episodes where I found it very hard to carry out my job when my depression was bad but my employer never found out about it and I was able to keep it hidden. I never missed a days work due to my depression which was extremely hard on some days.
I often have people saying to me that they like me because I am such a positive person and I think to myself "if only you knew" but I cannot bring myself to confess to my fears, I don't know why but it is impossible for me to be openly so negative, dark and grusome! Sometimes I wonder if I am outwardly so positive to mask how I am really feeling inside. I am also so scared of hearing other people say that they fear death.
I never used forums before, until our daughter died and then I used them, and found them so helpful, to talk with other mums who had lost babies. It helped me immensely. I suddenly thought the other day about my last phycologst describing my condition as a phobia of death and thought I wonder if there are any websites for people with Phobias - after all the years of having this and all the money spent on therapy you would really think I would have done this before but I never had! Well I found the forum and the thread "Fear of death" was at the top of the list!! I thought my problem was one which was very rare - my therapyst never told me that it was a common problem. I started to read the threads and I couldn't believe it with many of you describing my fears exactly. It felt like an amazing relief - all this time and I have never discussed with anyone, other than a therapyst, how I feel.
I am so sorry that my post is so long. I realise that many of you will not have read it and I don't blame you. My purpose of writing it was for those who maybe did want to read parts of it and also I did it because it is the first time ever I have written down how I feel. My therapysts have suggested that I did this before but I couldn't bring myself to because I was too frightened to read back what I had written. When I saw that other people were the same as me I wanted to write everything down.
Right you will be pleased to know I have finished now!