I recently had a nasty little short-lived (thankfully) virus or something that caused me to puke violently. It didn’t last long and I felt fine the next day, but it did get me thinking about what would happen should either of us suffer from a serious case of seasickness. I don’t enjoy hurling even when I have a regular toilet to flush. The idea of having to throw up on my boat is kind of, well, let’s just say I don’t want to.

Not too bad, really.

Neither of us has ever been seasick (knock on wood).  We’ve certainly had the opportunity. We’ve been in conditions that have made us feel washed up and spit out. We’ve traveled through the dreaded haystack waves off Cattle Point. When we brought Galapagos up the coast from Astoria, the sea state was what could be called ‘washing machine’ until we got far enough off the coast. Even in our heavy boat, that was pretty nasty. I remember making the comment that if we were ever going to get seasick, that would be the time. Over the years of cruising locally, we’ve both felt like we’ve been on the edge of seasickness, but we’ve never fallen over that edge. We’ve always been able to keep it at bay. But what if we can’t? What if it happens?

Many experienced sailors say that seasickness is something that every sailor experiences at some point. That makes me slightly nervous. I mean, seasickness can be very debilitating and for some people it can last for days. You could deal with dehydration, which could be serious. That doesn’t sound like something I would willingly choose.

Moonrise crashing through the sea. No seasickness in sight.

Still,  my friend Fran ‘The Frontal’ Cortex is in charge of this one, fortunately. The Fear-o-Meter registers mild anxiety, the kind that can be thwarted by getting more information and good planning. That’s key: sometimes people get mildly anxious about something because it’s ‘unknown’. In fact, this is a normal part of human experience, right?  Frankly, I’m not even sure it qualifies as anxiety unless you just let it sit and do nothing about it. So, if people can make it ‘known’, and have a plan for dealing with it, the anxiety goes away. Whew.

Let me give you another example from the archives of my memory. I once worked with a woman who came to see me because she was feeling panicked whenever she had to drive on the highway. She professed she had been driving for years, had never had an accident and that this panic had come upon her suddenly.  She thought there must be something dreadfully wrong with her and she was worried she had Panic Disorder.

During the first session I questioned her closely and determined that she seemed like a well adjusted and even-keeled individual. I felt confused by her alleged panic. She had no traumatic incidents regarding driving, no prior history of trauma, no prior history of anxiety, no ANYTHING that seemed amiss except for her fear of driving on our roads.

Upon further questioning, she revealed that she had just moved to the Puget Sound region from a small town in the midwest; a town she had lived in for her entire life. There was no traffic there and only really one major road. She also didn’t know how to read a map because she had never needed one.  Her fear about driving on the highway was not one about being in traffic or having an accident. She was afraid that she wouldn’t know where to exit. And that’s as far as her thinking went.

So often when people feel afraid, they just stop thinking things through. They don’t ask this one  critical question: And then what?  They just hit a kind of wall and then the thinking stops. So when I asked this client what exactly she was afraid would happen when she drove on the highway, she said to me, “I’m afraid I will not know where to exit the highway.” I replied with that old therapist standby, “And then what will happen?”.

She looked confused by the question and said, ‘I don’t know.”.  That’s a sure sign that an unconscious belief is at play. She said nothing and continued to look confused so I rescued her.

“I mean, what will you do? Will you just keep driving forever and ever? What will you actually do?”

Knowledge dawned on her relieved face.

“I guess I will just get off at the next exit and go back! I never thought of that before. Of course I won’t just keep driving forever. ”

Yes! That’s really all it took to relieve her mind. She was just stuck at the point where she felt afraid. Even though she did not have an anxiety disorder, she did not actually realize that she had not thought it through. Perhaps she was just too afraid to think, since we know that Fran ‘The Frontal’ Cortex doesn’t work well when Amy G. Dala starts having her tantrums.

I had her bring a road map to the next session. We spread it out on the floor and I taught her some basic map reading skills. We therapists have to be Jills of all trades sometimes. Her homework assignment was to find the mall on the map and drive there. (Yes, this was before smart phones. I’m that old.) She would come back and report to me how that went.  Our next session she arrived beaming with success. She was ‘cured’ in three sessions. I love when that happens.

So when I feel the bit of anxiety about getting seasick, I ask myself,  ‘And then what will happen?”. And I ask again and again until there are no more answers. This allows me to research what I need and come up with a plan. So what’s the plan for mitigating sea sickness? OK. Here’s all the book learning I have so far:

Stay well hydrated. Start out the trip well hydrated.
Stay above deck when below is uncomfortable.
Don’t get over heated. Stay out of the sun.
Keep your eye on the horizon. Stand behind the wheel if it helps.
Adjust sails to make the ride more comfortable if necessary.
Take medications at the first sign of nausea.
Keep a supply of powdered electrolyte replacement on board.
Get enough sleep. (Ha, that could be tough.)
Remember that this should pass.

Got some other tips?

Unless we get some kind of serious sea sickness that just doesn’t go away, I think we’ll be able to handle it. Sometimes anxiety is really just a need for a plan and for information. It’s just your brain, doing its job to mitigate some possibility that is actually based in reality in the physical world. If the information and plan is enough to alleviate the anxiety, as in this case, then well done, brain. Nicely played.

Just joined us for the A to Z Challenge and want to read from the beginning? Here’s a link to the first post. Just click on ‘next’ to go to the next post.

A little ‘Boat Yoga’ aboard Moonrise. Never got sick even once. Damn that was a fun boat.

I encourage young people from western nations like the United States to do their traveling to less developed countries while they are young. They need to be old enough to make reasonably thoughtful choices, but not so old that they have spent literally decades being swaddled in the false sense of security that comes with living a middle class life in the midst of laws intended to keep a person safe from themselves.

We have seat belt laws, speed limit laws, building codes laws, car safety laws, stop signs that should be heeded… the list seems almost endless. And we have laws about how long a commercial driver can be behind the wheel when taking passengers or freight over our roads. These laws seem like good common sense laws. We get used to them and take them for granted.

This doesn’t look like a country I am traveling to. But, um, NO.

We have lived such a swaddled life. And in my protected world, I do not ride chicken buses. In fact,  I almost never ride public transportation even here at home because, hello, I don’t go anywhere that makes it necessary. If I lived in Seattle, it’s likely I would ride the bus frequently because driving and parking in Seattle is a nightmare. There is good public transport there, unlike here in Tacoma. Still, I like my buses clean, on time, in good repair and not overly crowded. HAHAHAHAHA! Can you say, “Good luck, Melissa. Didn’t you say you’d be traveling to Mexico and Central America?”  Yeah. I did.

I probably wouldn’t be very concerned about any of this if it weren’t for my friend. Her 16 year old daughter went to Bolivia to study on a Rotary Club scholarship and never came home. Her daughter got on a bus with a bunch of other students. The driver had been driving for over 24 hours. He fell asleep at the wheel. The bus went off the cliff and killed her. Sure, that’s not likely to happen to me, but remember: Amy G. Dala does not play odds. She plays to survive.

Our clean, efficient, regulated buses with drivers who may be cranky but are unlikely to drive off a cliff.

Here’s what my mind tells me riding a chicken bus will be like: crowded, smelly, hot, filled with noise, with people sitting in my personal space, and just possibly dangerous. Why would I choose such a thing? Why would I willingly get on a bus like that without wearing a respirator and protective bubble wrap suit? Because some places I understand that’s just how you get around. That or walk. Part of the entire point of this trip is experiencing how they live in other cultures, something Fran ‘the frontal’ Cortex looks forward to but Amy G. Dala really doesn’t. Besides, I know Mike will be the first one on that stupid bus and he won’t even save me a seat. That being said, check out the Fear-o-Meter.

Well, okay, it’s maybe a little irrationally high. I mean I kind of want to do it for the adventure part of it, and to say I did it. Probably if we aren’t going a great distance I am going to be fine.  But if we’re going to someplace far away, and there are mountains involved, it’s likely I’m going to want to ask the driver if he got a good night’s sleep.

Nah, I’m totally going to do it. Just shut the hell up, Amy.

Well, yes, that does sound redundant considering these are all posts about feeling anxiety lately. However, one of the tenants of anxiety as a diagnosis is the avoidance of feelings of anxiety. It’s not really circular logic. Let me explain through a real life example.

Be soothed by this photo taken at Benson Island.

This summer I had anxiety pretty bad. I was rocking and rolling from one hour to the next and feeling very out of control much of the time. My brain really was not my own. I was hoping that our cruise would settle me down, but, of course, it’s so much more complicated than that.

As long as I was on the ocean, with land really far away, I was fine. In fact, when we left our anchorage in Seiku to cross the Strait of Juan de fuca and Mike said we were taking on water through the shaft seal, I didn’t even flinch. I wasn’t the least bit worried about that, and you’d think that would be the kind of thing that would set anybody off, especially as it was one of the big three things that happened on our first day out. Nope. I’ve always handled things like that really well (when they are not bundled on top of lots of other bad things)  because I know Mike will fix it.  Engine won’t start and the tide is pushing us toward the rocks? No problem. I will make that sail fill with whatever air is available.  Shaft seal lost some screws and water is pouring into the bilge? Why worry?  I just sailed around in circles until he got it managed and we carried on. I love being on the open water. There’s almost never anything to hit.

In spite of my anxiety, we really had a wonderful time this summer.

Let’s compare that to the almost complete melt down I had halfway into the trip. We’d been traveling up one of the fjords and all was well. We had a few wonderful days of anchoring and looking at wildlife, but we were running out of fresh food and we’d had no cell service for several days (more on that in another post). My internal stress level was a little high because of that.  Mike suggested we go to Tofino to get groceries and some walking. And that’s when I began panicking. Why? Because the water around Tofino is crowded with people and boats and sand bars that shift around, and we’d have to find a place to dock. (Read my post on Death By Docking to see why that matters.) We don’t know our way around the water ways there, there is a lot of shallow water, and not a lot of dock space. It’s the kind of place I like to avoid. My day was about to be seriously ruined.

I lay in the cockpit and breathed, realizing how silly it was, trying to talk myself out of feeling terrified. I mean to tell you, Fran ‘The Frontal’ Cortex was really giving it her best shot but I was seriously on the edge.  Poor Mike. He knew I was suffering, but really there was nothing he could do about it. Here’s the Fear-O-Meter reading on that situation. Yeah, it was pretty bad:

How can I make this point most succinctly? The avoidance is only partly about the docking per se. That is generally over fairly quickly. There is either space or there isn’t. Of course, I hate docking, but it’s really the fear, all the feelings that surround the experience of it that I want to avoid. And this is a crucial thing to understand about anxiety. If I have to participate in getting the boat docked, I’m going to be feeling tense and anxious until it’s over and so I prefer to not even entertain the notion.  Avoidance of the fear is a significant part of having a traumatic memory. Sometimes people can try to organize their entire lives around avoiding having to feel what we identify as fear, whatever causes it.

Let me say it another way. If you were to ask me if I was worried I would be hurt or killed during docking I would certainly say no. Absolutely not. And that would be true. But when I think about participating in a docking experience in a marina, my brain creates certain feelings in my body and those feelings (increased heart rate, nausea, feelings of being unconnected to my body) are identified by me as ‘fear’. That’s what I want to avoid. Capice?

Here’s another example of what I mean by avoiding the feelings. I have clients who need to have things a certain way in their physical surroundings. They keep their homes just so, have many rules about right and wrong, have exact ways that things should be done, etc. They lack the internal flexibility that is required to ‘go with the flow’. If there is anything out of place, it creates feelings of uneasiness, restlessness. In other words, anxiety. It isn’t that they have some kind of moral value about having a tidy room. They don’t care a bit about how you live in your own space. If you want to be a slob, that’s fine by them. But they can never relax in their own space until they know that everything is in order; their own special kind of order. They create all these rules in order to avoid feeling out of control. It helps them believe that they are in charge of their lives. When asked what would happen should someone, for instance, leave their shoes in the middle of the floor, they generally respond that they would feel very uncomfortable until they put the shoes away. Sometimes these people have anger problems because they are always so tense and watchful about how things are going that the least little thing sets them off. Thankfully, I don’t suffer this particular form of anxiety.

Incidentally, I am relieved to report there was no room for us in Tofino on the public dock, which is usually taken up by fishing boats. I did put my big girl panties on and we did pull up to the public dock to give it a shot, but Galapagos is a big boat and we were too long for the space. Frankly, it would have been rude of us to dock there even had there been space. Don’t we all love the big assed boat that swoops in like they own the place and takes up all the room? Yeah, we aren’t that boat.

Can I just say my husband parks that boat like a boss?

We anchored around the corner, out of the way, and rowed to town and had a lovely time. That creates no anxiety for me whatever. I will row for an hour against the current to avoid trying to squeeze onto a dock, unless we’re the only boat around. If we are securely held with our anchor, I’m fine with leaving the boat for a few hours, although we are both always relieved to see her floating where we left her when we return. I think that’s a normal cruiser response.

I know this post makes it sound like we had a terrible trip. We didn’t. We had an awesome trip. I’m not going to let this demon win. If you have anxiety, one thing you can do to help yourself is to begin to separate your identity from the anxious feelings. I might be me, but I am not my anxiety. Get it? My brain may be causing these feelings to cascade through my body, but I’m not my body, either, and if I just wait, these feelings will pass. (Incidentally, this is a very useful technique when children are needing help managing their emotional state. We can say things like ‘your body needs a rest’ not ‘YOU need a rest’ or ‘Let’s teach your body how to sit quietly for a couple of minutes.’  You get the idea. Works well with little ones in early childhood.)

Give it a try and see if it doesn’t make you feel differently about the way your own brain and body react to situations you’d like to avoid.

Ahousat. We didn’t even try to dock there. We wanted to anchor at the head of the cove.