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.

Recently on the Women Who Sail Facebook page a woman posted a photograph of a tiny crab. The crab was very cute.  As a rule I kind of like crabs and other creatures with exoskeletons (except for the one I wrote about in B is for Bugs), even if they ARE like giant insects of the sea. I won’t say that the spider crabs we have up here don’t kind of give me the creeps, but I my internal Fran ‘The Frontal’ Cortex can convince me they are kind of cute, from a considerable distance.

No, actually what sticks in my mind about this particular crab is that the woman said she had pulled it out of her partner’s ear. WHAAATTT? That’s disgusting! I cannot unsee or unread that. (And now, neither can you. Just sharing the wealth here. ) So… apparently now I have to be worried about tiny animals finding ways to enter my bodily orifices when I clean the hull down in the tropics? Who knew? To make matters worse, this is not an unusual occurrence. Other people have found crabs in their ears. One person even found a baby eel in someone’s ear! OH MY GOD! I don’t know about you, but I’m just saying ‘no’ to any kind of living creature taking up residence in any of my personal orifices.  Now I cannot get this scenario out of my head and I am completely grossed out. I mean, how can you have an entire crab living in your ear?

Not too worried because I will be taking steps.

Because of this, I will have to ‘take steps’. I’ll need to get a full body dive suit, including the hood, for any hull cleaning. Either that, or we have to pay someone to clean the hull. I have learned through the feedback on this FB post about a tiny crab that there is an entire ecosystem that begins to form on the hull bottom. First I’m reading about small crabs, and the next thing I know it’s all kinds of tiny living creatures floating around in the water. Of course, that makes sense, I just never thought about it. And I wish I wasn’t thinking about it now. When you scrape all those tiny animals off the hull, they float around looking for somewhere else to live. How do they know they won’t be welcome in your ear? Or some other more personal place?

Not to put too fine a point on it, the reason I’m not particularly anxious about crabs being in my own personal ears is because it’s not going to happen. Because I will TAKE STEPS to see it doesn’t. Amy wins on that one. Now she can go drink her milkshake and read Harry Potter.

The other giant exo-skeletoned animal I am not looking forward to is lobsters. I don’t really have anything against them, but they are a bit repulsive. And apparently fishermen and other cruisers just love to share them with you. The problem is that I can’t imagine eating one. I mean, these are GIANT INSECTS, people! I kind of have a thing about eating things where the bones are on the outside. Perhaps if I use enough butter.

If we were meant to eat lobsters, do you think they would be starring in horror movies?

Plus, I had a bad experience with cooking lobster when I was in high school. I don’t remember all the details but it was in Maine and whoever I was with had decided he had to eat lobster for the ‘full-on Maine’ experience. But he couldn’t afford to go to a restaurant to get one cooked the normal way: by someone else trained to do so. No. Of course not. He got a live one and dumped it in a pot of boiling water. And the pot was too small, and the poor thing just suffered rather than dying. Okay. First off, I do believe that if you are going to eat meat, which I do, the animal should be dead before you eat it. I’m not into eating living flesh. Plus, I don’t like animals having to suffer. That damn lobster wouldn’t die and it made noise. Have you ever heard a lobster make the noise of death? Yeah. I thought not.  Now the thought of cooking lobster makes me a little sick.

So I worry that on our trip, I will have to eat lobster. And crab. And maybe other things that have an exoskeleton. Or that live in shells.  I’m not sure about that, either. I’m kind of not into eating filter feeders as well because, you know, detritus and all that nasty stuff. Frankly, I’m not really into sea food at all, having only recently learned to eat fish. This has been hard on Mike, who loves all kinds of sea food. And still, we’ve managed to be married for a long time. We’ll figure this out, too.

Hmmm. Check back with me in a few years on this.

To be clear, I would be perfectly fine with not EVER eating any of those things if I didn’t know that I will be in situations where people are bound to say things like, ‘You don’t eat lobster? Really? What’s wrong with you? It’s delicious! Here! Just try it, you’ll see.’. Then they will point and laugh. And then I will feel compelled to try it just to please them and put a stop to their mirth. Because I kind of know that if most people in the world eat seafood, then how bad can it be?  Now I want to run screaming. And also probably brush my teeth and rinse really well.

Exoskeletons. Just let them stay in the sea as God intended.

Do I have to keep putting the A to Z badge at the top? I’ve chosen to put it at the bottom from now on. This is a long post. Get some coffee. Make yourself comfortable.

When we owned Moonrise, guess who docked her much of the time? Yours truly. I remember fondly the days when I would “ride cowboy” by standing on the seat behind the wheel and steer her into her little slip. Those days are behind me. Now we have full-keeled, heavy bodied, center cockpit Galapagos. As much as I love our boat, I loathe docking her. That’s because of the nature of traumatic memory and how it seems to live forever in our bodies sometimes, coming back to haunt us at the worst possible times.

Someday, this is not going to be the case.

If you’ve been following along with us for these years, you may remember the first time we took Galapagos out for a sail down in Astoria, Oregon. That was the day that three bad things happened all in a row. In the post I wrote about that day, I used sheer vulgarity. That was a day that got lodged in my psyche and in my body, and most importantly: in my brain in the wrong location.  I haven’t been able to shake it yet. I am determined that I will. But for now, it still lurks around. Amy G. Dala does her utmost to ‘save my life’ with this one, no matter how hard I try to shut her up.

We had taken Galapagos out for the first time with her shiny new engine, on the Columbia River.  We had just pulled over into a quiet area to practice things like turning on her keel, raising sails, you know…all the things that you need to know how to do on a boat. I don’t want to repeat all the things I wrote about in the original article, so suffice to say we were already a bit concerned about what might be going on with the engine and the transmission. Also, the bilge pump kept coming on and Mike couldn’t figure out why. There were enough things to be worried about  that we decided to cut the trip short and return to the marina.

I got cocky and confident and decided I would bring the boat into the marina myself. Well, it was the first time for both of us with this boat, remember? May as well have been me that took the hit. The dock was a straight shot and there was plenty of room if I flubbed it. I knew the current was wicked getting in and I would have to gun the engine to keep from getting swept into the steel wall at the entrance to the marina. I counted on having to use the engine to slow her down once inside.

What I didn’t count on was the transmission sticking in reverse, although one reason we were returning was because we were worried about the transmission. Go figure. Denial is a terrible thing sometimes. I had overshot the dock on the first pass due to current. No harm done, I was backing up to try again and the transmission stuck hard. It was completely jammed and once our girl is moving, she doesn’t stop very well unless you use the engine to stop her. Not being able to put her in forward, she just kept moving back. The dockhand was running down the dock yelling at me to throw the thing into forward, (Really? You think???), the Coast Guard boat at the fuel dock was lined with faces watching the drama unfold. I don’t remember giving a rip about that. But I will never forget the sickening feeling as the rear of my beautiful boat slowly pushed into the steel fishing vessel behind us, bending our starboard steel davit just enough to remind me every time I see it now. It was, in a word, awful, even though it could have been worse. Turns out, this was a traumatic experience for me. And I don’t use that term lightly.

Part of what defines a trauma is how the person experiences it. What separates a traumatic experience from any other kind of bad experience is that by definition it overwhelms the person’s coping mechanisms. People go into a dissociated state of awareness as a protection. They may experience the event as though they are watching it happen to someone else, like it’s a movie, or as though they are watching themselves from outside their body. Time seems to slow down.  Sometimes people will actually be unable to remember the sequence of events later, or they may be missing critical sensory information such as sounds or sights. Some people get tunnel vision. These are signs that the brain is going to be recording this memory differently than a regular daily event. And that’s a bad thing.

There she is. The boat that bent our davit.

Let me give you another example. A few years ago I was doing a Critical Incident Debriefing at a bank that had been robbed. This is where a therapist goes in and helps the staff process the event. There is a specific protocol. In this incident, two robbers came in waving weapons and shouting for everyone to get onto the floor. There was a lot of yelling and the criminals threatened to hurt people if they did not comply. Everyone present that day agreed that it was an extremely frightening event and commented on how much yelling there was. Part of my job was to assess each individual in the group for evidence that they may not integrate this incident very well and need help processing it.

One man clearly would need more help. He had hidden under his desk, eyes squeezed shut, as soon as the robbery began. He expressed to the group his surprise that everyone was reporting how loud the event was. He had heard nothing. To him, the entire episode had happened in complete silence. He didn’t even know it was over until someone found him under the desk.  He had absolutely no memory of any kind of sound. For him, the current memory was one of silence and no visual cues; just one long incident of being scared literally to death.  I referred him for further evaluation.

Traumatic events are cumulative over time. If you’ve had a number of events that have been pretty hard to take, over time your ability to handle unusual stressors can get eroded.  It may seem like you are able to take things in stride, only getting a little overly concerned about some situations, until suddenly one more thing happens and you’ve hit the end of the line. Then it can be a little like flipping a switch and there’s no turning back without some kind of intervention.

This was not my first rodeo with traumatic events. Even though this event was certainly not in the least life threatening, the conditions under which this happened proved to be a perfect storm that overwhelmed me. All the things that happened that day, being on a new boat in new waters,  and my own personal history all converged  and I experienced this event through the lens of a traumatic experience.

Oh, and the bilge pump thing? Our shaft seal had lost two bolts. It was leaking like a mother f*&^. The third thing? Once the docking debacle had been resolved, Mike discovered water in our brand new engine. Brand. New. Seriously. We were so completely beaten we both could have walked away from the whole project then and there.

Entrance to the Astoria marina. It always felt so small, then when I look at the photo I’m amazed at how much room there actually was.

I long for the days when I had the confidence to pull Moonrise right up into her slip without undue stress. Buying this boat down in Astoria without ever having taken her out on the water was a huge leap of faith. We knew she was a good boat. We never doubted it, and she has proven herself many times already. We actually love our boat. But we had zero experience with a full keeled boat and we also had zero experience with the kinds of currents that are ever present on the Columbia River. Every time we left the dock it was a challenge. Every time we came back, it was a challenge. And there was no one to teach us. Talk about trial by fire. And we chose this… WHY? Oh yes. Because we loved the boat and just decided we would make it work. How did I know that this would be the straw that broke my camel’s back?

That straw broke the camel’s back, and also bent this very sturdy davit, which acted like a shock absorber, protecting the boat. The fishing  boat was scratched, but the owner didn’t care. There was zero damage to the hull and the deck. Whew.

Ever since that day I have been very anxious, in fact sometimes terrified, whenever we are underway in a tight space close to other boats.  I have wanted to avoid taking the boat out because of my fear of bringing her back in. This has been, really, just terrible. I know what has caused these feelings, but knowing what causes post traumatic feelings goes only so far in handling them. To be fair to myself, I have actually docked our boat. If there are no other boats around, and the dock is a straight shot, I can swing that without a worry. When we pulled into Canada and check in at Poet’s Cove, I docked her and was so proud I almost cried.

When there are no other boats around, I’m fine. There is nothing to hit but the dock. I don’t care much about hitting docks.  And this summer, in spite of the fact that I suffered from pretty bad anxiety for almost the entire trip, I got to know the boat better and became more confident and comfortable on her. I have to think that once we are aboard and sailing around as a lifestyle, I’m going to get used to her even more and become more confident over time. I actually do believe that.

Added to my stress was that Mike was learning, too. I didn’t realize how much that mattered to me until he said that out loud; how much he felt responsible, and how much got nervous, too. That actually made a huge difference to me, and it helped calm me down quite a bit. It’s highly possible that the amount of anxiety I was feeling was magnified because part of it actually belonged to him. That was just a really bad, horrible day for us both. I consider it a testament of strength and our probable success as cruisers that we didn’t throw in the towel right there.

Now every time Mike docks the boat successfully I feel better about it, so I’m learning, even if I’m not, yet,  doing. A couple of times last summer, after the trip, I actually thought ‘I’ll bring her in this time’, but then I wouldn’t let myself, because if I rush this and something doesn’t go well, it’s going to set me back considerably and it’s not worth the risk. The fact that Mike is mastering this makes me feel loads better. When he wasn’t confident either, you really wouldn’t want to know what all was going on in my head.

See that area underneath the LL in Michelle? I did that. With my davit.

The last time we were out I handled the docking situation really well. I didn’t worry about it at all in advance, and when we approached the marina, I was pretty calm and cool. I waited until he did his part, then stepped off onto the dock and tied her off as though I’d been doing it all my life. Damn, that felt good.

You know why I handled it well? It wasn’t because I talked myself into it. Like I said, with traumatic memory, that rarely works. I’m glad that I know that. I’m grateful that I have the level of professional knowledge I have. I finally decided I’d had enough of this crappy anxiety and how much suffering it causes me, as well as Mike,  and went on medication. That’s right. I went on Zoloft. And thank God for it. Looking back over a few years I realize I should have done it a long time ago, probably when I hit menopause.  It has calmed Amy G. Dala down enough that I can feel like myself again. I may still be a little afraid, but I can put it in perspective once more and I know that eventually I will learn and it will be fine. This is a true gift because seriously, anxiety can ruin what is otherwise a beautiful thing: being on the boat.