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Baggage Reclaim: recognising emotional abuse

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We all have baggage about all kinds of things. My sister describes the state of something being psychological or personal baggage for someone--a trauma, compulsion, phobia, fear or obsession, for example--as having "brain spaghetti." For example, apparently she has spaghetti about me pinning her down as a child and tickling her until she screamed for mercy. She knows this because when her spouse tried to do the same, the experience she had as a child came flooding back as a complex tangle of fears, feelings, and mental images. Notwithstanding the trauma inflicted on my poor sister, the spaghetti metaphor is a simple but useful tool for explaining how complex our experiences are, and I bring it up here because I believe a lot of people have spaghetti, most particularly about love. So many hopeful love relationships turn sour and yet we continue to idealise love. Romantic love is so deeply ingrained into our psyches, because we are faced with it at every point in our lives—flic
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Anxiety as a Rational Response (Part 2)

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Angele had been working at the local supermarket for about two months, mostly rearranging shelves. Sometimes they put her on checkout, which was more lively, but rearranging products on shelves was her main job for up to six hours at a time. Where shoppers had taken products from the front of the shelf, Angele was required to move the remaining products forward so that the shelf looked full. It was easy work, paying minimum wage because she was only fifteen, but it was pocket money. One day she was about mid-shift when she suddenly felt light-headed, a little giddy even, and her heart began to beat faster. Then it began to pound and she became paralysed with panic. What if she was having a heart attack? What if she was going to faint, to fall down right there in the middle of aisle 5, maybe even die? Her pulse was beating rapidly in her ears, and she felt as if her heart would jump out of her chest. Horrified, she felt rooted to the spot, her thoughts whirling around in her head, h
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Anxiety as a Rational Response (Part 1)

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Most people I know have suffered from anxiety or depression or both at some time in their lives. In my own case, it began many years ago when a close family member became depressed and anxious, and back then we had no idea what we were in for!  We both did the best we could, but as I am sure many of you know, depression can drop like a dark cloud on your soul. It robs you of your ability to see things clearly, your motivation for almost everything; it turns everything grey and flat and horrible.  You look for causes, for reasons for feeling this way, and blame often ends with whoever is closest, including yourself.  Your parents, siblings and friends don’t fare much better. They don’t understand why you’re in such a funk. They’ll tell you to get over yourself, to get a life, to pull your socks up, and every other soulless cliché they can think of. This makes you feel even worse because you just can’t ! You cast around your mind and decide it was your
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