Feelings of terror and mental torture

Hi there,

Sorry this is a bit of a long one. Here's a picture of myself :

www.tinderbird.com/dean/dean.jpg

It's so difficult to try and describe these things briefly. All I can say is I've had a very up and down past, in and out of mental hospitals, places of safety, etc. Mom committed suicide, my girlfriend who I lived with for a few years died in a head on collission. I think everything lead me to a point of deep inner growth.

In the last 7 years since I've been in Cape Town it's been the most intense turning point I could ever imagine. It's all become an internal struggle rather than an external struggle. It's been incredibly rewarding watching my life change as I've begun to change my thinking and attitude, but there's an "ego" part of one that holds one back, and I'm sensing that this darkness could stem from that.

I feel like it's nothing less than this "dark night of the soul" that everyone speaks about.

I've been through the worst, but these are the ongoing, stretched out feelings which I wrote down when they came up :

Intense feelings of terror and anxiety and immobilising panic. Feel like there's someone there, feel VERY sensitive to sounds, light etc, feel delirious, scared, suicidal, insane, confused, sense of urgency always, desperation, isolated and lonely, emotionally exhausted, like a rat in a box running frantically from one side to the other trying to escape and not finding a way out but continuing to run, like I've got no skin on my body and I'm exposed to the world without a hardened skin that most people seem to have to the general struggle.

I go to every single trance party but could not ever consider taking drugs, I think you have to be quite stable to do that, I can hardly drink becaus alcohol just accentuates emotions and deepens depression.

A girlfriend of mine is taking Efexor and it's helped her so so much, but I don't think these feelings of mine are anything near to normal depression. I don't know what they are, they seem to run deeper than that. I think what's most difficult is that I work in a 24 hour shift call centre and find it so difficult to get out, and these shifts make things even worse. I feel like I'm prostituting myself to this job and these shifts on top of these feelings is all making me feel just completely delirious.

Dean, 32, Cape Town.