The Trouble with Tranqs

These drugs have a clinically similar effect to alcohol on the central nervous system, and longterm use might have a significant severe effect on brain tissue, in much just how alcohol does. However the real problem with one of these drugs is their addictiveness, and the issue in stopping taking them after a good relatively short time of use. A few of these distressing withdrawal symptoms that could be experienced are: anger, anxiety, bowel changes, insufficient concentration, emotional disturbance, depression, coordination difficulties, vertigo, sensitivity to light, head pressure, muscle and pain, numbness, paranoia, agitation, shaking, insomnia, and feelings of unreality or dissociation.

So what's the choice?

The alternative isn't a more impressive, better, newer, more focused drug. The choice may be the realisation by the medical world, and by sufferers from anxiety, these drugs don't change anything. They just disconnect you as a result. Whatever it really is that's evoking the anxiety, it's still there once the drug is eventually stopped. Postponing facing around it for 3 months, per year, 10 years, twenty years... still leaves the issue sitting there, and it'll wait for so long as is necessary since it is part of the mind, part of the belief system, part of the upbringing, part of the self. All of the drugs do is numb your brain, wrap it in cotton wool so thinking is fuzzier, however they leave the issue sitting there looking forward to your day the drug is removed. There's hardly any escape through drugs.

The trouble is we've all become very much accustomed to the thought of the simple option, the effortless solution - magic is what we wish. What we don't want would be to need to look at what we don't desire to look at because each time we look we obtain the anxiety response that we're attempting to escape from to begin with.

There is one solution.

That solution is for the sufferer to choose they are likely to be free from the issue, and that their life is not any longer likely to be controlled by their anxiety.

Without dedication at that level, nothing will continue to work long-term.

Once that commitment is manufactured, then it really is around the sufferer to permit themselves to be guided (with what feels to them) towards the help and assistance they might need. This can be therapy in another of its many forms, counselling, cognitive therapy, psychotherapy, Gestalt, behavioural therapy, hypnotherapy...; or the avid reading of self-help books that appeal, attending therapy/self-help groups, attending workshops, visiting a spiritual healer...

What is essential is that the sufferer feels heard and honoured and supported, not really much what the flavour of the month is in therapy. Each of them work. Each of them impact, provided that the match between your sufferer's mind, the design of therapy, and the personality of the therapist/facilitator, certainly are a comfortable fit.

There is not any suggestion here that anyone taking tranquillisers should stop taking them without consulting their physician. Several drugs need a gradual decrease in dose - a weaning, due to the effects they will have on the mind. Sudden removal can produce worse or comparable symptoms to the ones that the drug had been prescribed for to begin with.

What I'm suggesting is that alternatives are seriously considered, and that it's possible to lead a life free from the necessity of the tranquillising crutch that prevents the sufferer from ever exceptional fullness and wonder of self in every it's creative and successful glory.