How Your ‘Crazy’ is the Key to Your Psychological Freedom

Each of us has our own unique kind of freak-out. Instead of letting it get you down, find out how it to use your freak-out to free yourself from its grip.

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Everybody has their own kind of crazy, and each one of us is likely to be intimately familiar with their own. I use the term “crazy” and “crazies” with affection. We should treat our crazies, paradoxically enough, with respect, care, and compassion. After all, it’s there for a reason - it’s probably just outlived its usefulness.

Everyone’s craziness comes is activated by a particular trigger, and triggers differ enormously from person to person. For example, one person might go nuts with anxiety if they have the smallest inkling that they’ve embarrassed themselves in mixed company; something that somebody else would simply laugh off. Meanwhile, that very same person who laughed it off might get into pits of despair for having missed a small detail at work; something the easily embarrassed person would just apologise for and move on.

Each of us comes by our crazy in a variety of ways: I call my personal set ‘my crazies’. Your particular crazy will be a mixture of your character (call it your DNA) and upbringing. Sometimes they can be brought on by particular experiences in life. For example if when young a member of your family died of an illness, your crazy might manifest itself though irrational fears about your health, what we call hypochondria or simply health anxiety. Or if you had a parent who would freak out every time you got something wrong, you might be hypersensitive to criticism. It’s not always that direct, but we can usually find a reason for our crazies somewhere.

The great news is that once we identify our crazies as something that happens to us for a reason and not because of who we are, we’re already well on the way of resolving them. Let’s start by having a look at what sorts of crazies there are. They include things like:

• Attacking yourself relentlessly with negative self-talk.

• Finding yourself incredibly anxious about something you said or did.

• Ruminating intensely about something you think you got wrong, like replaying a difficult conversation over and over again.

• Feeling overly guilty or punishing yourself relentlessly.

• Getting overly worked up about something that’s coming up because you think it’s going to go terrible wrong.

• Getting physically unwell when you are stressed out.

These are just a few examples, but there are tons more. Each of these crazies can be a result of some of the following triggers:

• You messed something up at work, with friends, family, or a romantic partner.

• Someone messed something up with you.

• You did something you wish you hadn’t.

• Someone gave you some “constructive” criticism.

• Someone was nasty to you on social media.

• Something very important is coming up and you’re freaking out because “everything is riding on it.”

If you are experiencing one of your crazies, you can generally follow it back to your trigger. When you find that trigger, you’ll notice that it will have all the elements that have given you the crazies on previous occasions. Usually when this happens you are taking your crazy as the most serious thing in the world: it’s all you can think about, making you truly miserable. The thing is it’s your crazy that’s making you miserable not the trigger that caused it. So long as your unaware that it’s the same kinds of triggers that cause your crazy, they are like trap doors you fall into. The more you become aware of them, the less surprising they become; once you know the link between your triggers and your crazies, you strip them of their power.

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Don’t Let Your Crazies Limit You.

Many of us live our lives from crazy to crazy — and even worse, we may try to avoid things that that might trigger us, just so we don’t have to experience these awful feeling they provoke. But avoiding triggers means avoiding life itself. That can get in the way of progressing in your work, friendships, and your love life.

Wouldn’t it be better if once you’re triggered you could identify that you are responding from one of your crazies and walk it back to a happier place?

I work with this stuff everyday as a psychotherapist, but that doesn’t mean I’m immune to my own crazies. I’m full of them — but I have (mostly) learned to deal with them. In fact, it was from a time that I was in a really deep crazy that I learned how to get out of it.

My Crazies Story

One day I found myself on the second story of a double decker bus completely freaking out about something I said to someone that I admired. I was replaying the event over and over again in my head and suffering terrible anxiety and regret. My breathing was shallow, my heart was beating fast, and I was furiously thinking and re-thinking what had happened. Then I suddenly had a thought:

I know this feeling — this is a feeling I’ve had before.

This was followed by a mind-blowing insight. I realised that the elements that led me to feel this way were always the same. They included speaking to someone with authority whom I admired and wanted to make a good impression in front of — and getting it sorely wrong.

I said to myself, “Of course you feel like this — this is just the sort of thing that makes you anxious.” Once I realised this was a particular vulnerability of mine (related to a personal history which is TMI for here) I worked out that I was taking it more personally than I needed to. I realised that what I was experiencing was what Jung called a “complex” - that is a semi-autonomous constellation of thoughts and emotions from early in life. When we experience a complex we’re experiencing strong feelings that belong in the past, not the present.

"A complex is a cluster of energy in the unconscious, charged by historic events, reinforced through repetition, embodying a fragment of our personality, and generating a programmed response and an implicit set of expectations."

- C.G. Jung

The most pernicious thing about a complex is not the complex itself, but when you identify with it. Instead of seeing it as a set of thoughts and feelings your are experiencing due to a trigger that threw you into a crazy, you believe it is about you in real time. While that thing that triggered your complex may indeed be real and unsettling, it’s almost never so bad as we imagine it when we’re in a complex. The trick is to be able to step out of the complex and see it for what it is.

In my case, I was able to see that all the conditions were perfect for my freak out in that moment. That brought be great relief because I was able to step aside from my complex (instead of identifying with it) and realise that back in the real world, if there were a way to resolve it I’d try and do that, and if not, well, that sucks, but it’s not the end of the world - and certainly not worthy of the freak out I was giving it. Once I’d made sense of it that way, my anxiety virtually disappeared. I still wasn’t happy about what had happened, there was nothing essentially terrible about it either: I simply didn’t have to suffer like I had been.

Next Time Your Crazies Take You Over, Recognise Them For What They Are:

Your crazies are familiar to you because that’s where you go when you’re triggered in that particular way. Triggers happen so quickly that it’s almost impossible to identify them straight away because they’ll have already sent you directly into the eye of the storm. If you’re ever lucky enough to become a Zen master you can meet your triggers with equanimity all the time— but if your like me and the rest of us, you generally have to get started after you’ve been triggered and you’re well inside your crazies.

Crazies announce themselves because they always feel the same way when you’re in them, and that’s the ticket out. Next time you experience your crazies, the first thing you need to do is simply acknowledge that your in a crazy (or more technically, you’re identified with your complex). “This is it,” you’ll tell yourself, “these are my crazies.” The main cue is that you’re freaking out in your usual familiar way: if it feels like your crazy, you know it’s not so much about what happened, but about how it triggered you.

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Once you’ve made that realisation you’re halfway there — just take some deep breaths and start to slowly walk it back. The thoughts and feelings associated with your complex will still be there, but you’ll be better able to observe it rather than be in the centre of it. Once you’re a bit calmer, you can start to ask yourself what the trigger was. It’s likely to be just the sort of thing that sends you to your crazies — and you can use that knowledge to strip away its power.

Your thinking will be something like, “Of course I’m freaking out, that sort of thing always freaks me out.” Whatever you need to do (or not) about the thing that triggered you can be decided later, the main thing to do now is step out of your crazies as soon as you can. Give yourself a nice pat on the back for using your crazy to learn something about yourself. You’re now on your way to controlling your crazies, instead of them controlling you.

It Takes Time To Overcome Your Crazies, But Awareness Of Your Complexes Usually Brings Immediate Improvement:

This sort of thing doesn’t happen overnight. Even the story I shared with you above only happened after I’d fallen down that trap door enough times that this time I finally woke up to it. And even now they still get to me, but I’m much better at knowing what to do with them when they do.

When we’re in our crazies it feels like the most important thing in the world, but 99% of the time, it’s just not. Don’t believe me? All you have to do is check.

• How many times have you freaked out about something for ages that you said or did only to find that nobody really noticed, or if they did, it wasn’t nearly so bad as you thought?

• How many times have you wasted hours on crazies only to find out later you were worried about nothing?

• How many times were you freaking out about something that felt like it was going to ruin everything at the time, but you can hardly remember what it was now?

Sure, actual bad things do happen, but we find that when they do, we generally have the resources to deal with them without getting crazy. Furthermore, when your in a complex you’re terrible at being objective about the situation, so the crazies don’t actually help anyway. You’re much better at addressing any given situation from outside your crazy.

Getting control of your crazies takes time. But each time you identify one, step back, find the trigger, and understand it, you gain a foothold into greater emotional freedom.

Even just being able to say to yourself, “Oh, I’m in one of my crazies right now” gives you enough distance from it to make a big difference.

With practice you’ll learn that these events trigger an emotional experience and no more than that — so learn to deal with the emotional experiences. Over time triggers have less power because you’ve become conscious their little game. Sure, you’ll still succumb to your crazies sometimes even after you’re aware of them, but once you know their game too they will be less severe and happen less often.

It’s as Simple as Not Taking the Invitation.

Imagine your trigger as if it were an invitation to freak out. Ideally, you just don’t accept the invitation. In the real world, however, we generally find that we’ve accepted it without realising it: we’re already mid-crazy. But it’s realising when you are mid-crazy that is the key. It might be a bit late, but now is the time to send back that invitation. No doubt it’s hard to send back in mid-crazy, but it can be done. With practice you can send it back sooner and sooner, getting less and less crazy.

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In the name of total transparency, it can be difficult to do this on your own. I believe I was able to do what I did on the bus as a result of many years of therapy that gave me the insight I needed to identify my crazies. By all means do try and do it on your own, but if you have the opportunity, doing it with a trained professional helps a lot. It' usually takes the eyes of another person in a therapeutic relationship not only to deal with the crazies as they arise, but to help you heal from the situations that gave you the crazies in the first place.

All Crazies Are Not Equal:

I’m writing here about the everyday crazies that disrupt our lives and make us all miserable and unhappy — not the sorts of mental disorders that profoundly inhibit and disrupt a life. I’ve been using the word “crazy” on purpose to deconstruct and have a bit of fun with it. Every single human being has crazies and it helps to see “crazy” as something on a spectrum, rather than something someone has or doesn’t have.

That being said, experiences at the more severe end of the spectrum will need more specialist help than you can give yourself by reading an article (however wonderful) like this. The same goes for triggers. A trigger can be any event that sends us into an uncomfortable psychological state — but being triggered into a traumatised state is a different thing altogether. So if you find yourself suffering in a way that you can’t handle on your own or put yourself in any kind of danger, do seek professional help.

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This is a version of an article I wrote some years ago for Medium that has now been deleted.

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