Nancy McWilliams Annihilation vs Separation Anxiety
Channel: Visceral Gravitas
Date: 2024-03-06

excerpt from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZh3V81MkXw

transcript:
we're defining in the DSM 
anxiety based on sweaty Palms rapid heartbeat reported feeling of apprehension 
and there's a huge clinical literature about internal differences in the experience of anxiety 
is it separation anxiety 
is it Annihilation anxiety 
is it moral anxiety 
is it signal anxiety 
is it post-traumatic anxiety 

and we've been trying to tell the researchers it matters for therapy, which one it is 

recently again in panksepp's research 
we are finding that there is a biological basis for some of these different subjective experiences of anxiety 

there are 
panksepp writes about there being seven different basic needs biologically or systems in the brain or even drives 
he's bringing back a term that's been much scorned in recent years 
but that, among these are 

There's an anxiety center in the brain brain that seems to be the legacy of our fears of predatory animals 
and that's you know somebody's going to get me 
and that's what clinicians have called 
paranoid anxiety or 
psychotic anxiety or 
Annihilation anxiety 
I'm going to be destroyed 

if you've ever been close to being destroyed 
you have felt Annihilation anxiety 
it's not just people with psychotic tendencies that feel this 
I felt it on uh September 11th when there were planes in the sky and nobody knew what they were doing and they had taken down one Tower and everybody was afraid they could be anywhere 

I felt Annihilation anxiety then 
That kind of anxiety is completely indifferent to the serotonin reuptake Inhibitors because it's not mediated by serotonin 
in fact the main thing that will calm that kind of anxiety are the benzos and alcohol 
the downer drugs 
which may be why you know a lot of people with substance use disorders have a certain level of annihilation anxiety 
that they're trying to drown and self-medicate for 

then there's also separation anxiety 
that's in a completely different part of the brain 
in separation anxiety there is a part 
every young mammal has a separation cry and when separated from the mother, it will make that cry and exactly the same brain area will light up in the mother as has lit up in the baby, in response to that baby's cry 

if you insist on separating the baby animal from the mother for longer than a few minutes 
it will first get very very anxious and then it will fall into a depression 
and it's visible, some of you I'm sure have seen work by people like beatrice beebe 
where you can see this happen with human infants 
that system is mediated by serotonin and that system is responsive to the SSRI 
so there's even a medical implication for looking at what's the meaning of anxiety