Claire Weekes - Hope and Help for Your Nerves

THEY SAY ITS JUST NERVES

But it can stop you from working upset your personal relationships transform you from the busy and interesting person you used to be into someone else. Dr. Claire Weekes has treated victims of nervous illness with the care that only a sympathetic, understanding doctor can offer. The man who has trouble swallowing the woman who cannot travel outside the safety of her own home the young girl who is afraid she will be sick in publicDr. Weekes has answers for them all. She knows about the tricks your nervous system can play on you, and gives down-to-earth, step-by-step guidance for achieving full recovery.

DR. CLAIRE WEEKES is the author of the bestselling Peace from Nervous Suffering, also available in a Signet edition. In addition, Dr. Weekes, best known for her pioneering work in the study of nervous illness and anxiety, has lectured at psychiatric hospitals in Britain and has spoken often on radio and television both in Britain and in the United States.

Hope and Help
for Your Nerves

by
Dr. Claire Weekes,
M.B., D.Sc., M.R.A.C.P.

Consulting Physician to the
Rachel Forster Hospital
Sydney, Australia

A SIGNET BOOK

SIGNET

Published by New American Library, a division of
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Published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin
Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Dutton edition.

First Signet Printing, September 1990
40 39 38 37

Copyright Dr. Claire Weekes, 1969

Afterword copyright Dr. Claire Weekes, 1990

All rights reserved

ISBN: 978-1-101-63988-7

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To the memory of my indomitable mother

Many of those who suffer from nervousness are persons of fine susceptibilities and delicate regard for honor, endowed with a feeling of duty and obligation toward others. Their nerves have tricked them, misled them.

W. R. H OUSTON

Hope and Help
for Your Nerves

If you are reading this book because your nerves are in a bad way, you are the very person for whom it has been written, and I shall therefore talk directly to you as if you were sitting beside me.

I shall show clearly and simply, and yet with all necessary detail, how such nervous illness begins and develops and how it can be cured. The advice given here will definitely cure you, if you follow it. This will take perseverance and some courage. You may notice that I have not asked for patience. A nervously ill person is rarely patient, because sick nerves are usually agitated nervesthat is one reason why he is bewildered by them. To wait patiently in line can be almost intolerable misery for such a person. However, there is a substitute for patience, and this I shall present to you later.

It will not be difficult for you to read this book: it is about you and your nerves, and for this reason you will read it with interest, whereas to read an ordinary book or newspaper may seem an impossibility or, should you succeed, may leave you more distressed than when you began.

I used the word cure and this may surprise you, because it implies an illness and you may think of yourself as more bewildered than ill, lost in a maze, trying to find your way back to being the person you used to be.

On the other hand, you may be so depressed and exhausted that you may readily agree that you are ill. Whether or not you consider yourself ill, more than anything else you want to be yourself again. You probably look at others in the street and wonder why you cant be like them. What is this terrible thing that has happened to you? What is the meaning of these terrible feelings?

Such feelings may have possessed you for a long time, even for years. Indeed, you may have reached a point of such desperate suffering that you could be thinking of ending it all, or may even have attempted to do just that. And yet, however deeply involved you may be in nervous illness, however long you may have suffered, you can recover and enjoy life again. I emphasize however deeply involved and however long. The main difference between a person ill for many years and someone ill for a short time is that the one who suffered for long has had more time to collect disturbing memories, especially the memory of much defeat, so that he despairs easily. But there is nothing altered within this person determining that because he has been ill for so long, he cannot possibly recover now.

However long you may have been ill, your body is waiting to recover in exactly the same way as the body of a person who has been ill for only a short time. It is important to understand this, because your illness is very much an illness of how you think. It is very much an illness of your attitude to fear, panic. You may think it is an illness of how you feel (it most certainly seems like this), but how you feel depends on how you think, on what you think. Because it is an illness of what you think, you can recover.