Things I've done under the influence of PMDD

• Kicked shoeboxes, breaking the frame of a wall mirror, and almost breaking a window


• Broke a computer peripheral by throwing it at my desk


• Broke a cat litter scoop handle


• Screamed at my cats, my VCR, my computer, my DVD player, and my husband


• Freaked out on a fellow cast member in a show (Her words: "Whoa sweetie... you just went from zero to sixty on me and I have no idea why.")


• In high school in the midwest, I went for a walk in the dead of winter in a tank top and sat under a tree, hoping I would freeze to death.


• More than once, I have not eaten for more than a day in an attempt to punish myself for being fat.


• Also more than once, I have slept on the floor or the couch (to punish myself) after having a PMDD-instigated argument with my husband.

Once, I got so angry and despondent that I left the house without telling my husband and drove off, intending to jump off a local bridge. Thankfully, I have a very strong survival instinct and I ended up going to my parents' house instead. I told my parents not to call my husband because I was so angry that I didn't want him to know where I was. Of course, they didn't listen to me, and bravo to them.

This was actually a major turning point in our relationship, because before this, my husband tended to just leave me alone when I "shut off." I felt like he didn't care, but he really didn't know what I was going through.

The way I explained it to him, it's like a whirlpool.* Something sets me off and I get mad at myself. I start to feel like I'm a horrible person, and I find that talking, expressing myself in anyway, is next to impossible. It's like my mouth is glued shut. My thoughts head into an ever-worsening spiral of self-loathing, and I end up curled up on the bed, wishing I were dead, and sometimes actually trying to act on it. Before I was able to explain this to him, he didn't know what to do and tended to just leave me alone till I came out of it. But that led to me leaving the house and driving off on my own, headed for that bridge.

After this experience, we had a long talk. I promised that I would never leave the house like that again, and he promised that he wouldn't leave me alone to deal with it on my own.

The next PMDD event after this, I was sitting on the bed, unable to talk, heading down into the whirlpool. My dear, sweet husband was sitting on the floor next me, rubbing my arm, trying to do anything at all to help me (but feeling pretty lost). For the first time, amazingly, the whirlpool feeling dissipated, like cloud cover burning off. I was able to rally and get back to my somewhat-normal self — at least enough to talk to him.

I told him that it had stopped, and that I thought it was because he was rubbing my arm. With further experimentation, over the next few times that it happened, we discovered that if he touched me, if there was any sort of physical contact at all, then I wouldn't end up in a black hole of suicidal despair.**

Since I can't talk, it's become a signal to him that if I curl up on the bed, I need him, right then. He drops whatever he's doing and curls up around me, holds me and lets me know that he's there, and it makes everything bearable. Sometimes I manage to come out of it, and sometimes I cry, but it means that I won't end up in that black hole. It's absolutely amazing to me how supportive and wonderful my husband is. He has taken the brunt of my screaming, crying, insane-asylum-quality episodes, and yet he still loves me unconditionally and supports me in whatever way he can. Now that I have some better coping mechanisms and the support of sertraline, I'm myself probably 90% of the time, and the other 10% is at least not as bad as it used to be.

*Interestingly, my dad has told my mom that the same kind of "whirlpool effect" happens to him when he gets depressed. Our personalities are remarkably similar, but his emotional problems aren't based on a monthly hormonal cycle.

**I think it's because of two things: 1) if I have physical contact with him, it helps get me out of my head, back into the real world, and 2) it shows that someone actually cares about me, and makes it harder to believe the negative thoughts that "I don't matter, and I should just die." I also learned from my therapist that talking about my feelings helps engage my logical brain and helps stop the emotional whirlpool.