Adderral stopping Restless Leg Syndrome and acting as hypnotic

A single woman, in her late forties, who had too much unwanted sexual attention paid to her as a child because of her blond hair, very fair skin, delicate frame and attractive features, all of which give impression of vulnerability, and as a consequence of which she developed a hysterical fear of men, told me in her psychotherapy session that often in the night she develops Restless Leg Syndrome (RLS) which keeps her awake, and only when she takes Adderall does she get relief from it and can fall asleep.
Now we know that hysteria is running away from the demands of genital sexuality. When the body and mind are not yet ready to meet the challenge of genital sex, if the child is  sexually irritated (sexually abused), or even if the over-stimulation is done without actual physical contact (seduction from a distance), she reacts with great fear to any future demands of genital sexuality and becomes anesthetic to genital sensations (sexual frigidity). In such women non-genital components of sexuality become hypertrophied. Most of the sexual bombshells like Marilyn Monroe owe their sexual appeal to this overly expressed pregenital sexuality over the genital. There is hysterical suppression of the latter.
This patient loves to come to my office with her yoga mattress, which she puts on the floor and starts  her yoga stretches, ostensibly to treat her body aches and pains (fibromyalgia due to childhood sexual overstimulation)  but which are thinly veiled hysterical seductive actions, in which non-genital aspects of her sexuality is displayed in the guise of yoga postures.
What is most noticeable about this behavior is how she jumps up with fright at any noise, or anything startling, while she is doing this yogic behavior, as if she fears getting caught doing something forbidden and naughty.
It is not surprising that this excessive fearful response, partly innate (inherited), partly due to sexual overstimulation in childhood, which was always accompanied by fear of getting caught and punished for it, persists during the night and emerges as Restless Leg Syndrome.
Restless Leg Syndrome appears to be running away from life's troubles (dangers) even when one is in bed and safe from actual harm. One cannot fall asleep because one is anxious and all aroused to run away from the anticipated harm. The thought processes are busy making up scenarios in which one is protecting oneself from impending harm. And in some this is the extent of their motor response to anxiety. However, in some the thoughts alone are not able to deal with the fear. In them the motor response spills into actual physical action of running away though an aborted one. They run but only through the restlessness of their legs.
How does Adderall, an amphetamine salt, a psychostimulant, reverses this fear response? Amphetamines release dopamine in the brain. A chemical that is released on receiving signals that happy things are happening, something good has fallen in your lot, or is about to fall in your lot, for there is a relaxation of your muscle tensions, and drop in the level of brain activity, because there is good and not danger around you.
Receiving this message that all is good where you are, and therefore there is no need to run away out of your bed,  the mind at last takes a sigh of relief, stops worrying, stops sending orders to the body to prepare for running, the racing thoughts and restless legs cease, and one falls asleep.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome caused by experiencing sexual abuse in the proxy

It is almost guaranteed that any sexual abuse in childhood will result in fibromyalgia. Its mechanism appears to be that the person cannot quite give up the vigilance that was first put in to place to watch for and escape the repetition of the abuse. This vigilance becomes such a character of the sexually molested person that even at night, when she is supposed to drop all her guard, curl up and sleep, she remains half-awake, not allowing her muscles to enter into full relaxation and rest.  Added to this is the fight the person nightly wages against the ghosts of the past - the abuser/s - reliving the trauma and trying to get even with the perpetrators even if in dreams. This recreation of the trauma causes varying degrees of anxiety and muscle tension depending upon how abusive and painful the experiences were versus the discharge of sexual tension that occurs with the repetition of the memory.

Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS) is not too far behind fibromyalgia. Sexual abuse causes this malady as well and with regular frequency. Here too the affect generated by recalling the trauma, whether done unconsciously or in sleep or dreams it does not matter, causes a great degree of muscle tension, and the anger against the abuser/s is discharged through excessive mucosal secretion from the intestines and the spasmodic muscle activities of the colon.

But I guess I am getting diverted from the original intent of the post which was to give a clinical account of a patient who witnessed infidelity of her mother as a child and this caused her to have the same reaction that happens in children who are sexually traumatized. Her main mode of discharge of this memory and the anger generated by it was through the symptoms of IBS.

Now in her thirties and plagued by depression, anxiety, remorse, and guilt, as a child she was taken by her mother to the mall and left in department stores so she could make her escapades with her lovers. The little girl greatly resented this. However, she could not betray her mother to the father because she was taken into confidence by the mother and the latter would beg her to not tell the father for it would lead to divorce and tear apart the family. The girl tenderly loved her father who was more than 20 years older than the mother and was in his fifties when she was conceived. When the mother was cheating, he was in his sixties and already old, sick, and dying. The girl hated the mother for her inability to restrain her need to be loved by younger men but was too afraid to offend her.

She was filled with revenge fantasies against the mother, which now as an adult, when activated by some triggers, caused her bowel to flare up.  To this day she cringes when her mother touches her and refuses to hug her. She remarked that he mother is cold and selfish, only into herself whose conversation is mostly about showing how she can never do no wrong, and even today when the daughter confronts her as to how she could expose her child to such depraved behavior finds excuses to escape responsibility.

 "I can hug my mother-in-law but never my mother.I hate her for what she did behind my father's back."

The mother's extra-marital affairs, which the child knew was resulting in sexual intercourse between her mother and her lovers while she was being bought off with the money to shop to her heart's content, acted as if she was getting sexually abused herself. At least that is what my analytic observations led me to conclude.   And in my mind there is little doubt that it was this sexual trauma in the proxy that was resulting in her IBS.

Fibromyalgia, childhood sexual abuse and muscle tension

Once a week I do disability determination examinations for Social Security Administration at a location that is in the heart of Detroit. Most of the patients are very poor, and most of them suffer from plenty of vague pains, aches, and other physical discomforts, some of which arise from definite physical problems such as slipped discs in the back, bone spurs, lupus, etc., and some without the presence of clear cut physical etiology.

Whether or not their pain has clear physical basis, an astonishingly high number, on careful asking, give history of sexual and physical abuse in childhood. I find these physical aches and pains a substitute, arising from the factor of 'repetition compulsion', for the sexual experience itself, done in a distorted fashion, and simultaneously a self punishment for the abuse.

In my practice, on pursuing this line of thinking with my patients, I find that in an overwhelming number of cases the sexual experience was frightening, painful and humiliating. Nevertheless,
the patients repeat the experience in his or her fantasy and in extreme cases virtually every night. Its purpose is to abreact the trauma. When the patients are made aware that they are repeating the unwanted sexual trauma either in their racing thoughts/daydreams or in their nocturnal dreams, they first usually protest tooth and nail, but eventually see the correctness of the interpretation.

The relief obtained from repeating the trauma in their fantasies is meager in comparison to the punishment they heap upon themselves for repeating the experience in their thoughts. The punishment is not just for the guilt for having participated in the act - even when it was coerced, as is in an overwhelming number of cases - but it also involves punishing the perpetrator through identifying with him.

Childhood sexual abuse to females provokes thoughts/impulses/fantasies to attack the perpetrator, including a strong wish to castrate him to rob him of his penis for her own use, and a wish to have a child by him. The aggressive impulses towards the perpetrator is often discharged by turning it against one's own self and doing the suffering of the perpetrator through identification. Fibromyalgia in such cases occurs because the patient, on repeating the sexual trauma in her daytime fantasies and in her dreams, keeps her body tense. The muscles are tense because in sleep, when body musculature is supposed to be relaxed, it is not. Such patients, even in sleep, are in a state of half alertness, prepared to fight the perpetrator to void the abuse, attacking him back in the dream to avenge for the sexual humiliation.

Brain scan studies that show hypersensitivity to pain stimuli which is held as the cause of fibromyalgia does not contradict the above theory, it supports it. Childhood sexual activity is more painful than pleasurable because the body is not physiologically prepared for discharging the sexual stimulation. Also, often sexual abuse of children is accompanied by physically hurting them for sadistic satisfaction and to complete the intimidation process. Therefore, the tracts of pain are simultaneously stimulated with sexual behavior. As an adult, whenever there is any sexual arousal it immediately provokes the reactivation of pain tracts, increases muscle tension, and results in fibromyalgia.

No wonder people who have been sexually overstimulated as children avoid normal sexual activity as adults.