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Last week I saw someone wearing a sweatshirt that said, Your Anxiety is Lying to You, and I bristled. Anxiety has been unfairly vilified and what I call enenemized. Yes, it’s uncomfortable but it’s not bad or wrong. As someone who had the diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (along with quite a few other diagnoses), I often felt treated as if I needed to be fixed. It’s not that the diagnoses was wrong. It matched my experience. But it felt as if my angst and unsettledness were treated like a miswiring—something that shouldn’t be there. When, in fact, my anxiety reflected just how much my body had to adapt to keep help me stay safe and connected given the environment I grew up in. What I wish someone had asked me instead was, “What are you afraid of?” Feeling anxious and on edge is a reaction to something and/or someone. It emerges for a reason, often a protective one. And when we’re labeled with an anxiety disorder or simply told, “You’re anxious,” it can leave us feeling as if, somehow, we’re flawed or at fault. Let me share a story … Many years ago, I met with a specialist in the hopes that he could cure my anxiety once and for all. At the end of our meeting he said in a gruff, lecturing tone, “You have to be less anxious. You have to want to be less anxious.” My first thought was Duh, that’s why I’m here. And then I felt this burst of punchy aggression and thought, Nobody gets to speak to her like that! I wondered who the “her” was. I walked back out to the waiting room, sat down and cried. Then I realized: The “her” was my anxiety. And, I wondered, If I’m feeling protective of her might she have been protecting me this whole time? Right then, in that moment, something shifted. I felt my entire body go from feeling like a clenched fist to un-gripping, softening and mellowing. She felt gotten and my body relaxed.
That shift wasn’t a one and done process, but it was the start of relating to anxiety as a loyal, loving friend instead of an enemy to fight against. And that’s when the real, lasting change began. I had spent years and lots of money trying to get rid of her without realizing she had come about to keep me safe. No wonder she never left my side! You may be wondering, Are you still anxious? No. I still have the strengths that anxiety brought me like attentiveness and discernment, but I’m no longer on edge and unsettled. Do I still get worried? Absolutely. Is change still hard? You bet. But I no longer live in that state of bracing alertness—caught up in ruminating and exhausted from worrying all day, every day. If you’re exhausted from always bracing, worrying or feeling on edge, you may be interested in my upcoming course, Living Fully Amidst Uncertainty, beginning October 14th. One of the many skills you’ll learn is how to turn towards protective strategies (obsessive thinking, worrying, bracing … ) in a respectful way, so they can begin to shift—without any kind of pushing, forcing or fixing. To learn more about this 4-week online course and how to register you can click the button below.
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