INTRODUCTION
This is episode 109 on The Place We Find Ourselves podcast: Anxiety: What it Is and How to Respond to it. I encourage you to listen to the episode for yourself. If you EVER battle anxiety, this will help you understand WHY.
Oh, how I wish someone would have explained this to me when I was younger and my anxiety started popping up. I wish they wouldn't have just given me medication and instead would have said, "There is a reason you are feeling this. Let's find out WHY!"
WHERE DOES ANXIETY COME FROM?
"Fear is an emotional reaction in the presence of genuine or perceived danger in the environment. Anxiety is what you feel when you are avoiding important emotions."
Anxiety is what you feel when you push down core emotions like grief, sadness, anger.
If you are feeling something that feels like fear but you are not in any danger in the moment, than you are most likely experiencing anxiety.
Our experience of anxiety is often linked to early experiences of emotions. Suppose you were sad a lot as an eight-year-old boy and your Dad got frustrated with you or didn't listen to you. The little boy learns to push the sadness down and suppress it and avoid it. As a result, the sadness will not be able to flow through his body. Little boy can't deal with the sadness. And in time, this boy will begin to feel anxiety whenever sadness bubbles up.
Please note: Everyone has this in their childhood. EVERYONE has some sort of trauma from their childhood. Much of it was not intentional. Some of it just happened. It could have happened from an innocuous comment someone made one time. This is not about blaming the people in your past. This is about naming what happened so you can heal from it.
Why does this little boy feel anxiety?
This boy's brain has paired sadness with: Dad withdraws or Dad gets upset with me. Also, he begins to accumulate a reservoir of "unfelt" sadness. He should have been able to process through this sadness, but now, as an adult, he is overwhelmed by the cumulative "unfelt" sadness that is in his body. Now, when he feels all that "unfelt" sadness inside his heart, he feels anxious.
Many children may be taught that if they feel fear or anger, they are bad.
QUESTIONS TO PONDER
Ponder a few questions for me:
1. When you felt fear or sorrow as a kid, were those emotions welcomed by your caregivers?
2. Did your parents sit with you in your fear or sorrow and help you process through it?
3. Did you somehow get the message that your fear or sorrow was bad or weak or simply, unwelcome?
4. What about anger? Was that anger welcomed by your parents?
5. Did your parents make space for your anger?
6. Did they hear you out and let you express that anger?
7. Was there room in your home for your anger?
The avoidance of his sadness is not this little boy's fault. And as he grows up, he is not making a conscious decision to avoid this sadness. But if the parent can't tolerate the sadness, avoiding sadness is the little boy's only option. He has learned to do this subconsciously. And it worked for him. Until it no longer worked anymore.
THE PROBLEM WITH A CHRISTIAN'S EMOTIONS
Here's another BIG one that may have come into your home ... accidentally ... and this one is very common with Christians.
Feeling sadness, grief, or anger can also conflict with other beliefs that are important to us. As a Christian, what should be your response when you feel one of these emotions? For many Christians, feeling sadness conflicts with their beliefs about what they should be feeling. They should be "rejoicing in the Lord always." Or what about fear? We are taught that we should be strong and courageous and trusting in God and not fearful. Feeling anger does the same. They aren't supposed to let the sun goes down on their anger.
As a result, when these emotions bubble up, you shove them into the basement of your heart because you feel like they are ungodly things to feel. And that shoving LEADS TO ANXIETY.
Anxiety is caused by avoiding feelings that your body is TRYING and NEEDS to express. If you are angry because you have been wronged by someone and you shove that anger down because the good, Christian thing to do is not get angry ... you will eventually experience anxiety. Your emotions don't go away because you ignore them.
What happens when you start to feel anxiety? Very often we respond the same way we responded to our sadness, grief, and anger. Instead, we feel guilty for feeling the anxiety. I say, "Wendi, you aren't supposed to be anxious. The Bible says not to feel anxious about anything. Stop this. Just trust God."
Here's the problem with that.
You are attempting to push your real feelings down. But remember! That's what causes anxiety in the first place. The Bible is far more complex than we want to acknowledge. It cannot be reduced to a single sentence. This means, yes, Paul tells us not to be anxious about anything. But, two chapters earlier, Paul talks about his own anxiety when he discusses having to send his friend back to a previous church saying," ... that I may have less anxiety." Paul felt fear! He says, "For even when we came into Macedonia, our bodies had no rest, but we were afflicted at every turn — fighting without and fear within."
He was afraid. For many Christians, anxiety is caused by not expressing the anger that is inside you. Christian men can have a little anger. But Christian women aren't permitted anger at all.
THE LINK TO YOUR STORY
Anxiety is almost always linked to "your story" which is your past .... the story of your past. Are you anxious about your child being ostracized? Others finances. Others work. Why are some people anxious about one thing and someone else is anxious about something else? There is a reason that you are anxious about the things you are anxious about. And that reason is rooted in your story.
Anxiety needs to become a prompt for you to be curious about your story. Especially your story from -18 in your family of origin. Your anxiety is almost always connecting you to unfelt emotions from your past. Especially those that you experienced in your 0-18 years and that you weren't given space to feel. Anxiety is a light on the dashboard of your heart that says something isn't right with your emotions inside. You have unfelt emotions in your engine that need tending to and needs your attention. It wants your attention!
HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU ARE FEELING IS ANXIETY?
How do you know you are feeling anxious. If you experience any of the following, you may be feeling anxiety:
There are lots of other things that can cause the bodily sensations above. But, if you are experiencing one or more of these symptoms, it might be your body's way of saying you are anxious.
We need to be familiar with our body and inparticular, the sensations in our body. Emotions are FIRST bodily sensations. If you arne't familiar with the sensations in your body, then you can't name what you are feeling and you can't engage it well.
DYSREGULATION
When most people say, "I am feeling anxious," what they are confessing is that their body is in a state of DISREGULATION.
Affect is the felt sense of what is happening inside your body. It refers to your inner emotional and bodily experience. Affect exists on a spectrum.
Not everyone's brain has the same ability to self-regulate.
HAVING CURIOSITY & KINDNESS
So, what do you do about all this? What do you DO when you are dysregaulated. The TWO most important words as you begin engaging your anxiety are:
CURIOSITY: Will I be curious about what this anxiety might be telling me?
KINDNESS: What would it look like to be kind to my body right now?
What do you think God wants for your body when your body is suffering with high levels of cortisol. And sustained levels of cortisol are not good for the body or the brain. When you are feeling anxious, YOU ARE SUFFERING! I think God wants:
1. You to experience the comfort that kindness brings, and in time ...
2. God wants you to take your body seriously and wants you to think about what your body is feeling and why.
So next time you feel anxious, do the following:
1. BE AWARE! Notice the anxiety. Notice where in your body you are feeling the anxiety. Where is it? Tune into it. Just notice it.
2. ASK YOURSELF: WHAT WOULD KINDNESS TO MY BODY LOOK LIKE RIGHT NOW? Part of kindness is doing some things that bring regulation back to your body. Pressing your feet into the ground and mindfully taking some deep breaths. You can approach with:
3. WHAT EMOTIONS MIGHT I BE PUSHING DOWN OR SUPPRESSING? WHAT MIGHT MY ANXIETY BE TRYING TO TELL ME? Be curious about what your anxiety might be protecting you from feeling? Are you sad? Are you angry? Do you feel grief?
THE GOAL: LET THE EMOTIONS FLOW
The goal is to let your emotions flow. The goal is to experience and express the emotions that are underneath the anxiety. The unfelt and avoided emotions. If your emotions are a river, you want your emotions to flow, freely down the river. You want to express is fully and feel it freely.
When rivers can't flow freely, bad things happen .... like FLOODS. It is the same thing with emotions. So, if you are sad about something in the present today, you need to let your body feel that sadness and express that sadness because it MATTERS.
If you have unfelt sadness from your past, you must let your body feel that sadness and express it. You must bear witness to the suffering you endured as a child (which we have ALL felt!) There is a part of us that needs to pay attention to this and take it seriously. There might be an angry part of you from middle school that needs to have some space and take that anger seriously.
WE NEED COMMUNITY!
It is especially helpful if you can do this with one or two other people. We are designed to let this happen in community, with others. Many cultures have communal rituals for the expression of sorrow and rage. You need at least one person there to bear witness to your expression of sorrow. This is what the spirit of God does. Jesus says, "Blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted." God will bear witness to your story and your suffering.
The Kitsteiner family added another little member about two months ago. John's sister, Katie, and her husband, Eddie (who live over the mountain from us) had a second child. This makes twelve children amongst John's siblings. We have four. His older sister Elizabeth has two. His younger brother Ray has two. His brother Matt has two. And now Katie has two. (Rob, who lives in California doesn't have children.) Here are a few snaps!
The following notes have been taken from this podcast: The Place We Find Ourselves: What Gets in the Way of Healing?
God designed us to heal. We heal if the conditions for healing are right. So why don't we heal? You can block the natural healing process of trauma by doing any of the following things. There are four main reasons:
1. Minimizing Your Story: Everyone minimizes their story -- no one comes into a counseling office saying, "this is the worst story you've ever heard!" We all minimize our wounds. You don't believe that your story from when you are a child is affecting you today. In Jeremiah 6 & 8, God says something fascinating. He gets angry because the leader of his people are minimizing the wounds of Israel. "They dress the wounds of my people as though it were not serious. 'Peace, peace' they say, when there is no peace." Most of us do the same thing with regard to our own wounds. We minimize our wounds, "peace, peace, everything is fine," when in fact there is no peace in our bodies. How many times have you said, "I shouldn't complain because _____ has had it so much harder than me." The point is, she shouldn't focus on her own pain. Why do we feel the need to compare our pain and story to another person? Anytime you compare your story, you are minimizing your story and dressing the wounds of yourself as a boy or girl as though it was not serious. You do not want your story to affect yourself as much as you did. You will feel the grief and suffering rising up, and your first thought is, "Okay, wait, but they had a bad story." It may be true that someone else had a worse story, but all you are trying to do is escape your own story and having to look it in the face. Why do you contempt for the younger you? Why do you want to dress the wounds of that younger child as if they do not matter?
Here is another important thing to keep in mind. If you are asked to come up with positive memories and you do not have them, that is a big deal. If you have no memories, it means that the memories were devoid of goodness. Lack of memories indicates that there is tragedy. It is very hard to give weight to the absence of something. If there was an immense void of goodness, it can be hard to give weight to it because you are acknowledging the absence of something.
2. Spiritualizing the bad things that have happened to you. (This is a big one for people who have spent time in a church community!) This means that you have theology or the Bible to avoid engaging with what you have endured. You use these things to avoid feeling your feelings. This is another way of minimizing your story. The vast majority of churches are very skilled at creating environments at which the harsh realities of living in a sinful world are spiritualized away. We all have a way of not looking at how painful life can be and has been. Here's an example. You are talking about your parent's divorce. And when your friend presses in and says, "Man, that must have been hard," you respond with, "Yeah, it was hard, but I see how God used that in my life to shape my character and grow me as a person." You are spiritualizing away the big feelings that you would have felt if you had stayed with the reality of the heartache of the story. You are using spirituality to avoid feeling your feelings. You are appealing to God's goodness to avoid sitting with that eight-year-old girl when her parents got divorced. You are abating the dicomsfort of your own story by saying, "Well, I know God is using all things for His glory."
Please understand. I don't disagree that God does use all things for good. But why do you have to bring that up right when your friend was giving weight to your pain and empathizing with you and really being with you in it? This misguided optimism has nothing to do with the gospel of Jesus. Misguided optimism wants to say, "There was no crucifixtion. There was only resurrection.
3. Self-contempt: Flashback. You are an overweight teenager and when you go to sit on a small chair while helping younger kids, another boy says to his friend, "I hope she doesn't break that chair because she is so fat." Instead of sitting in the shame which is intolerable, you join them in their contempt of you by thinking, "You are so fat. Why are you always snacking. Why can't you have more self-control? You are so lazy." And you stab yourself with darts a dozen more times. Did your classmate hurt you? Oh yes. But your self-contempt by the end of the day has done far more damage. From that day forward, how many times do you look in the mirror and berate yourself for your weight. This is the goal of evil. To seduce you to inflict violence on yourself. It is violence from you, to you. It is designed to protect you from feeling your big feelings which in this case, it would be SHAME.
What is your posture toward the younger you? Look back at yourself as a middle schooler. How do you feel toward that little boy or girl? More often than not, our posture isn't very kind. It's this posture of, "He was so needy" or "She was so stupid to think her grandfather actually cared for her" or just "I can't stand her." Do you hear the violence in those accusations? When you are awash in self-contempt, you can't feel your feelings. When you are hating yourself, you can't access those big feelings! The anecdote for this is kindness! Can you soften your heart just a little bit? There has to be a growing kindness to yourself in order to heal
4. The Pace of Your Life: This is actually the fourth excuse that gets in the way of healing. Our frantic pace of life prohibits us from actually being present for ourselves! How much time do you spend noticing your inner life of thoughts and longings? Of just noticing your thoughts, feelings, and longings? Rather than attending to the tasks of your day? You must spend more time with yourself, with your heart, with all the swirl of activity in your mind. The thing that stops most of us from spending time with ourselves is actually fear of what might be lurking in there. It can be very scary to get connected to your true thoughts and feelings. The pace of your life may be driven by a fear of slowing down and just being with your own heart. This makes sense.
You must create space for grief to emerge. You must stop to grieve. In The Poisonwood Bible: "As long as I kept moving, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer's long hair in water. I knew the weight was there, but it didn't touch me. Only when I stopped, did the slick, dark stuff of it come floating around my face, catching my arms and throat 'till I began to drown. So I just didn't stop." We are truly afraid that our grief will pull us under and we will never make it back up. But what if going down into the depths of grief is required for your body to experience the naturalness of healing.
