Anxiety: What It Is and How to Repsond to it

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:

• increased heart rate
• sweating
• dizziness
• chest pain
  
• shortness of breath
• muscle pain
• tension 
• tightnesss (especially in the head or neck or face)
• felt sense of nervousness or restlessness in your torso
• or a sense of doom in your throat or chest

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.

If you are in a restaurant and a man holds up a gun, most people will get dysregulated. But what about if you get dysregulated but something very different like just someone not liking them. If you have a history of trauma, you will get dysregulated more often than other people AND you will also have a much harder time getting regulated again. 

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:

• Top-Down approach: Use your thinking brain to calm your anxiety -- self talk to try to calm your anxiety. You know this often doesn't work very well. This is because top-down doesn't usually work nearly as well. 
• Bottom-Up approach: Uses your brain stem to calm your limbic system. Breathing. Slowing your breathing. After you have breathed a little, you can ask yourself what else would bring you a deeper sense of calm. Music? Smells? A bath? You have to find out what those things are that soothe your body. 

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.