Anxious about Anxiety

When that hot feeling of anxiety rises from our gut to become a lump in our throat ....it is simply our cue to pause and self care.  First and foremost before we do anything else. 

Feeling unsafe, upset, overwhelmed and fearful are emotional states that are simply human, and have been all too familiar for me throughout the past fourteen years of my own recovery.

For some of us, when we start to actually face our life issues this is when our anxiety levels increase.  The reason we haven't faced our issues in the past usually has something to do with the fact that we didn't have the willingness, support system or emotional skills to move through our fears.  So we lived in denial of our fear, pushing it down deep into our gut so that it couldn't and wouldn't surface.

When we start to face our fears it can be like gradually taking the bricks that we spent years piling on top of our fears away ... one by one.  My fears were rotting inside of me, like emotional sewerage and were not pleasant to face when I got clean and sober back in 1995.   I felt sick and actual distaste in my mouth from the emotional toxicity I had been suppressing for so many years.

I recall driving through the heart of Brisbane going to pick my sons up one day, when an anxiety attack hit me so hard I thought I was having a heart attack.  My heart started pounding out of my chest so hard I could almost hear it.  My vision blurred and I could hardly get my breath.  I thought I was dying.  Well a part of me was ... one of my many fears was in a death roll.

I was emotionally detoxing.  I was healing and getting better, but it felt like I was getting worse.

Anxiety is a byproduct of fears coming up and out.  Unless we flush out our fears we have very little room for love.  Fear takes up a lot of space if it keeps accumulating over years and if we have no skills on how to flush it out.  If we keep storing it inside of ourselves, packing it down with bricks of denial, it compromises our health and quality of life on so many levels.

When people have past traumas that happened years ago, and others say to them "Oh for god sake, build a bridge and get over it, it happened 30 years ago".  This sort of shaming and ignorance often encourages the anxiety sufferer to just use more bricks and go on keeping a stiff upper lip, so to speak.

The only way out of fear is through the eye of it. And, I believe we all need support in that process.  This involves Tribal support, Tribal elders and skills in how to self care when our tribe or our elders are unavailable.

Our heart tribe may not be our biological family but a recovery group, mediation or yoga group, church group or near and dear friends who treat you as an equal and love you no matter what. 

Our elders may not be our biological parents, they may be professional elders such as clinicians, therapists or loving and wise elders that you meet and choose to become your heart parents.

For me, it became imperative to remember not to get anxious about my anxiety and to self care through loving thoughts, feelings, words and actions instead of self harming by becoming fearful, judgmental and embarrassed about this normal component of the recovery journey. 

I had spent the first 33 years of my life being so afraid of feeling anything.  I had been emotionally disconnected for nineteen years using and abusing drugs and alcohol so that I didn't have to be present to any feelings.  Good or bad.

When good stuff happened I drank and drugged to celebrate, when bad stuff happened I drank and drugged to commiserate.  I used substances like one uses a remote control I could crank up the volume on one feeling and mute another with the right combination of drugs, alcohol, sugar, starvation, nicotine and caffeine.  It worked a treat, until it stopped working in 1995.  What was once my solution became just one more of my problems.

I now choose to see my fear and anxiety as a necessary part of my healing process.  Like a splinter that has to be removed from my foot before I can walk comfortably again, my fears also have to come up and out like a splinter, so I can regain emotional mobility and comfort.  The removal part of emotional splinters is undoubtedly challenging to endure at times, and does hurt, like disinfectant on a wound.   But when you can remember that it is helping you, the fear is replaced with understanding that the pain will pass and that you will be better for having tolerated it, than putting your shoe back on and limping around in denial and discomfort.

Some of us have more emotional splinters that require removal from a traumatized heart than others.  This is where a clinical expert is imperative.  When I started my recovery journey, I felt like I had countless shards of green glass shattered through my heart, that would take forever to remove, one by one.   It has taken a few years, but I am so grateful to say, almost all of it is now gone.   My heart is no longer too tender and too wounded to let anyone close to it.  I call my therapist an emotional surgeon.  I identify with the title of an emotional masseuse.  I help people with circulating a healthy flow of hope and opportunities to identify emotionally tender areas, but a therapist or a clinician, performs emotional surgery. 

When people come to me and say that they don't trust therapist for they don't know their emotional pain first hand.  They believe that those who haven't lived a life like theirs and who only know about trauma through a text book cannot be truly helpful, my response is always the same.

"If I needed brain surgery for a brain tumor, I wouldn't give a rat's arse that the surgeon didn't have a brain tumor too.  I would just want someone who knows their stuff to be skilled and professional and to get the job done.  Actually I would prefer someone who didn't have a brain tumor to operate on me as they would need to be in tip top mental health as far as I am concerned."

So I explain that it is often a very good thing that an emotional clinician does not have the same background as us, and if they have had past traumas, they would not be able to do their job well, had they not done their own work first.   Clinical therapist are skilled in helping remove deep splinters of trauma from the human heart without causing more damage.  If we could remove the splinters like a brain tumor on our own, we would.  But we don't have the skills or ability to do so, so it is just smart to ask for help.

My emotional support tribe and my tribal elders treat me with respect and emotional and always offer helpful verbal support.  When anxiety hits me I often think of them and use words they have said to me in the past to self sooth when I am anxious.  Phrases Beautiful Barb my heart mother or The Gentle Giant, my male elder and therapist, would say to me if they were with me whilst in an anxiety attack... come flooding back like a warm shawl being put around my shoulders.

"You are safe now"

"You will get through the other side of this, you have already survived this, healing the memory will not send you insane, it will reclaim your sanity"

"This is finite, it will not go on forever, each time you remove a splinter of fear, that is one less that you carry with you, you are making space for love now"

"You will be emotionally tender after sitting with this feeling, but in a few days you will be stronger and your self respect will bear new growth"

"You are far stronger than you realize"

"Mother Nature and Father Time have more faith in you than you have in yourself"

"You won't be given anything you can't handle"

"You are allowed to turn the world off, say no to people and look after yourself first; it is your time to heal"

"Once you let this fear out, you can let more love in"

"You are birthing a new love for life, go with the pain, let it come, don't fight it"

It is when I am fearful of my anxiety and I fight it that I inflame my suffering.  Like a woman giving birth ... going with the pain and using it to push when required and resting when exhausted is the most productive way to birth new life.  Recovering from fear and deep heart trauma is exactly the same; it is about birthing a new life.

So whenever I get anxious these days there a quite a few ways I can self care to help myself flush out the fear and create new space for love.  I often silently say one or a few of the above phrases that my support system would use.  Or I might just surrender and cry.  I like to lie down and not fight the fear either on a bed, on Mother Earths lap on the grass or on the floor; it helps with the process of surrender.   I will call someone who loves me as an act of self care even if I don't reach them and get their voicemail it helps me remember I am no longer alone.  If I reach them I just confess to feeling upset, afraid and anxious and I own my emotional state lovingly without shame.  When I do this it always dissolves a big chunk of the fear instantly.  Deep breaths are priceless and help quell my anxiety too.  Closing my eyes, and trying to sleep if I can also helps reset my brain chemistry and relieves my panic.

If you or someone you love suffers from anxiety and panic attacks it is important for them to understand they are not weak, strange, weird or flawed for life. Anxiety is a normal human reaction that indicates attention and self care is required.  If anxiety is not supported and understood this is when it becomes problematic. 

The anxiety is not the problem ...the fear, negative judgment and anxiety about the anxiety is the issue that needs to be addressed. 

When those experiencing anxiety are supported well and reminded that they are in the process of emotionally detoxing old fears, it can become a productive not destructive process.  If they are not supported but shamed and treated disrespectfully they will become stuck in this process like a woman birthing a child without support it can be emotionally dangerous if people around them are inexperienced as they can cause more harm rather than help.

When anxiety is managed with alcohol, denial, abuse of drugs, shame, fear, food and other weapons of mass distraction, it puts all emotionally toxic fears on pause and buried, until the person is eventually ready to do their emotional homework. 

Of course some people choose not to grow emotionally, and some do and it is important to mind our own business and not get self righteous towards those who choose to stay living in denial.  God knows I did for 33 years, my denial helped me cope.   Love and support is the only way people heal and choose to recover, shaming them just keeps them digging their heels in with rebellion.

I have been at my most anxious when realizing I do have choices, that I can stand up for myself and actually give myself permission to change a situation I have been pretending is ok with me, when it is not.   When I get a glimpse of my own truth, my own strength and capacity to choose and make changes, that is when I get most anxious.  The fear of freedom, empowerment and emotional responsibility, success, respect and self love are always at the core of why I am anxious.  It is the too good to be true possibilities for someone like me, who has been so dysfunctional, so angry and emotionally irresponsible in my past that has frightened me most.  I don't get fearful of my life stuffing up; I am most familiar with that.  My anxiety arises around feeling worthy and deserving of the beauty and love in this wonderful life.

I find many that I work with that are trudging the road to happy destiny, also find that they too are at their most anxious when they allow themselves to dare to question, challenge, stand up and speak up.  To have the audacity to unashamedly admit to self love and ignore those tall poppy voices that try to pull them back into a life of fear and insecurity.   Those people who when they succeed, or say no, or set a boundary attempt to shame them and accusingly say...

"Who do you think you are?"

And for the person in recovery to actually be able to reply and say....,

"I am finally free to be me and you aint seen nothin' yet, I am just getting started at living an amazing life ....  my life".

I am over the half way mark with my next manuscript at the moment, and can see the light at the end of the tunnel, so thank you for continuing to share this space with me, as contact with the outside world is rare as I sit in my cave and write in 11 hour blocks.  So I look forward to connecting to the outside world with my blogs, and am so grateful to hear from you all, thank you for your ongoing support.

I am getting very excited about the prospect of sharing this next book child with you later this year.

My Word Vitamins for today that I need for nourishment more than ever as my anxiety accompanies me into my writers chair every morning.   It remains a daily challenge for me to work on believing in myself as a writer and a worthy mother of this active book child that wakes my heart most nights, getting ready to take its place in the world.

Anxiety is fear of one's self."    Wilhelm Stekel