by Sheryl Paul
To my family — Daev, Everest, and Asher — three beautiful, sensitive souls who bring rivers of love, kindness, meaning, and joy into my life every day
Jung observed that most of the neurosis, the feeling of fragmentation, the vacuum of meaning, in modern lives, results from this isolation of the ego-mind from the unconscious. . . . If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.
ROBERT JOHNSON
Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth
CONTENTS
List of Practices
INTRODUCTIONAnxiety Is a Doorway
PART ONEAnxiety and Its Messages
1Anxiety Defined and the Call to Turn Inward
Symptoms of Anxiety
Origins of Anxiety
Anxiety Is Not a Game of Whac-A-Mole
Four Key Elements: Curiosity, Compassion, Stillness, and Gratitude
2Two Cultural Messages That Create Anxiety: The Myth of Normal and the Expectation of Happiness
The Myth of Normal
The Expectation of Happiness
There Are No Answers, Only Guideposts to Wisdom
To Be Human
3Roadblocks to Healing
The Character of Resistance
Responsibility: The Key to Transformation
The Escape Hatch of Perfection: A Way to Avoid Responsibility
The Timeline of Healing
4Transitions
The Three Stages of Transition
The Transitions That the Culture Doesn’t Talk About
5Months and Seasons: Attuning to the Rhythms of the Year
Autumn: The Season of Letting Go
Winter: Season of Stillness and Gratitude
Spring: The Season of Rebirth
Summer: The Season of Celebration
6The Vulnerability of Being Present
No Escape Hatch from Life
The Fear of Feeling Too Good
PART TWOThe Four Realms of Self: Healing Anxiety from the Ground Up
7The Seat at the Head of Your Table
The Qualities of a Loving Inner Parent
8The Realm of the Body
The Physical Symptoms of Anxiety
Low Blood Sugar and Anxiety
Food and Anxiety
Alcohol and Anxiety
Exercise
Sleep
Hormones
9The Realm of Thoughts
Intrusive Thoughts and the Cognitive Manifestations of Anxiety
Accessing the Choice-Point
Developing Discernment: Whatever You Water Will Grow
Symbols, Metaphors, and Dreams
The Metaphor of Intrusive Thoughts
Living with Uncertainty: The Call of Intrusive Thoughts
10The Realm of Feelings
Anxiety Is a Placeholder for Feelings
A Lifetime Habit of Avoiding Pain
Early and Ancient Pain
How Unshed Grief Morphs into Anxiety
Turn to Face Your Fear
Fundamental Human Feelings: Boredom and Loneliness
11Longing
Root Versus Secondary Longing
The Lives We Will Never Live
The Wisdom of Longing
12The Realm of Soul
The Well of Being
The Essential Function of Healthy Rituals
13When Anxiety Heals
Anxiety and Emptiness
The Fruits of the Labor
PART THREERelationships
14The Vulnerability of Connection
15The Romantic Connection
What Is Relationship Anxiety?
What Is Healthy Love?
Fear Eyes or Clear Eyes: Love Is Not the Absence of Fear
Key Concepts for Understanding Relationship Anxiety: Projection and the Pursuer-Distancer Syndrome
16Parenting in an Age of Anxiety
Worry Is the Work of Parenthood
Three Antianxiety Medications for Parents: Gratitude, Attunement, Taking the Long View
Helping Children with Anxiety
Teaching Kids to Feel Their Feelings
Fully Loved
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
APPENDIX ARelationship Red Flags
APPENDIX BTwo Ways to Journal
Recommendations for Further Learning
About the Author
About Sounds True
Copyright
PRACTICES
Chapter 1A Media Diet
Become Curious by Noticing and Naming
Tonglen
Meditative Questions to Help You Slow Down
Belly Breathing
Chapter 2How the Myth of Normal Has Affected You
Replacing “Should” with Loving Action
Noticing Your Intrinsic, Positive Traits
Chapter 3Working with Resistance
Locate Your Inner Parent/Wise Self/Inner Parent
Chapter 4Meeting What Arises Through the Fissures of Transitions
Chapter 5Invite Pain to Your Holiday Table
Invitation of the Seasons
Chapter 6Working with the Fear of Feeling Too Good
Chapter 7Growing Your Wise Self/Inner Parent
Chapter 8A Thirty-Day Challenge
Chapter 9Identify How You Water Your Thoughts
An Exercise in Metaphors
Four Steps for Dismantling Intrusive Thoughts
Chapter 10Memories and Beliefs about Pain
Chapter 11Becoming Curious about Longing
Chapter 12Developing Healthy Rituals
Chapter 15Working with Projection
Chapter 16Seeing Yourself Through Eyes of Love
INTRODUCTION
ANXIETY IS A DOORWAY
Carl Jung said that if you find the psychic wound in an individual or a people, there you also find their path to consciousness. For it is in the healing of our psychic wounds that we come to know ourselves. . . . In the evolution of consciousness, our greatest problem is always our richest opportunity.
ROBERT JOHNSON
We: Understanding the Psychology of Romantic Love
Anxiety is the wound of our times. According to the World Health Organization, 260 million people are diagnosed with anxiety worldwide — and millions more are without a diagnosis. These numbers clearly indicate that we are living in an age of anxiety. This profound psychic wound crosses all boundaries by which we typically classify ourselves, for anxiety, like loss, is one of the great equalizers: it doesn’t matter how old you are, where you live, what you look like, how much money you make, your sexual orientation, or your gender — eventually everyone will meet anxiety in the dark of night.
While the nature of the wound is clear, what is less clear from a mainstream perspective is how to address it. Guided by a Western mindset that seeks to erase pain in all forms (physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual), most people see anxiety and its cohort of symptoms as something to hide, deny, distract from, or eradicate. What we don’t realize is that when we regard anxiety only as a problem and seek to eliminate the symptoms, it is pushed underground, where it’s forced to rise back up with greater intensity, and we also miss the rich opportunity to evolve both individual and cultural consciousness that anxiety invites.
For anxiety is both the wound and the messenger, and at the core of the message is an invitation to wake up. In order to decipher the specifics of its messages, we have to shift from a mindset of shame, which sees anxiety as evidence of brokenness, to a mindset of curiosity, which recognizes that anxiety is evidence of our sensitive heart, our imaginative mind, and our soul’s desire to grow toward
wholeness. Anxiety, when approached from the mindset of learning, directs you to something deep inside that needs to be seen, a call from soul to pay attention, an invitation from the wellsprings of being to turn inward and heal at the next layer of growth.
One element that reduces the shame around anxiety is knowing that you’re not alone; normalization causes shame to shrink. From the cross section of my worldwide audience, I hear the same symptoms and thoughts: “What if I married the wrong person?” “What if I have a terminal illness?” “What if I run out of money?” “What if something horrible happens to someone I love?” “What if I hurt my baby?” These are all clues that anxiety is the wound of our times and that we’re in the territory of the collective unconscious. Carl Jung coined the term “collective unconscious” to describe the part of the mind that is common to all humans; and these thoughts, emerging from a shared psyche, point to the archetypal themes and stories where anxiety constellates: relationships, health, money, parenthood, the need for safety and security. Over the years, clients have shared these thoughts in hushed tones, but because I write about them weekly on my blog, they know that they’re not alone. One of the blessings of the internet is that the contents of the collective unconscious, formerly only accessible via dreams and myths, are now more widely accessible. You are far from alone with your anxiety, no matter how it manifests.
Anxiety’s emissaries arrive in many forms: worry, intrusive thoughts, obsessions, compulsions, insomnia, somatic symptoms. If we greet these emissaries with shame and try to sequester them into the far down, hidden recesses of psyche, they will gather in numbers and strength until we are forced to listen. As they scream for attention, the culturally induced, shaming voices take over and say, “You’re broken. You’re fundamentally wrong. These thoughts and symptoms are evidence that there’s something deeply, pathologically wrong with you. Don’t talk about. Don’t admit it. Try to get rid of it as quickly and cleanly as possible.”
Seeing anxiety and intrusive thoughts as wise manifestations of the unconscious is a vastly different view — and a much more hopeful and life-enhancing view — of anxiety than the one our culture holds. For what I’ve witnessed over the last twenty years of working closely in the underworld of psyche is that when we turn toward our symptoms instead of medicalizing and pathologizing them, we begin to gather our gold. Anxiety is a doorway into a self that longs for wholeness. Our symptoms, when honored, lead the way. When you meet your darkest, most uncomfortable places with a mindset of curiosity and compassion, you transform, and your life expands in untold ways. I’ve seen it countless times with my clients, my course members, my friends, my children, and in my own life. The same can be true for you.
Brazil: My Initiation into Anxiety
There were several pivotal events in my life that invited me to realign with my soul, times when my inner self grabbed me by the ankles and dragged me into the underworld. The first, and most powerful, was a panic attack that broke me open when I was twenty-one, a few months before I graduated from college. It was that panic attack and the subsequent years of drowning in daily anxiety that shattered my illusion of my “perfect life.” It destroyed my glass castle of superiority, the belief that I was beyond suffering, created and confirmed by years of immersion in an education system that rewarded me for being school-smart. It destroyed my conviction that I had the right answers, or any answers. In short, it brought me to my knees in all ways — from heart palpitations to a phobia of driving that ensued after that first panic attack to night terrors and nightmares that punctuated my sleep for years. And yet, from the ashes, the pain, and the total destruction of life as I had known it, a new life — and a life’s work — was born. This is how our unconscious, working through anxiety and its sisterhood of symptoms, invites us toward wholeness: we’re broken open, brought to our knees, dragged into the underworld not to be tortured or because there’s something wrong or disordered with us, but because there’s something right and beautiful inside that is longing to be seen and known.
The seeds of my panic attack had been planted a year before and were intimately connected to a trip to Brazil my junior year of college. I never planned to go to Brazil. Having spoken Spanish throughout high school and into college, I had always planned to travel to Spain. But then the Brazil bug bit me: I had taken a Brazilian dance class the summer after my first year of college, and I was hooked by the dance and the culture. I danced all summer. I danced through the next year and immersed myself in Brazilian music. Quite impulsively, I changed my plans and set into motion an experience that would alter the course of my life.
In January 1990, instead of getting on a plane to Spain, I headed for Salvador, Brazil, where I was immediately pummeled when the fantasy I had built up in my mind clashed hard with the reality I encountered. In a single moment, I was yanked from my safe, clean, upper-middle-class life and hammered down into the middle of a life I had never known on any level. I lived in favelas where cockroaches the size of snails lined the floors and ceilings in such numbers that white paint seemed black; I witnessed a man get shot during Carnival; I daily walked past pools of fresh blood on the streets; I nearly drowned in a sudden riptide; I had trouble finding anything healthier than Guaraná to drink (basically sugar water). For months, I ate what I thought were crushed peanut cakes from vendors on the side of the road only to learn at the end of the trip that they were actually crushed shrimp cakes that had been sitting in the hot sun all day. All my systems, from the physical to the spiritual, were on high-alert overload.
Those four months terrified me, yet they were also what initiated me into an essential breakdown that would lead to following the bread crumbs of anxiety and panic into my true self. Some people are initiated through ancient rites in the middle of a forest. Some people are initiated through a crisis of health, relationship, or faith. I was initiated in Brazil. And when I look back now, I can clearly see that I was pulled to Brazil by invisible forces: the dance, the music — something unnamable led me there. It was out of character for me to be so impulsive, but nothing was going to stop me; I had to go. I had to be broken open. The story of my life as I had known it — that I was somehow above suffering — had to shatter so that the underworld of hidden pain that lived inside the polished persona could emerge and be healed.
We’re all offered experiences that break us open to our core. One of the fatal flaws of our culture is that we take everything at face value and fail to see the metaphor, which, itself, contains the keys to healing. When a client comes to me convinced that he has cancer, regardless of the fact that he received a clean bill of health the week before, it takes time to quiet the ego’s convincing story enough to explore the deeper underpinnings that are longing to be known. If we remain attached to addressing the anxiety at the level of the story — which usually looks like seeking endless reassurance — we’ll remain stuck in anxiety. But if we can crack open the story and see that the fear of cancer, for example, is pointing to a need to develop tolerance for uncertainty and explore the metaphor that something is “eating away” at one’s heart or soul, shifts begin to occur.
In my story, Brazil wasn’t the problem. In fact, it took me years to understand that Brazil was the screen onto which my own unworked shadow — the pain, fear, and trauma that had to be shoved down in my first twenty years in order to keep going — was projected. Because Brazil carried my shadow, I couldn’t see its beauty; I only saw the terror and despair that lived inside of me reflected in my surroundings. And it took having a panic attack while driving down the 405 freeway in Los Angeles for the shadow to rise to the surface where I could finally see it, work with it, and heal.
The ensuing years, which were the decade of my twenties, were both painful and transformative. In my early twenties, I entered a graduate program in depth psychology, which helped me begin to make sense of my anxiety through the lens of Jungian theory, which understands that symptoms are messengers from the unconscious, inviting us to grow toward wholeness. In my m
idtwenties, after working with a series of mediocre therapists, I landed on the couch of a brilliant man who guided me through the terrain of anxiety and helped me navigate my inner landscape. I read voraciously about transitions and wrote my first book, The Conscious Bride, which explores the underbelly of the wedding rite of passage. I began to work with clients struggling through their own transitions, especially around relationships, and helped them understand the invitations and metaphors embedded in their presenting stories.
None of this would have happened without Brazil. For years I regretted that experience, until eventually I realized that Brazil was my soul’s way of forcing me to grow. It wasn’t an accident; and your life isn’t an accident either — not your anxiety, your wounds, your failures, or your traumas. In fact, the great sages teach that the seed for healing lives at the center of each trauma, meaning that your greatest challenge will also be your greatest strength. When I look back on Brazil, I know that it was through that experience that my inner world demanded to be known. Anxiety and panic were the doorways that led me to peel away the layers of pain and adapted persona that needed to be shed so that I could live closer to my true self. Anxiety is your doorway, too.
A Road Map Through Anxiety
This book will guide you step-by-step through the necessary mindsets and tools that will help you transform your relationship to anxiety so that you can release yourself from its grip and learn to decode its messages.
In part 1, I will clearly define anxiety and its symptoms as well as articulate the origins and causes of anxiety. I discuss the three pillars that allow the sensitive soul — and what I’ve come to see over the years of working with thousands of people is that we are all, to varying degrees, sensitive souls — to navigate successfully through life: understanding who you are and how you’re wired, understanding how transitions are crucial breaking and renewal points that can either calcify or heal layers of anxiety, and offering the foundational keys of curiosity, compassion, stillness, and personal responsibility, which allow you to transform anxiety from a burden to a gift. I will also discuss the most challenging roadblock that appears anytime we set out in the direction of healing: resistance.