The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  •It clings to the status quo.

  •It needs control at all costs.

  •It’s terrified of change in any form, especially inner change.

  •It’s solid in form, not soft or shifting.

  •It feels safest when life moves along without any change in rhythm or habits.

  •It abhors risk.

  •It’s terrified of trusting.

  •It has a misguided illusion of control and believes that if it worries enough it can prevent bad things from happening.

  •It’s impatient and wants things to be resolved right now.

  •It can’t tolerate paradox and thinks in black-and-white terms.

  •It feels safer in your head, meaning it doesn’t like to spend time in the realm of feelings. It associates feelings with being out of control, since that’s how they felt as a child, and the worst thing for this part of you is to feel out of control.

  •It thrives on laziness and loves to stagnate you in inertia.

  There are other reasons why we resist growth. Growing means taking responsibility for ourselves in all ways. The child part of us that longs for someone else to rescue us from our pain becomes very loud when we consider taking on this task ourselves. I’ve worked with many clients who, as adults, are still operating from the belief, often unconsciously, that it’s someone else’s job to take care of them, especially their parents, and that if they assume that responsibility, then their parents never will. Of course, their parents never will anyway, but the resistant part of them doesn’t want to acknowledge that.

  Here’s another aspect of resistance and self: Jungian psychology teaches us that resistance itself is part of the plan. It’s not just something to get over or hate, but our resistance, because it provides something to push up against, helps us grow. It’s not any more helpful to think of resistance as a bad part of our personality than it is to think of anxiety as the enemy. Rather, like anxiety, resistance is an essential aspect of self that, when attended to and worked with effectively, aids our healing process. In other words, by working with resistance, we strengthen our sense of self. It’s all exactly as it’s meant to be; none of it is an accident.

  You can see this principle at play in our political sphere. Regardless of your beliefs, you can see that the greatest amount of change occurs when there’s a force to push against. We seem to need something to push against in order to initiate growth, both in the outer sphere and in the inner one. This helps us view all parts of ourselves — including our resistance — as inner friends that are here to help us heal and move toward wholeness.

  Is it possible to break through resistance? Absolutely. A colleague and I once had an invigorating conversation about how one of the most challenging and rewarding aspects of our work is helping clients break through the wall of resistance that prevents them from taking full responsibility for their well-being. On the surface, it looks like all these clients want to feel better — otherwise why would they be seeking help? — but resistance works undercover and often emerges through the back door. While they want to feel better, they don’t always want to do the inner work that will allow them to feel better. It’s even deeper than that: they may want to want to do the work, but when their resistance is ironclad, it wields all of the power. They are powerless. Until they’re not; until they’re able to do enough of the work that they can break through the roadblock and shift from stuckness to movement.

  Many people are so identified with their shame-and-pain stories that they’re scared to shift out of that identity; they would rather remain miserable than take the risk of stepping into a new story. Remember: resistance clings to the familiar at all costs, even if what’s familiar is making you miserable. If you’re battling with resistance, ask yourself this cut-through question: Am I ready to make my own healing more important than this current identity? If so, then sit still and listen for the answer.

  Following are clues that you’re avoiding responsibility and are stuck behind a wall of resistance:

  •Your focus is almost exclusively on the key to happiness as something external. This can take the form of being single and tortured by the question of whether or not you made the right decision to leave your partner, or being with a partner and ruminating on one aspect of the relationship that isn’t fulfilling you.

  •You’re obsessed with a single question that occupies a significant amount of your time and energy. This is usually an intrusive thought, but can appear as an obsessive question like “Should I change jobs?” or “Did I make a mistake?”

  •You feel stuck on your healing path. You’ve tried many different modalities, programs, courses, books, and so on, and none of them “work.” This is usually an indicator that resistance is preventing you from actually doing the work and is instead hoping for a magic fix.

  •When you’re honest with yourself, you realize that you want someone else to fix and rescue you (your mother, father, partner, friend, or therapist).

  I have worked with many clients who, regardless of the specifics of the resistance story or the underlying reasons why it wields power, were able to break through it and begin the work of reclaiming their life. If you commit to your inner work and call on the resource of patience — while continually naming resistance every time it tries to sabotage your attempts to heal — and choose the counteraction, you will break through as well.

  PRACTICEWORKING WITH RESISTANCE

  Take some time to write down how resistance shows up for you. The more familiar you become with this internal character, the easier it will be to identify it when it shows up. When you notice that resistance is in the driver’s seat, try the following three actions to help you break through:

  1.Name it. We can’t change what we’re not aware of, and for many people, simply realizing that they’re in resistance helps them to shift out of it.

  2.Ask for help from a greater source. Even if you can’t seem to stay with the inner work but want to, you can ask for help: “Please help me commit to my own growth. Please help me take responsibility.” By the way, religion doesn’t own the copyright on prayer. If you have posttraumatic God syndrome, pray to your own higher self. Pray to the Universe. Pray to the ocean, to life force, to healing. You don’t even have to believe in the power of prayer. Do it anyway.

  3.Harness your inner loving father. The loving father is the masculine energy inside of you that says, “I know you don’t want to do it, but we’re doing it anyway.” The healthy inner father is decisive, clear thinking, firm with love, and doesn’t indulge in resistant voices that say, “I don’t feel like it.” It’s the parent who says to the child, “I know you don’t want to go to [piano, martial arts, acting] class, but every time you go, you’re happy you went, so we’re going anyway.” This is not the part that forces someone to do something that is truly not in their best interest, but rather the part that is connected to the highest good and pushes through the resistance in service of that aim. It’s the part that knows that that fundamental laziness is part of being human and that resistance, which never wants to change, clings to what is easy and familiar. Remember: resistance loves sitting in front of the television for a Netflix bingefest instead of getting up and going for a brisk walk. If you want to break free from anxiety, you must act against fundamental laziness until the new, loving habit takes hold.

  Working with resistance is one of the hardest elements of healing. And while it’s important to recognize that sometimes there’s wisdom in resistance, it’s equally important to keep working with it, patiently and with commitment, until a window of light opens inside. Because the bottom-line, tough-love truth is that nobody is going to save you: not your relationship, not a different job or house or city, not your parents, not your therapist. There’s no escape hatch for life. We must bring awareness to all the tricky ways that resistance takes hold — the thoughts, the propensity toward inertia, allowing ourselves to become swallowed up in intrusive pain — and then access and grow our stronger inner parts
that are working in service of our wholeness and healing.

  Responsibility: The Key to Transformation

  Taking responsibility for our well-being is an essential key to transformation. We cannot heal if we’re waiting for someone else to heal us and if we’re committed to a mindset of blame and refusal. Along with resistance, one of the ways that people refuse responsibility is by subscribing to the belief that their suffering shouldn’t be happening: that if something external were different, they wouldn’t be struggling with anxiety. As discussed, we’re so culturally addicted to the belief that our internal states are determined by external circumstances that it’s like swimming upstream to develop a different mindset — one that invites taking 100 percent responsibility for our pain. The belief that anxiety shouldn’t be happening stops people dead in their tracks from doing the work that needs to be done. This is fighting against reality, because the anxiety is happening, and every time you fall prey to the escape-hatch mindset you miss the opportunity you’re being given to heal and grow.

  Growing a Loving Inner Parent

  An essential component to taking responsibility is accessing the loving parent at the helm of our ship. Paradoxically, a significant aspect of this work is about growing this loving parent. How do we access something we don’t have? We recognize that the belief of “I don’t have a loving parent” isn’t actually true. It’s one of resistance’s tactics to tell you that you don’t have an inner adult, and therefore, you can’t take responsibility for yourself.

  We all have this part of us. Every time you offer support to a friend in need, you’re accessing your own inner compassionate friend. Every time you hold loving space for your son or daughter to feel their feelings, you’re accessing the inner parent. Every time you connect to your wisdom, that place below thoughts and feelings, you’re touching into your wise self. Every time you take care of your body, heart, mind, or soul in a loving and attentive way, you’re acting from your loving adult. Every time you take care of your pet, you’re being a loving caregiver.

  The definition of a wise self/inner parent is:

  The solid, compassionate, curious part of you that takes loving care of you in all four realms — physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. It is the part of you that can access wisdom to counteract faulty beliefs, can hold emotional pain without being swallowed by it, and works with resistance in effective ways so that you can continue to carve out time daily for your practices and inner work.

  When someone is first starting to try to change their negative self-talk, they realize that they would never say to a friend the things they say to themselves. This is a very good starting point. Next time you’re feeling sad or anxious, imagine how you might respond to a friend or a child who was feeling that way. The dialogue might look like this (to learn the dialogue journaling method, see appendix B):

  Fear. I’m feeling scared. I’m scared I might have a terminal illness.

  Friend. Oh, that sounds so frightening. What makes you think that?

  Fear. I don’t know. I just haven’t been feeling right lately. I keep having this thought, Something is wrong, and I think it’s coming from my intuition, like I just know deep down that something is wrong.

  Friend. I know how that feels. I sometimes feel that way, too. But then I try to go a bit deeper and ask if there’s anything else going on that I don’t want to look at or feel. Like if there’s anything I’m feeling that I’ve pushed aside. Has anything happened lately that has made you feel scared or sad?

  Fear. Yes. One of my close friends from childhood was just diagnosed with a brain tumor. I don’t think she’s going to make it.

  Friend. Oh, goodness. I’m so sorry. That sounds so scary and so sad.

  Fear (now with some grief). Yes, I feel so sad. I feel sad for her kids and her husband, and I can only imagine how scared she must feel.

  Silence. A good friend allows for silence when pure feelings arise.

  Fear/Grief. Oh God, I’m so sad for her. And I feel scared for me, too. What if that happens to me? [This character wants to dart away from the vulnerability of feeling the pure feeling.]

  Friend. As soon as I hear “what if,” I know we’re in anxiety territory. I know that’s a really scary thought, but let’s come back to the feelings. Can you stay with the sadness and the vulnerability? Let’s put a hand on your heart. [Places hand on heart.]

  Grief/Uncertainty (crying now). I’m just so sad. Life is so uncertain. What can we hang on to? How could this happen to someone so young? What do I do with this?

  Friend. You just feel it. Let yourself feel it. Grief is medicine. There’s nothing to do but be.

  You might be thinking, “I would never know how to say those things to a friend. I’m not that wise, and sometimes I just don’t know what to say.” You start where you are. You do the best you can with responding to yourself with compassion and curiosity. Remember: when you can shift from a mindset of shame and judgment to one of compassion and curiosity, you’re doing the work. So even if you don’t know the exact words, it doesn’t matter; what matters is that you start to pay close attention to every time you’re judging yourself or falling prey to a shame story and are willing to step into a new mindset that is powered by the headlight of curiosity and held in the hand of compassion.

  Note: I use the terms wise self/inner parent/compassionate friend interchangeably, and I encourage you to use the one that resonates most strongly for you.

  PRACTICELOCATE YOUR INNER Parent/Wise Self/Compassionate Friend

  Take some time to reflect on and write down any times in your life when you’ve been able to show up for yourself in a present, attentive, clear way. If it’s easier for you to recall a time when you’ve been a compassionate friend to another, that’s okay. Again, the fact that you can do it for someone else means that the capacity and resource lives inside you and simply needs the right attention in order to grow. Remember what it felt like inside when you listened to your friend, what kinds of things you said, how your friend responded. If you can’t recall a specific time with a friend, think about how you show up for a pet: how you care for a pet, what sacrifices you make, how you respond when the pet is in pain or seems sad. Anytime you show up for another being with compassion, you are accessing this inner part, which we call the wise self or the compassionate friend. Locating and accessing this part is one of the essential keys to breaking free from anxiety.

  The Escape Hatch of Perfection: A Way to Avoid Responsibility

  There are so many ways that we can avoid pain and, thus, responsibility. We can choose denial. We can self-medicate with drugs and alcohol. We can fall prey to fear’s insidiously convincing beliefs that to turn inward is “selfish, indulgent, and will get you nowhere.” We avoid pain because we live in a culture that teaches us to avoid pain. We avoid pain because we don’t know that turning toward pain — and I use pain as an umbrella term for anything uncomfortable that we wish to avoid feeling — is one of the secret pathways to joy.

  For most people, especially those prone to anxiety, one of the default methods of avoiding pain is to travel up to the safe regions of your mind where pain can’t find you. There you sit at the great loom of intrusive thoughts and spin your web of “what ifs” and “if onlys,” each thread keeping you stuck in anxiety about the future or regret of the past. Grief can’t find you there, lost like the girl in “Rumpelstiltskin,” in the uppermost corner of your mental castle, spinning and spinning your golden threads. Except this thread isn’t gold. It might shimmer like gold. It might lure you like gold. But there’s nothing golden about being stuck in the cold chambers of the mind. Safe, yes. But it’s not alive, rich, or full. It’s simply where you’ve learned to go because you haven’t been taught another way to tend to pain.

  On this loom, alongside thoughts that characterize anxiety — “What if I’m dying?” or “What if I’m in the wrong city?” — escape-hatch threads weave their way into the fabric of the psyche. These sound like, “I’ll never be
a mother” and “I’ll be happy when I [finish this degree; have a baby; find the right partner].” Everyone has escape-hatch threads that are as familiar to their inner landscape as breathing. And almost all these thoughts are braided with the thread of perfection.

  It simmers down to one, simple, powerful belief: “If I’m perfect, I’ll avoid pain.” The sister beliefs are: “If I’m with my perfect partner, I’ll avoid pain” or “If I find the perfect [house, city, job], I’ll avoid pain.”

  Embedded in the quest for perfection is the quest for certainty. Ego believes that the attainment of perfection is the safeguard against the uncertainty that defines human life. But of course, perfection is never attained because it doesn’t exist. Even if we consciously know this, a part of us rails against this reality and still keeps trying. We create more subtle yet elaborate ways to escape from the messiness and discomfort of being human, from the unavoidable reality that life includes pain, loss, and ultimately, death.

  A moment of pain can enter as quietly as a feather landing on the cushion of the heart. One day I was sitting outside, and I had the thought, “I want to move.” I know my mind well enough to realize that this had become one of my escape hatches starting with the September 2013 flood here in Colorado that turned our world upside down. I had dabbled with the idea of moving prior to the flood, but after we lost our land and almost lost our house, I experienced a new level of uncertainty that I desperately wanted to avoid again. Now the thought “I want to move” or the image of a picture-perfect house arrived on the heels of a pinprick of pain.