The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  Living with uncertainty. We simply don’t like it. We want definitive answers. We want definable goals. We are intrinsically wired to gravitate toward a need for control and a subsequent attempt to create the illusion of control. Our dominant parenting and education models reinforce this basic ego need. When we don’t honor the natural rhythm of a child and coerce her into conforming to an externalized model whereby she gains approval, her inborn self-trust is weakened. Adults inadvertently reinforce the ego’s need for control instead of helping children cultivate their connection to self, which helps them connect to the transitory flow of life.

  The fear-based self believes that if you could answer the intrusive thoughts of the day, you would hedge your bets and know, without any doubt, that you’re okay. Because the fear-based self is terrified of risk, terrified of anything that touches into vulnerability, it creates elaborate and convincing reasons why you need to change your life or seek certainty in some way. This creates an illusion of control, and as uncomfortable as it is to live in the head-space of anxiety or uncertainty, it’s often a preferable state to the ambiguous, vulnerable place of living in your heart. In other words, the question to ask yourself is, “Is it more important for me to remain attached to the illusion of control or to learn about what it means to be loving?” If you want to learn about what it means to be loving to yourself and others, you have to be willing to let go of control.

  This obviously doesn’t happen in one Hollywood-breakthrough moment of therapeutic enlightenment. Making the choice to learn rather than remain tightly wound in the safe fortress of control is a daily, sometimes hourly, choice. It’s a terrifying choice, no doubt. It’s a choice that flies in the face of every illusion of safety that you’ve spent a lifetime constructing. It’s as terrifying as standing on the cliff of eternity and leaping into the abyss. Let yourself feel that terror. Let yourself begin to befriend the mystery of life instead of clinging to what you think you can control. The truth is that there is so little we can control. We make plans because we want to know what will happen in the next hour, but the unknowable and mysterious force of life could subvert your plans in an instant. The only freedom is to make friends with not knowing. When you become more comfortable with the places of not knowing and explore the gifts encased inside the thoughts, the intrusive thoughts will slowly fade away.

  PRACTICEFOUR STEPS FOR DISMANTLING INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS

  Healing from intrusive thoughts is a multilayered process. Following these basic steps will help you begin to break free from their hold:

  1.Name the thought. For many people, just naming and normalizing what’s happening inside their minds — knowing that the thoughts are not indications that there’s something wrong with them but are actually coming in the service of health and healing — is half the battle toward recovery. When you name the thought, you’re already de-fusing from it, since naming it requires that you’re witnessing it. This one small action is how you begin to widen the gap between stimulus and response.

  2.Expose the lie. If you believe the thought is true, you will go down the rabbit hole of anxiety and depression. If you can say, “This is my familiar intrusive thought, and even if I think it’s true, I know it’s not true,” you will take an essential step toward de-fusing your attachment to it.

  3.Sit with the underlying feeling. Once you remove the addiction by naming the thought and exposing it as a lie, you will be left with what the thought is covering up: a sense of inadequacy, insecurity, vulnerability, sadness, groundlessness of the human experience. Breathe into those feelings and remind yourself that being human — with all of its vulnerability — isn’t something that you can get over. It can’t be fixed. The best we can do is be with ourselves with love and compassion. And in the loving, we find freedom.

  4.Ask the cut-through question for intrusive thoughts. “What is this thought protecting me from feeling?” Then be willing to sit in silence until your breath leads you to what is needed, which isn’t always an answer as much as a direction, a signpost, a crack of spaciousness in the choke hold of anxiety. Allow your exploration to be led by the headlight of curiosity and cradled in the pillows of compassion. Imagine a warrior strapping on her protective gear and amulets: a shield, a headband with a gem in the middle, a spear. So we, as love-warriors delving into the uncertain inner realms, strap on the gear of our loving inner parent and sit beside the parts of ourselves who are crying out for attention. (You will learn more about how to attend to the feelings inside the intrusive thoughts in the next chapter.)

  Once you have a sense of what needs attention, make a wheel. Having a visual representation of the core needs, feelings, and beliefs embedded inside a thought will help you break the habit of immediately attaching to the thought as truth and will help you create a new neural pathway in your brain that learns to view the thoughts as messengers arriving in the guise of metaphor. Use the figures provided earlier in this chapter as guides.

  10

  THE REALM OF FEELINGS

  When we block our awareness of feelings, they continue to affect us anyway. Research has shown repeatedly that even without conscious awareness, neural input from the internal world of body and emotion influences our reasoning and our decision making. . . . In other words, you can run but you cannot hide.

  DANIEL J. SIEGEL

  Mindsight: The New Science of Personal Transformation

  At the center of ourselves, at the very center of our body and our soul, lives the heart. When we allow ourselves to stay in the flow of our feelings — feeling sadness when it reaches out like a child in the dark, feeling jealousy when it pricks the sides of the eyes, feeling anger when it scalds like lava, feeling joy when it hums and laughs — the heart remains open and fully alive, and anxiety is edged to the outer rims.

  But more often than not, we plug up our hearts like a cork in a bottle. We do this because we learned early in life, from a culture that doesn’t have the faintest clue how to guide its members through big and difficult feelings, to shut down. And when we shut down and cork up the heart enough, the energy system of feelings is often forced to go upward, into the head in the form of thoughts. This is when people often find their way to healing: when the habit of intrusive thoughts has taken hold to such a degree that the person feels imprisoned by their own mind. As Michael Singer writes in The Untethered Soul:

  If you close around the pain and stop it from passing through, it will stay in you. That is why our natural tendency to resist is so counterproductive. If you don’t want the pain, why do you close around it and keep it? Do you actually think that if you resist, it will go away? It’s not true. If you release and let the energy pass through, then it will go away. If you relax when the pain comes up inside your heart, and actually dare to face it, it will pass. Every single time you relax and release, a piece of the pain leaves forever. Yet every time you resist and close, you are building up the pain inside. It’s like damming up a stream. You are then forced to use the psyche to create a layer of distance between you who experiences the pain and the pain itself. That is what all the noise is inside your mind: an attempt to avoid the stored pain.

  Instead of feeling the stored pain, which is raw and vulnerable, we spin up into the safe and familiar refuge of the thought patterns. Instead of dropping down into the body, which is round and amorphous, we become caught in the illusion that if we could only answer this one question, we would find certainty. As such, we continue on in the pattern that began as a defense and protection — retreating to the somewhat safe haven of mind — and continue to avoid our feelings.

  Why do we avoid something so natural and essential to healthy living? We avoid it because we’ve introjected the voices from the culture that have told us from the beginning that our feelings were something to get over, avoid, or ignore, and that there was no place for them at the table of psyche.

  As you’re reading through the following sections, notice what feelings enter your heart, tighten your chest, ask for release throug
h your throat and mouth. If you can, let the pain emerge: cry, write, dance, breathe. Pain only asks for one thing: to be seen and heard and known. When you move toward it instead of pushing it away, your anxiety will begin to transform as you step into the fullness of being human, which we cannot experience unless we allow ourselves to feel the full spectrum of emotions. Anxiety, once again, is the portal through which we’re invited to become more fully ourselves, and a gateway into our more vulnerable feelings. The anxiety grabs our attention, sounds the alarm, and invites us to ask, “What is the anxiety protecting me from feeling?” When we start to thaw out and feel our lives, anxiety, having completed its current mission, fades away.

  Anxiety Is a Placeholder for Feelings

  One of the strange and fascinating elements about anxiety is that it’s not actually a feeling. We feel the manifestations of anxiety in our bodies and minds through physical symptoms and intrusive thoughts, but anxiety itself isn’t a real feeling, but instead a placeholder for the vulnerable feelings that we’re too scared to feel. I’ll elucidate through a story.

  One day many years ago, I was out shopping for clothes with my two boys at our favorite consignment store, and my older son said, “Mommy, let’s look at some rain boots for Asher.”

  “Oh, great idea,” I responded, and held Asher’s hand as we walked to the display. Asher immediately grabbed a pair of ladybug rain boots, an almost identical replica of his big brother’s pair that had cracked open to the point of needing to be replaced. Asher tried them on, they were a perfect fit, and we started to walk to the counter when Everest grumbled, “It’s not okay that Asher gets new rain boots before I do.”

  “But you just suggested that we look for new rain boots for him! I don’t understand why you’re upset,” I said, annoyed.

  “Because I don’t want him to have new boots if I don’t have new boots.” He grumbled all the way to the cash register.

  It was a classic case of sibling envy, but it took me a while to see it.

  A few minutes later, as we were driving to our next destination, Everest complained, “It’s not okay if Asher wears his boots in the creek before mine arrive.”

  “It’s not okay” was a phrase Everest often said at that time in his life when he was trying to control outer circumstances. I used to try to convince him why it was okay, until I realized that arguing with the fear-and-control-driven ego is pointless. Eventually, I became more adept at first naming his experience, then directing him down into his feelings.

  “It sounds like you’re trying to control instead of letting yourself feel envious,” I said.

  “What’s envious?” Everest asked.

  “It’s kind of like jealousy. Jealousy is when you’re feeling left out, like when Daddy plays with Asher and makes him laugh really hard. Envy is when you want something that someone else has. They’re both really hard feelings to let yourself feel,” I explained.

  “You mean the green-eyed monster?” Asher piped up. “Humphrey was jealous of Og the Frog.” He was referring to one of their favorite book series about Humphrey, the classroom hamster, and how he felt jealous when the teacher brought in a new pet, a frog, and all of the kids went gaga over him.

  “Yes, that’s jealousy. It’s called a monster because it feels so big inside, like it could just swallow you up. Most people try to deny it when they feel jealous or envious, because they think they shouldn’t feel that way, but everyone feels those feelings sometimes. They’re part of being human.

  “But they really are very difficult feelings to feel. A part of you (ego — although I didn’t use that term with my kids yet) doesn’t believe that you can handle such a big feeling, and it tells you to control other people so that you don’t have to feel it. But it doesn’t work! You can’t control people and circumstances, and it takes a lot of energy to try. In the end, it’s much easier to let yourself feel the envy. It’s just a feeling — an energy — and it’s very uncomfortable, but it will pass through you. When you try to exert control, you become tight inside and the feeling can’t get out. Then it becomes trapped inside of you and actually grows bigger. If you can let yourself feel envious, it will pass through you, and eventually you’ll arrive at acceptance.”

  Everest seemed to hear me, and his complaining and controlling quieted down. I could see him visibly exhale. The tightness of control released into acceptance.

  I was teaching my kids a simple equation, one that I teach my clients every day:

  feel your feelings = acceptance of what is = flowing with the river of life

  VERSUS

  avoid the feelings = control what is = fight the river of life and feel stuck inside

  As soon as I identified the feeling encased in the control, the tension broke open for all of us. I stopped trying to convince Everest to focus on something else, and Everest stopped trying to control me and Asher.

  We seem wired as humans to try to control outer circumstances in an attempt to avoid painful and uncomfortable feelings. Yet one of the golden keys, one of the ways that we learn to let go and flow in the river of life, is to allow ourselves to feel our feelings. It’s a satisfying moment in a session when a client says to me, “I finally understand what you’ve been saying. Today I noticed my brain swimming and churning and the anxiety building up, and I took a few deep breaths, turned inside, and asked myself, ‘What am I feeling right now?’ It’s usually something like grief or envy or maybe fear of the unknown, and when I just let myself feel it, the anxiety fell away.”

  Feelings are manageable; anxiety is not. The more you practice cutting through the habit of spider-monkeying up the vines of anxiety that entrap your brain, and instead drop back down into your heart, where your feelings live, the less anxious and more peaceful you will feel.

  A Lifetime Habit of Avoiding Pain

  It’s one thing to say “Just feel your feelings,” as if it’s as easy as snapping your fingers. Yet when you’ve spent a lifetime avoiding pain, it takes time, practice, and patience to create new neural pathways that rewire this habit. In order to do this, it’s helpful to understand why it’s so scary to feel pain. Once you can identify the beliefs that are standing sentry in front of your heart, you can call them out, challenge them, and gently create inroads led by the new message that it’s not only safe to feel your pain, but it’s also essential for your healing.

  There is no doubt that most people will do anything and everything to avoid feeling the basic feelings of life. Some of this is biological, as all species are wired to recoil from pain, both physical and emotional. Some of this is cultural, as Western culture has a particular attraction to the happy face, which means a particular denial of pain and messiness (as discussed in chapter 2). And much of this is because many people still carry a litany of rules, “shoulds,” and early memories about their emotional lives, beliefs and patterns absorbed before they even learned to talk.

  When you cried as an infant for prolonged periods of time and weren’t picked up, something inside shut down. When those undesirable feelings erupted as a child, and you received the literal or metaphoric slap in the face, you were silenced. If you cried alone, which many children will do as the feelings cannot be contained, the only comfort was a thick blanket of shame. Sometimes the cries were so big that it felt like you were going to die. On the heels of these experiences, you may have formed the following beliefs around crying.

  •I shouldn’t be sad.

  •Feelings are weak.

  •Crying is shameful.

  •If I’m overly emotional, I’m doing something wrong and/or there’s something wrong with me.

  •Feelings are a waste of time.

  •If I let myself cry fully, something bad will happen.

  •I feel out of control and too vulnerable when I cry.

  •Feelings are an indulgence.

  •Crying is for sissies.

  •I’m too much, too emotional, too sensitive.

  •Crying makes it worse, so what’s the point?r />
  It’s essential to identify the beliefs you’re carrying about pain so that you can assess if they’re true or faulty, then decide, with your inner parent at the helm, how to proceed the next time you’re aware of pain surfacing.

  I often tell my course members the story of teaching my sons to practice Tonglen when we see dead animals on the side of the road. To refresh your memory: the practice is to breathe in what’s unwanted — in this case grief, helplessness, heartbreak — and breathe out what’s wanted: peace to all beings. The practice teaches us to move toward our pain instead of giving in to the habitual tendency to push it away. For even though my husband and I never shame away emotional reactions to anything in life — and certainly not the true pain of seeing death in any form — our kids still fall prey to the natural response to retreat from pain. In this case, encouraging the practice teaches our kids that every feeling deserves attention. So I’ll say something like, “I can see how sad you felt when we passed that dead prairie dog. Let’s put our hands on our hearts and breathe into the pain, then breathe out comfort and love to the prairie dog and its family.”