Anxiety
We all know a little something about anxiety. Many of us know a whole lot more than we would like.
Anxiety is one of the most unpleasant parts of being human, and very often we suffer through without really knowing what’s causing it. Or perhaps more often, we come up with explanations for our anxiety, pinning it on something concrete like stress from the project at work, flying on a plane (which literally could fall out of the sky at any moment), or the fear of being unable to sleep tonight, then tomorrow, then probably the rest of my life. We are very good at obsessing about this or that, coming up with all kinds of scary things to worry about, and then doing it all over again tomorrow. What we are not very good at, turns out, is knowing what we are actually anxious about. Especially if we haven’t been taught how to pay careful attention to what we feel from moment to moment by a loving and attentive caregiver.
The previous post gave some information about emotions and the central role they play in human (and mammalian) life. Today’s topic is just as important, because anxiety plays a central role in almost every psychological disorder. Here’s how it works.
When a healthy and well-raised child experiences a feeling, she feels it and expresses it. She remains aware of her own inner reactions, and her emotions guide her through her world. When her caregiver cannot tolerate her emotions, however, she learns early on that her strong feelings are unwanted, and represent a threat to her precious relationship with mom or dad. On some level, kids know they depend entirely on their parents, and experience a primal and appropriate terror if left alone. Children—and infants even more—cannot survive without an attentive caregiver to protect, feed, and comfort them. Since the stakes are so high, kids don’t mess around with their primary attachment relationships. If mom doesn’t like anger, anger has got to go. Same with sadness, joy, love, or any other emotion that mom or dad cannot tolerate.
In this scenario, any emotion that the caregiver does not want produces anxiety in the child. She learns deep in her bones that this or that feeling constitutes a literally existential threat. The presence of this parentally-unwanted emotion represents a threat to the child’s most essential relationship, which in turn represents a threat to her existence. The emotion then becomes associated with life-threatening peril before the child even has words to express it.
When this child grows to maturity, she will carry with her the terror of the relationship-threatening feeling, and will immediately become anxious when something happens to her that triggers it. If she learned early on that anger was intolerable, she will continue to fear and avoid her own anger, and will enter a chronic state of anxiety if she does not find a way to either shut off the feeling or avoid what triggers it. She may then avoid conflict and the anger it triggers as if her life depends on it, because she very much feels it does. Alternatively, she may have learned that sadness was not ok, only later to find herself crippled by panic after a loved-one dies. Her unfelt sadness would be pervasive and ultimately unavoidable, leaving her swamped by anxiety.
In this understanding, anxiety serves both as a signal of deeper unfelt feelings, and as an inhibitory affect that pushes down and covers over the feelings that are deemed threatening. When a client enters therapy with complaints of anxiety, the first task is to understand what unfelt and threatening feelings are driving the anxiety, and what recently has been triggering them. Once the forbidden feelings are identified and uncovered, and the client understands in her body that they are no longer life-threatening, she will be able to feel them without experiencing the anxiety that brings her to therapy. This process can be transformative, opening up entirely new realms of life and of relationships.
