Anxiety.
I’ve tried so many ways to manage my anxiety over the years.
Mind over matter.
Feel the fear and do it anyway!
Prescriptions.
Meditations.
Prayer.
Journaling.
Confession.
Bible studies.
Pretending everything was fine and I wasn’t worried about anything.
This past year I found the answer: My life was the problem.
Realising this does not, unfortunately, cure my anxiety - it’s part of me now – but it does alert me to some important things about my life and the way that I think, that I need to adjust.
My life. The way I’d learned to submit to authority figures. Black and white thinking, all or nothing. Believing I wasn’t good enough the way I was, that I had to become more like someone else. Putting other peoples needs ahead of my own. Turning the other cheek instead of fighting for justice. That if healing prayer didn’t help me, it meant my faith was weak.
Everything about my outer life was filled with other people’s desires for me and other people’s expectations of me. It was my life’s work to understand who I was expected to be, and then try to be that. If I don’t please them, I believed my job would be lost — or, earlier, that of my husband — and of course this turned out to be true in both cases.
When the jobs were lost, the home was gone, the sense of community was shattered, the savings were spent, my health was failing, the worst had happened, and I was still alive. I burned out, and finally got professional help.
I’m learning about many things, including neuroplasticity, religious trauma recovery, and accepting reality.
Like a brand new nugget of wisdom, it occurred to me that maybe the type of job that requires that I be other than myself is not the kind of job I should be seeking.
Maybe seeking community to replace the one I lost is not my best goal. Maybe my next community needs to grow around me, instead of already existing when I step into it.
It wasn’t until I changed everything about my outer life that I finally felt safe enough to be able to honestly explore my inner life, learn to love myself, and befriend my anxiety.
I’m learning.
Anxiety is not my enemy, it seems to be here to protect me.
Anxiety brings dangers to mind and cautions me to take action: Fight! Flight! or Freeze!
Sometimes it overwhelms me, offering too many possible dangers to consider. Therapy taught me methods to settle.
Otherwise, I can take action and deal with problems before they occur by paying active attention to my anxious warnings.
Freeze!
Is my instinctive response to pain and anxiety. I quietly wait, hidden, silent, watchful, often quaking in fear, without the power to do anything about it. I don’t yet know what shaped me to respond to a threat this way, and the origin doesn’t really matter. This response is appropriate if there is a predator nearby who I don’t want to notice me. This response is no longer appropriate for my current life.
Fight!
Is hard to do if the threat is a gaslighter. Or if the threat is protected by a signed non-disclosure agreement. Or if the threat happened decades ago and you only now are beginning to understand what happened. In my current life, writing is how I fight. I write like a mad woman in my journal, working through my memories and my traumas as I write. Giving myself a more compassionate was to remember what happened.
Flight!
Leaving the communities that caused me suffering and heartbreak were good, but also very difficult choices; It’s hard for me to start over again. I am tired of having to start over again and again and again. We moved to nine different communities over the timespan of my husband’s training and career. Making friends gets harder every time.
In my current life, flight equals a short workout on a second hand exercise machine that sits in the corner. I can even do this in the middle of the night; when I wake up filled with anxiety and fear, and deep breathing doesn’t help settle me, then I just work out for a minute, use up all that anxious energy and can usually be back asleep in less than ten minutes.
It helps me to envision an anxiety attack as a passing storm.
It’s uncomfortable right now, but it will pass and my emotions will be calm again.
Anxiety is not simple to manage. It’s not nothing. In my life it has brought about chronic pain so debilitating that I lost my ability to walk very far for over ten years. I am learning that anxiety can be befriended and used to my benefit.
**Disclaimer: I am not a medical professional or any kind of expert in anything except my own body and my own experience. I read a lot and I like to learn, but I study with a bias towards my understanding of own personal needs and instincts. If reading about the path I am walking benefits you in some way, I am happy. However, if you take my experience as advice that does not work out well for you, I can bear no responsibility for this. You need to seek out your own professional helpers because I am not they.