My experiences of living with and working through Anxiety

Most people will experience a level of anxiety at some point. Most of us know this to be 'stress'. Whether you have an anxiety disorder or whether life has gotten the better of you and you are struggling with the feelings of stress and anxiety, it can be very hard to deal with.

I could come at this from a more clinical perspective and tell you that Anxiety is a fear based disorder classified as 'excessive worry' by the DSM-V (Diagnostic and statistical Manual used to categorize and label mental health illnesses). Instead I would like to talk about this in a more real, experiential way, sharing my experiences and how I have worked through and with my own anxiety. As with all illnesses, there are some common symptoms but every person is unique and will have their own experiences. I am no different. Hopefully this will help you to view anxiety a bit differently and approach your own stress in a slightly different frame of mind.

I have experienced 'stress' for as long as I can remember. I feel my anxiety in my body more than anything. Anxiety is a very physical disorder for many people due to the inability to relax and the high levels of worry that you may experience. Your body starts to react which I found increased my worry and made me feel trapped in this state of hypersensitivity. When I am anxious I tend to feel a great deal of pressure. The feelings of anxiety will latch on to relevant issues in my life that deserve a bit of stress but my reactions far outweigh the problem. Much of the time I manage this without people being aware. One of the worst mental pitfalls of anxiety that I experience is rumination. Thoughts that go round and round. Playing conversations in my head over and over. Having imaginary fights with people, even strangers, often based on me lashing out in defence to perceived threats or insults. None of this is warranted, none of it worthy of the amount of energy I expend. I end up mentally exhausted and angry. I become frustrated and angry with myself and often feel ashamed at my inability to control this. The negative, judgemental self talk starts. I feel defeated and want to escape, run away and start again. The light at the end of the anxiety attack seems very distant and at times I can't imagine it being there.

For me, mental exercises such as stopping thoughts and re-framing thoughts is difficult. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy works well for some people but for me, it added to my mental exhaustion and didn't fit. I never went to a CBT therapist, I did a group when in the UK and found the whole process to be a great learning opportunity (budding psychotherapist that I am) but in no way helpful or applicable. In fact one of the members was clearly grieving and had been lumped in this group without being fully assessed. The mental health system can be like this at times. We are so hell bent on finding a quick fix, evidence based solution that the government will fund that individual experiences and the acknowledgement of people having complex life experiences falls by the wayside.

Anxiety is often a product of emotional neglect in childhood. I have learnt a great deal in my own healing journey and would very much like to share this with you all. Emotional neglect is a bit different from emotional abuse, which we associate with emotionally manipulating people in order to control them or put them down. Childhood emotional neglect is a bit different and possibly one of the most damaging forms of abuse. It is often not deliberate at all and I hesitated calling it abuse. It occurs when parents or carers fail to effectively meet their child's emotional needs. Children are not attended to emotionally and they are not taught how to manage their emotions. Often this is because parents have not had their own emotional needs met. It is generational. Fear stems from instability and a lack of safety in the world. When needs are consistently not met in childhood this creates anxiety from an early age. Anxiety is a tough one to identify though as stress is such a common state. I remember being in a pharmacy looking for a vitamins and chose one that was good for stress. The pharmacist asked me if I was stressed and I replied 'Who isn't?' She said to me that she wasn't and looked taken aback by my response. I started to wonder if my stress was unusual.

I learn't in therapy and through my own personal growth and professional knowledge that instead of trying to change my thinking patterns, I needed to understand my emotions. I needed to understand what my child self went through on a feeling level. I had become so cut off from my felt sense, from how I experience things in my body. I was unable to connect to many of my feelings, I stayed in the realm of thinking and intellectualising. I inherently had to learn how to do this again. Meditation was key for me. I struggled a great deal at first. I find doing this whilst being open to exploring your true feelings and experiences in a safe and guided manner is the most helpful. I needed to work on some deep set beliefs I had been holding for most of my life. I have had a lot of shame and am still muddling through this aspect of myself.

The release for me has been confronting my anxiety and the reasons for it head on. I do not believe some people 'just develop it'. This is a myth and centred around our denial and resistance to looking at how we have been parented. This is not a criticism at all. I know first hand how guilty you can feel seeing the people who gave you so much as being the people who hurt you emotionally. Let me tell you though, once I worked through my attachment issues with my mother, I realised one day that my memories of her had changed for the better. The very memories that induced so much pain have been re-framed in my mind and I was seeing them more fondly. I understood her, I saw her for who she was and loved her more deeply than I was ever able to. In working on my childhood pain with a therapist that I trusted I was able to release the intense emotions attached to my trauma. I learnt how to be the parent to myself and identify my own needs and meet them for myself. This process is tough and so much comes to the surface before it can be released. This means the intensity heightens and you have to be aware of the process or you may just want to retreat back into your shell (believe me, that's normal). Should you persist, you WILL overcome it and come out so much stronger. Each challenge becomes that little bit easier. You find strength to work on yourself in ways which you never thought possible. You look at patterns in your life that no longer serve you. You start feeling a sense of self love you never thought was possible. This takes time but something I always felt was that although there is pain, it's NEW pain. It sure beats the same old ruminations and stress.

Not all therapist's believe in this. Working on your childhood attachment trauma when suffering from anxiety or any mental illness is the key. It allows you to release and purge this unwanted baggage and change in a way that you can't possibly go backwards from. You learn HOW to work on yourself and WHY you are feeling the way you do. You learn how to feel and trust your feelings. You learn about who you are. I no longer struggle in the same way. I get triggered at times but I allow those triggers to surface and I observe them, my behaviour and work through my emotions. Like I said, you learn how to work on yourself, on your shadow self.

Anxiety is not a life sentence and you don't need to stop your thoughts or change anything. On the contrary you need to observe them, accept them and reflect on them. Let them guide you. Focus on your feelings, really work hard at being in the present and with whatever you are experiencing. Be kind to yourself and hang in there!

Take care,
Paula X

How to Cope with Difficult Emotions

I have been wanting to put something I have recently discovered down for you all around coping with difficult emotions. I say recently because until recently, I have been a bit of an 'avoider'. Not deliberately and not completely. I have always been in touch with emotions in general. I have never been uncomfortable around other people's emotions (with the exception of anger at times). Today though, I am talking about those deep buried emotions that we try our best to avoid or ignore. Those emotions we deny because of the fear and negativity we experience when we feel them. The ones we think will swallow us up whole, never returning us to the light.

All emotions, including happiness, have the potential to be difficult. The reason for this is because of the experiences associated with the emotions and what these emotions mean to us. Fear is one of the big and uncomfortable ones. Fear is also something we enjoy in certain contexts such as watching a horror movie or going on a ghost tour. There is a huge market for spooky things for Halloween due to our love of getting thrills and chills. Why is this? Why can we invoke fear on one hand and build up massive defences against it on the other?

It is not the emotion we are fearing. It is not the emotion that gets us so to speak. As children, we are driven by emotions and our 'felt sense' or how we perceive the world outside of thoughts and logic. We have the strongest instincts when we are children because we are unable to understand other people's feelings outside of our own experience of them. We don't talk ourselves out of feelings. We don't anticipate what loss, anger, sadness etc. will feel like. We live in the present and take each experience as it comes. We don't fear emotions. What we are afraid of is the lack of understanding, the unknown.

This fear of emotions comes from childhood and feelings we have experienced that have not been made clear to us. We have not understood our emotions within a difficult experience and have had to find ways of making sense of them without the tools of logic, learning and reason. Many of us build up defences in order to cope with these tough emotional experiences. When we feel something that unconsciously (or consciously) reminds us of this difficult experience, we logically assume it is the emotion that makes us feel this way. That the unbearable nature of what we are feeling must be due to our anger or fear or pain or sadness etc. We build up walls against these particular emotions and feelings and attempt to move out of them as quickly as possible in various ways. I hope I am making sense?

Let me give you an example. My father was not a part of my life. Fundamentally I felt abandoned and rejected. I felt sadness and hurt that he 'didn't want me'. My mother did her best to compensate for this by believing in me and expressing how much I was wanted by her. She tried to explain to me all the reason why he couldn't be a father to me. As much as she tried to help me to see that it wasn't because of me as an individual that he wasn't around, I still felt abandoned by him. I still felt loss and sadness at the fact that my father was not around and didn't want to be. This sadness was not attended to, by my mother and then later on by me. The reason was due to it being misunderstood and it was not something she was aware of in terms of my emotional needs. Sadness and emotional pain has always been quite difficult for me on a fundamental level. The deep sadness. Even in my grief, I struggled with truly experiencing this on a full level. I shoved it down and moved on from it as quickly as possible. I built up a world of defence mechanisms to cope with feelings of sadness, rejection and abandonment. One of my biggest defences is anger (an associated emotion I developed). For years the feelings I have felt towards my father have been anger. Anger has been a much easier emotion to bare, it has protected me and given me a false sense of security and justice. I have also developed the habit of trying to 'fix' other people when they feel sad. I have always felt sadness and pain is something that needs to be fixed or something I need to help people to avoid. As a therapist I have had to work extremely hard at allowing people to be in these emotions without trying to move them out of it and give them solutions. People will heal from discovering their own solutions.

The truth is though, in order for you to feel relief, you need to fully experience your feelings. The pain comes in when we bury them or build these defences up against them. We take these defences on board and keep using them way beyond their necessity. In my case, the anger has been holding me back in so many ways. My lack of ability to experience sadness fully has also held me back from being who I really am. It made the significant loss I have experienced incredibly hard and drawn out. It effects my relationships (all of them). It prevents me from being true to my own needs and living in a way that is in alignment with who I really am and would like to be.

To overcome difficult emotions, you need to allow them to come up to the surface. Think of something at the bottom of your tea cup, it is much harder to reach inside the cup and dig it out than it is to scoop it out when floating on the surface. You may just burn your fingers trying. Your buried emotions are the same. You need to have patience and understanding as each emotion starts to float. It won't all come at once although it can often feel like it does. To reassure you, your higher self or unconscious is in tune with your needs far more than your conscious self. In the same way as our dreams, we will never be given more than we can bare. If you are experiencing a difficult emotion, know that you are strong enough to cope with it. It wont feel good. That is to be expected.

The minute you let go of your expectations around how you should be feeling, you will accept and work through how you really feel. If you can allow the emotion to come through and have your full presence, your organic, natural and instinctual self will integrate and work through it. Once you have worked through it, it will be released. It will not only be released but you will be much better for it. You will learn from it and grow from it. You will feel relief and you will no longer have to bare the weight of the heaviness that comes with holding it in. This can take some work, especially if you are like me and have a lot of resistance to your difficult emotions. Start with trying to identify how you feel in your body.Get to know how you experience emotions and be gentle with yourself. Find time to be by yourself to think, feel and behave in the ways you need to. I personally like to be by myself to grieve and cry. I play sad music, light a candle and look at photos. When I am angry I like to vent, play heavy rock music or to sing or write. I am starting to honour the complex nature of my emotions and feelings and I have taken control back. I make it a point to understand all of the emotions and appreciate the importance they have in my life. In all our lives. The key to happiness and relief is in you, in being true to who you are and what you honestly feel.
There is no such thing as a bad emotion! Only bad experiences associated with emotions.

Love and light XX
Paula