No matter HOW bad it gets Anxiety issues stay entrenched, until we're willing to heal.
This may be hard to believe, but a lotta folks maintain anxiety symptoms, because they’re useful. In short, anxious feelings majorly contribute to self-motivation, particularly if we have ADD traits.
What happens do ya think, if we awaken in the morning feeling a little depression, and we don’t wanna get out of bed? Don’t we go up into our head and imagine various negative scenarios that will surely threaten our sense of well being, if we remain under the covers? Aren’t we worried we’ll be reprimanded for getting to work late, or even be fired for not showing up? What if we’re feeling so shitty, we don’t wanna have to get our kids ready for school and drive ‘em there?! Enter, the Panic Monster.
As I speak to in my online course, “Overcoming Anxiety,” profoundly uncomfortable sensations of anxiety and panic are the direct result of having harshly judged and disconnected/dissociated from difficult emotions (sadness, emptiness, depression, loneliness, etc.) in childhood, since we were very little.
Feelings of anxiety are intimately entwined with our ‘fight or flight’ reflex, which is a normal, natural human survival response to us feeling danger or threat. These feelings trigger the autonomic nervous system, which results in uncontrollable bodily sensations one might be familiar with during a panic attack (rapid/racing heartbeat, intense sweating, goosebumps, feeling faint or dizzy, painful pressure in the chest, sensations of going crazy, etc.).
When we’ve had to grow up suppressing various emotions that our parental units disapproved of, we are inevitably left with only half a personality structure. This condition is most common among people-pleaser/Codependent types, as well as those with Borderline Personality Disorder traits. In my view, both types of individuals are personality disordered, because they operate from a very narrow and limited set of emotions they’ve deemed as “acceptable,” since early childhood.
Killing off, suppressing, and judging certain emotions as “wrong” lifelong, is central to why one lives with Anxiety Disorder (and OCD symptoms as well). Anxiety and panic are surrogate emotions. What I mean by this, is they take the place of feeling states we either don’t wanna feel, or think we “shouldn’t” be experiencing.
If you’ve grown up being schooled by a mom or dad who insisted that hating someone was bad or wrong, and that your angry feelings were inappropriate or unacceptable, you learned to murder and bury all aggressive or dark emotions. All shades and dimensions of anger got suppressed in this process: Frustration, annoyance, feeling pissed-off, irritated, etc., were judged by you as wrong and “bad,” and relegated to a dark, dank basement or cellar in your home where they’ve remained locked in little cages without light, warmth, water or food.
In short, you’ve successfully amputated these feelings out your emotional repertoire to avoid being punished first by your parents~ and later yourself, for merely feeling them! Nobody can be emotionally whole and self-actualized, when they go thru life with a plethora of normal, human emotions missing from their personality structure! They become one-dimensional cardboard cutouts who are predictable, flat and boring to others (and themselves).
To understand anxiety issues better, think of a movie or TV production that hires look-alike ‘stand-ins’ to sit arduously for hours, while lighting and camera angles are arranged for an upcoming shot to be filmed with the lead actors, who are relaxing in-between ‘takes’ in their trailers or dressing rooms. You now have a mental picture of how anxiety functions as a stand-in or surrogate emotion, to replace genuine feelings you’re determined not to experience, due solely to childhood programming!
Suppression of any kind of emotion causes all other feeling states to lose their vibrancy, and is the only reason people feel flat, empty, bored, inert, lifeless or dead inside, which can spawn all kinds of addictive/compulsive issues! These folks keep themselves mentally and physically “too busy” to feel a litany of emotions that are desperately wanting to have those little cages in the cellar unlocked, so they can scamper up the stairs, come into the light, and be fed and received with warmth, rather than disdain.
The nature of emotions is, when you kill off some emotions, all others become impaired. If you refuse to acknowledge and feel your depression for instance (a powerful anxiety-inducing event), you’ll lose access to real glee and joy, as well.
There is no such thing as a “wrong” emotion. Some emotions feel bad in the body, but that doesn’t make them wrong or “bad.” It just means with the right kind of help, we can learn to endure and embrace ALL our emotions, and finally acquire full self-acceptance.
Bottom line, if you continue to ‘hate’ various feeling states and judge yourself harshly for experiencing ‘em, there’s no way on God’s green earth you’re ever gonna grow healthy self-esteem. To put this another way, ya can’t learn to be self-loving, as long as there are facets or features in yourself you despise!
Please share this with your friends, spread it around and call my landline, if you have any questions or concerns: 323 936-3637