Vibration

When anxiety becomes your teacher not your captor

I used to believe that anxiety was a deeply embedded character trait on par with being naturally an introvert, friendly or adventurous. I wore anxiety like a badge of honor, disclosing frequently in my clinical practice as a way to join with patients. I could authentically empathize with aspects of their journey because I understood what it was like to be pulled in the direction of racing thoughts, difficulty focusing and sleep disturbance. One criterion of an anxiety disorder diagnosis according to the DSM-V, is that the symptoms associated with anxiety, some of which I’ve listed above, are present for six months or more. Six months felt minuscule in comparison to the decades that I had been living with the hum and vibration of anxiety. 

While writing this post, I felt compelled to research the origins of Stockholm syndrome, which “is a proposed condition in which hostages develop a psychological bond with their captors¹.” My acceptance of anxiety as a deeply rooted part of my being felt analogous to the unconscious necessity of a hostage developing positive feelings toward their captor to preserve a greater potential for a safe and desirable outcome once help is dispatched. The manner in which I placed anxiety on a pedestal, rather than being acknowledged as a survival adaptation resulted in decades of blindspots for what it was actually trying to communicate to me. Similarly, for those impacted by the bondage of Stockholm Syndrome, onlookers often shudder at the possibility that one’s adaptations would result in the sacrifice of the inner bounds and self-protection that so often we believe will be accessible in our time of need. Our body’s capacity to disconnect from our felt-sense of protection and physical integrity, also understood as dissociation,  “... seems to be the favored means of enabling a person to endure experiences that are at the moment beyond endurance².” When something has been so habituated to become synonymous with our daily way of living, you can imagine the difficulty of believing that there is anything beyond how our nervous system becomes wired toward surviving rather than thriving. 

Some readers may be shocked to learn this, having known me in a professional capacity assisting patients in their healing journey from anxiety, mood and other trauma related disturbances. I was quite shocked myself when in 2021 my coach, Reggie, suggested that my modus operandi was indicative of me living someone else’s life. Around this time whenever I received feedback that was critical of my work performance, perhaps from a patient that I had rubbed the wrong way, I would defend my commitment to this way of being stating, “I don’t know any other way to be.” 

As I write this today I don’t recoil from the honesty in that rebuttal. I literally did not believe there was any other way of being, recognizing now that fear’s impact on the body provides us with informational and environmental tunnel vision to tune out what is not needed to aid in our survival. Perhaps my patients were seeing me living outside the truth, my integrity and the energy I wished to model as a healer. It took many months of work with Reggie to see that the energy, or vibration, that I was bringing with me into every room, every interaction, was actually founded upon a series of highly sophisticated adaptations. He went on to explain that,

"anxiety comes when the thoughts that consume you with what you are supposed to do and you continue to deny this reality" 

This definition of anxiety was so foreign from my decades of training to become a psychologist, which gleaned heavily from the medical model and evidence-based therapies, (EBT’s) like Cognitive-Behavioral therapy, which historically has prescribed the combination of psychotropic medication and EBT’s as the gold-standard of care for addressing anxiety and depression. It was not until 2014 when I was introduced to Somatic Experiencing, a body-oriented approach to treating and understanding trauma, did I discover that while EBT’s have their place, more and more compelling evidence demonstrated the body’s capacity to communicate to us not with language, but with aches, pains, and left unaddressed, symptoms and syndromes. This is evidenced in Bessel Van der Kolk’s acclaimed, The Body Keeps the Score, as well as Gabor Mate’s, When the Body Says No and The Myth of Normal. While these books are incredibly important guides on examining the mind-body connection to symptom presentation and should be required reading for anyone in a healing profession, I love Martha Beck’s concise affirmation to this growing body of research,

“Anything that takes you away from your North Star, your body protests³”

Martha,  like Reggie, acknowledges that when we are living a life that is not ours, but one built upon adaptations developed to survive, our body will not just sit back and fade away out of existence. We so often forget in our daily obligations that our body houses our soul, this precious energy that was present before entering our body and will live long after our bodies wither and perish in this form. 

Humans are so highly adaptive that the tension, angst, critical inner voice, all become muffled background noise, desensitizing us to the urgent, time-sensitive communication within our systems. Anxiety is not a way of being- it is a response, a natural reflex when over time there is a chronic denial of the inner wants, needs, desires. The shaking, tension, tightness, sleep deprivation is the body’s way of saying, “this matters, stop ignoring what I am desperately trying to communicate to you!” The soul’s evolving journey requires our human form to stop doing in order to illuminate our authentic call to being. 

Shifting from Doing to Being 

Get Quiet 

This world is loud, beautiful, constantly stimulating and at times utterly overwhelming! While the demands we’ve either learned or created may create stories in our mind that say, “I just don’t have time to sit still there is so much for me to do!” it is only in quiet solitude that we can even begin to get close to the whispers within. These pulses, which at first might just come in the form of thoughts pummeling you, will eventually evolve into more distinctive signals and messages. I used to avoid quiet time alone because my thoughts would race and race with all the things I had to do. But with years of practice, setting aside even 10 minutes to just sit, get quiet and listen in, it is amazing what will flash up; sometimes it is a creative direction to take my practice, others, a lovely memory of another season of life. The point here is to not get caught up in the what, but to permit your brain and body to simply be in the awareness of what you notice.

Reconnect with Nature 

Every summer my family and I travel to a remote part of Arizona to spend time boating with family. It is during this time that time slows down, technology is turned off and eyes welcome the vastness of the canyon walls encircled by hawks and eagles. My enthusiasm to adequately capture the healing afforded by nature drew me to my copy of Nature by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Having not picked it up in some time, I asked my five year-old daughter to close her eyes and choose a page that spoke to her. She took this request quite seriously, not allowing me to witness her process, grabbing the book gleefully and hiding her methods before returning it to show me this⁴

“The river, as it flows, resembles the air that flows over it; the air resembles the light which traverses it with more subtle currents; the light resembles heat which rides with it through Space. Each creature is only a modification of the other; the likeness in them is more than the difference, and their radical law is one and the same… So intimate is this Unity, that, it is easily seen, it lies under the undermost garment of nature, and betrays its source in Universal Spirit”-

The body knows the way

Our bodies have an incredible capacity to communicate unconsciously and subliminally. However, as I’ve mentioned throughout this work, our daily demands and hectic schedules have disconnected us from the pulsing, tingling sensual experience of our bodies navigating the curves and edges of our environment. I have recently been introduced to energy center work, and while my expertise is still in infancy, I have experienced the delight that only comes when an energy center that was formerly blocked becomes a clear channel of communication. I encourage my clients to listen to the whispers of their bodies, starting small in what I call “low-stake” decisions, like waking up and tuning into your body to communicate whether you prefer coffee or tea that day. We can become so fixated in our routines, that sometimes, with some playful curiosity, changing it up with the body as your guide can be quite illuminating. With enough practice and permission, these whispers become more distinguishable, nudging you more clearly in decisions made throughout the day.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome

2. Levine, P. (1997) Waking the tiger: healing trauma. Berkley, CA. North Atlantic Books.

3. Beck, M. (2003). Finding Your Own North Star. Piatkus Books.

4. Emerson, R.W. “Nature.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume I.New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979.