Overcoming Anxiety

You don’t have to retraumatize yourself to move forward

Every person I’ve talked to who has had general anxiety (not about anything specific, just a general sense of dread and concern) has come from a challenged childhood. This is where the anxiety started — but it’s not where it ends. You don’t have to go back and dig up your past to move forward in a stronger way.

First, let me start by defining what I mean by a “challenged childhood”. It means that you had a significant period in your childhood in which you felt emotionally unsafe. This could be because you were physically, sexually, and/or emotionally abused. It could be because one or both of your parents were narcissists, addicts, neglectful, or too overwhelmed with their own issues (mental health, too many kids to keep track of, financial woes, etc.)to notice/care about your needs. It could just be that you were the black sheep of the family and your sibling was the golden child. It doesn’t matter how you got there, you got there. And there are some significant symptoms that can help you self-identify. See if any of these sound familiar to you:

1. Never feeling good enough and/or feeling like a fraud
2. Always waiting for the other shoe to drop, no matter how good things look
3. Needing to control/manipulate those around you to make sure things turn out the way you want
4. Putting yourself last on your own priority list — living on the leftovers of your own life
5. Never saying “no” — even when you want to — because what you do determines your value in life
6. Being an empath — feeling what other people feel and sometimes being run over by those strong emotions
7. Having a running list of what everyone else wants in your head, but no idea what you want
8. Never asking for help — because you know it isn’t coming and if it does, it won’t be the way you wanted
9. Hyper-vigilance — monitoring everyone who comes and goes from the room and how they are feeling so you have fair warning if something bad is about to happen
10. Inner Judgment and Perfectionism — you judge yourself harshly — really harshly — and thus find it reasonable to expect really high standards from everyone else because, after all, it’s so much less than you (unreasonably) demand of yourself

If you’ve got more than 2 or 3 of these, then you had a challenged childhood (and/or been in an abusive relationship as an adult) and there’s a good chance you’re dealing with anxiety all the time.

Why You Can’t Find Solace

We’ve talked about where the anxiety comes from and what other symptoms come along with it. And you’ve probably done a lot of things to deal with it. If you’re like most of my clients, you’ve likely read a bunch of self-help books, listened to a bunch of podcasts (that’s where the bulk of my clients come from, my podcast), taken some classes, maybe you’ve even gone to therapy and found that it helped for a while but then it stopped working.

This is exactly what I did when I was searching for my own solution. I had been raised in the New Age movement and had been doing self-help classes with my mother from the age of six. And yet, when I went to do my own soul searching at 28, it took me 12 years of searching to overcome my anxiety and another 6–8 years to truly find happiness. Why? Because there are four things I was dealing with that you are probably dealing with too. And I had to discover them before I could address them. I’m going to tell you what they are in the hopes of shortening the process for you:

1. You’re On a Skateboard?— when you come out of a challenged childhood, you grow up seeing the world sideways from the ground level with someone standing on your face. Eventually, you realize that you need to move, so you put a skateboard under your face and then you crawl around on your hands and knees hoping that no one kicks you in the head or butt or steps on your feet or hands or trips over you. Of course, this happens all the time and you get hurt a LOT (not that you would tell anyone that this was true). And then you’ll come up to a crack in the sidewalk and you start to panic because you know the moment the front wheels hit, the non-skid surface of that skateboard is going to scratch up your face and then when the back wheels hit it’s going to happen again. So you’re freaking out saying “there’s a crack in the sidewalk!!” while everyone else around you is looking at you like you’re nuts because they are walking upright and the crack is irrelevant to them. This skateboard is the reason why a lot of therapy doesn’t work for my clients. The therapist is trying to lead them down a road but they are giving directions from the wrong perspective. What you need is someone who will tell you how your perspective is skewed so that you can wrap your head around the way other people see things. That’s what gets you off the skateboard.
2. The Straight Jacket of Coping Mechanisms?— when you were young, you wove a tapestry of coping mechanisms that were very functional in your dysfunctional environment. You wrapped that tapestry around you like a safety blanket and it got you through your childhood to adulthood. But now that you are in a functional environment, those coping mechanisms are what’s dysfunctional. And, to make matters worse, your safety blanket has gotten tighter and tighter over the years until it has become a straight jacket. In fact, if you close your eyes, you can probably feel yourself pushing out against it. And there is no way to just take it off. You have to unravel it just like you once wove it. This means addressing all of the issues in it at once. And this is why you haven’t been able to make and keep a lot of progress in your personal growth. Each time you pull on a thread, it gets snagged on all the others. So you have to address all of the issues at once.
3. Your Sense of Self, Your Identity, Has Holes In It. Every time you were told to put someone else’s needs ahead of your own, every time you were not allowed to have your own feelings, every time someone gaslit you about what your experience was or was not, you lost hold of who you were. This is the reason you have no idea what you want. Each time these things happened, it also poked a hole or tore a rip in your identity. And this is why it’s hard for you to hold onto decisions you make without taking immediate action on them. You build up the energy to make the decision, but if you don’t pull the trigger, all of the energy leaks out of the holes and tears in your identity until you don’t have any left to make the move. You need to solidify your sense of self.
4. Lack of Self Love?— with all of these things above being true, it’s next to impossible to cultivate self-love. You can write and say affirmations until you die and that inner voice will keep saying “yeeeeaaaahh, riiiiight”, denying the validity of the statements. But, when you address the three issues above, self-love is just around the corner.

So what does all of this have to do with anxiety? These are the underlying reasons why the anxiety exists. If you address these, the anxiety begins to melt away. Then, it’s just about addressing the habits that you’ve formed around the anxiety to eliminate those. (Doing this won’t help much if you aren’t addressing the thoughts that are creating the anxiety — there is an order of operations for this stuff, so if you’ve tried this before and it didn’t work for long, this is why.)

In short, before you try to medicate away your anxiety (or if you’re already on meds and want to get off), why not try looking under the covers for where it comes from and how you can address it.

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Kelle Sparta is a Transformational Shaman specializing in helping empaths build lives and businesses they can love. She is also the host of the popular?Spirit Sherpa Podcast . If you are an empath and you’re having trouble separating yourself from other’s emotions, download her free?Boundaries for Empaths program . You can find out more about Kelle at?www.KelleSparta.com .