The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  In part 2, I will guide you through the four realms of self — body, thoughts, emotions, and soul — so that you can learn to decipher the messages embedded in each realm. My work is holistically based, which means that, while most approaches address anxiety from a physical (somatic healing), emotional/psychological (some talk therapy), or cognitive (behavioral therapy and most talk therapies) perspective, my work encompasses all three of these areas plus a fourth: our soul. As I view anxiety not as something to get rid of but as a call for healing, part 2 will help you understand that anxiety is a messenger that is pointing to unmet needs and unhealed places in all four realms.

  In part 3, I will explore how anxiety shows up in your intimate relationships with friends, partners, and children. Because our culture sends the erroneous message that fear and love are mutually exclusive and doesn’t understand the paradoxical nature of love in all forms, when anxiety appears in our relationships, it’s easy to believe that there’s something wrong. This section explodes that belief and replaces it with a model that supports healthy love and mindful parenting so that we don’t allow shame and anxiety to tear at the fabric of our most sacred and meaningful relationships.

  In each section, I’ll share stories both from my clients’ experiences and moments of my own life that highlight how to sink below the surface of anxiety and tap into the wellsprings of wisdom that it offers. These stories will teach in a spiral as opposed to a linear fashion, meaning I’ll write about tending to grief in the chapter on transitions and reference back to transitions when talking about grief. Despite what the culture teaches, learning isn’t linear, but follows the circular, spiral rhythm of the soul. This book, while organized into chapters, follows the soul rhythm as well.

  Throughout the book, I’ll be offering both on-the-spot practices and deep-dive practices for healing from anxiety. On-the-spot practices are actions you can take in the moment, anywhere, at any time: in a meeting, on the elevator, in the airplane, at a party, in bed at night. They won’t heal the anxiety from the root, but they’ll help you move through a high-anxiety moment and will also help you take anxiety a few notches down in general so that you can engage in the deeper practices.

  The deep-dive practices are those that will heal anxiety from the ground up and help you decipher its messages. These are practices that I’ll be encouraging you to engage with every day, preferably when you first wake up in the morning (before you grab your phone) and at night before you go to sleep. As you read through the pages of this book, you will glean a lot of information about the roots of your anxiety, and this information will likely translate into personal insight. Write down these aha moments as they arise, either in the margins of this book or in a journal. Then use these insights as springboards from which to engage regularly with the deep-dive practices. Insight is essential, but it’s action that metabolizes the insight into your body and heart and result in change. It’s a simple formula: insight + action = change. If you want to break free from anxiety, practice is key.

  While all the tools are designed to be practiced on your own, inner work is infinitely more effective when we’re witnessed and guided by a skilled professional. As such, if you’re not currently in therapy, I recommend finding a therapist who can work alongside you on this journey. Throughout history, humans have sought counsel from mentors and shamans, religious figures and teachers, and for many modern people, therapists fill those roles. We are not meant to figure life out on our own. Also, don’t hesitate to share this book with your therapist. While they will have their own model and mindset from which they work, good therapists will always be open to learning new philosophies and tools that might help their clients, and possibly even themselves, grow and heal.

  Key Terms on the Journey

  In order to decipher anxiety’s messages, it’s helpful to understand the primary vessels through which anxiety communicates, so I’ll define here the terms that you’ll be encountering throughout this book.

  Soul. Our guiding principle. Jungian theorists refer to the soul as the Self with a capital S, and it is another word for the unconscious. We connect most deeply with this aspect of ourselves through dreams and symptoms, and it’s this inner guide that presents the symptoms that we’ll be discussing throughout this book — anxiety, rumination, worry, intrusive thoughts, insomnia — as it attempts to bring us back into alignment with our core essence. Psyche, another term you’ll find in this book, is another word for soul. In fact, in Greek mythology, Psyche is the goddess of the soul.

  Spirit. The connecting energy or source that is both inside each of us and beyond us. We connect to spirit most often through creativity, imagination, nature, meditation, the arts, animals, and prayer. We feel spirit at the birth of a child, at weddings, while standing at the base of giant redwoods or on the shores of the ocean. Some people connect to spirit in a religious context, but many people connect to this animating principle in ways that have nothing to do with organized religion. Joseph Campbell describes it as “the generating energy of the life that is within you and all things.” In its simplest definition, spirit is interchangeable with love.

  Ego. The ego, which simply means “I” in Latin, is the part of ourselves that is conscious and of which we are aware. As Robert Johnson writes in Inner Work,

  When we say “I” we are referring to only that small sector of ourselves of which we are aware. We assume that “I” contains only this personality, these traits, these values and viewpoints that are up on the surface within the ego’s range of vision, accessible to consciousness. This is my limited, highly inaccurate version of who “I” am.

  The ego is our conscious self and is a necessary and healthy part of our psychological structure, but it also includes the fear-based parts of our personality. The ego includes our conscious aspects — both the ability to think, feel, reflect, plan, and execute, and the part of us that feels so comfortable with what we know (conscious awareness) that it resists the unknown realm of the unconscious. When we believe that we are only our conscious/ego selves, we lose touch with the guiding principle of our lives, which is our soul/unconscious.

  Resistance. Ego has many subsets, including resistance, which is the part of us that is scared to grow because it fears change. Resistance clings to the status quo and often shows up as laziness, inertia, numbness, and fear. In order to gather the gifts of anxiety and grow to our next level of consciousness, we have to work actively with resistance so that it doesn’t run the show. The paradox of the ego is that it both resists growth and longs to be in relationship to the soul. Part of the tension of being human is being in relationship with this paradox.

  Individuation. Robert Johnson explains in Inner Work that “individuation is the term Jung used to refer to the lifelong process of becoming the complete human beings we were born to be. Individuation is our waking up to our total selves.” The process of individuating includes shedding aspects of the conditioned personalities that we absorbed through the process of growing up but that are not in alignment with our true selves.

  For example, if a child grows up to become a doctor to please her parents, but deep inside her passion lies in animal communication, when she’s broken open through anxiety or during a transition, she will have been invited to shed at least one layer of the need to please her parents, which will allow her to come closer to her true self. Every time we walk through a transition consciously, as we’ll see later in the book, we have an opportunity to shed a layer of our conditioned mindsets, habits, beliefs, and intergenerational patterns that no longer serve us. Anxiety and its attending feelings that arise during transitions and at other times in life are the arrows that point the way along the journey of individuating.

  Anxiety is the bridge that connects ego to soul, conscious to unconscious, and when we learn how to harness the wisdom of anxiety, the richness and messages contained in the unconscious can inform and expand our conscious lives.

  A Call to Grow

  Anxiety asks you, dear reade
r, to embrace the gift of who you are. Maybe you’ve been told that you’re too much — too sensitive, too dramatic, too emotional, too analytical — and this message was translated inside your young self to mean that you were wrong or broken in some way. But you must begin to know now, as hopefully you will as you read through this book, that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with you. You’re not broken. You’re not too much. You’re not wrong. In fact, it’s the very qualities that you’ve been shamed for that you now need to wrap up like a hurt animal and hug close to your heart. For it’s when you stop seeing your sensitivity as a burden and instead recognize it as the gift it is that you will begin to heal the hurt places inside you and bring your full presence into the world.

  The self-protective habit you’ve learned is to ignore the anxiety at best and judge it at worst. Bereft of tools that teach you to move toward your discomfort and encouraged by a culture that is externally oriented — where your self-worth is correlated to external factors like appearance, career status, financial assets, and achievements — you’ve developed an ingrained habit to track outward toward anything that will distract from or numb the pain. You may reach for external addictions like a digital device, a shopping spree, a drug, or staying busy through Googling, Facebooking, working, advancing, climbing the ladder, or to internal distractions like worry and intrusive thoughts. You so desperately want to avoid the “fundamental groundlessness of being,” as Pema Chödrön refers to a basic aspect of being human that feels out of control as it knows that our lives are informed by constant change and loss. The groundlessness is the sadness you feel around the passage of time, knowing that life is always in transition. The groundlessness is the fear of big feelings since nobody taught you how to tend to them with kindness. The groundlessness is the nameless fear, grief, and dread that often accompany anxiety. Conditioned by a culture that pounds you with the belief that the answers are “out there,” you naturally reach outward to stave off the discomfort of your inner world.

  But when you find the courage to turn inward, to become curious about the labyrinths and caves that make up your inner world, everything changes. You discover that anxiety can inform your life, but it does not have to define it. You’re not destined for anxiety; you’re destined for equanimity. You’re not destined for limitation; you’re destined for greatness. You’re not destined to feel lost, empty, and alone; you’re destined to feel purposeful and connected. You’re not destined to define yourself by your challenges; you’re destined to grow through these challenges and become a more balanced version of yourself, where your weaknesses become your strengths, and the places where you’ve struggled most become your greatest gifts.

  A library as big as the universe lives inside you, waiting for you to sit down in some dimly lit, quiet corner so that you can discover its contents. Are you ready to step inside, to unlearn much of what you’ve absorbed, and learn some basic principles of life and relationships that will fundamentally alter your understanding of yourself and the world? Are you ready to travel through the passageways of your four realms of self — body, mind, heart, and soul — to heed the messages that live inside each one? If so, take my hand, and let’s begin.

  PART ONE

  ANXIETY AND ITS MESSAGES

  What the frightened individual wishes above all is the restoration of the sense of self which once worked. What the therapist knows is that the symptoms are helpful clues to the place of injury or neglect, pointing the way to subsequent healing. . . . As Jung asserted, “The outbreak of the neurosis is not just a matter of chance. As a rule, it is most critical. It is usually the moment when a new psychological adjustment, a new adaptation is demanded.” This implies that our own psyche has organized this crisis, produced this suffering, precisely because injury has been done and change must occur.

  JAMES HOLLIS

  The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife

  1

  ANXIETY DEFINED AND THE CALL TO TURN INWARD

  Jung observed that the Aboriginal people of Australia spend two-thirds of their waking lives in some form of inner work. . . . We modern people can scarcely get a few hours free in an entire week to devote to the inner world.

  ROBERT JOHNSON

  Inner Work: Using Dreams and Active Imagination for Personal Growth

  A sixty-year-old man bolts awake every morning at 3:00 a.m., worrying about his financial future (even though he’s financially secure). A seven-year-old girl worries that her parents will die. A twenty-five-year-old woman ruminates that she doesn’t love her boyfriend enough (even though he’s everything she’s ever wanted in a partner). These are all people who are suffering from anxiety.

  While most people know what anxiety feels like, they often have a hard time describing what it is. Being able to define anxiety is one of the ways that we help to contain and soothe it, for what we can name and identify holds less charge than a nameless experience. Here’s my definition of anxiety:

  Anxiety is a feeling of dread, agitation, or foreboding associated with a danger that does not exist in the present moment. It can also be defined as a general and pervasive sense of dis-ease without an identified source. Anxiety, while often experienced in the body, is a head state that keeps its prisoners trapped in the realm of unproductive and fear-based thinking. Anxiety keeps you on high alert, and at its core, lives the belief that you’re not okay, that you’ll never be okay, and that you’re not safe physically, emotionally, and/or spiritually. Anxiety and trust are mutually exclusive.

  Anxiety is the catchall diagnosis du jour. Nearly everyone I know who has been sifted and sorted through the mainstream medical and psychological systems has been diagnosed with a generalized anxiety disorder. And it’s not that mainstream doctors and therapists are wrong: most people are, indeed, suffering from anxiety, and the official criteria that qualify someone as having an anxiety disorder as outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (known in psychological circles as the DSM) is very close to the definition I shared. While I agree with most components of the psychologically accepted definition of anxiety, where I diverge is in how I understand and work with it. As I’ve stated, I don’t see it as a “disorder” at all, for when we refer to anxiety as a disorder, we label ourselves with the stamp of “Problem” and fail to recognize the profound opportunity for awakening that approaching anxiety from a mindset of respect invites. When we see anxiety as evidence of something “wrong” we miss the wisdom, the metaphors, and the opportunities for growth encased in its symptoms.

  Understanding anxiety’s positive function throughout history can facilitate the essential shift in mindset from wanting to get rid of it to becoming curious about it. Anxiety has always been a messenger, but the messages have altered throughout time and change from person to person. For example, being on high alert while walking in the forest when there was the possibility of encountering a tiger around the next bend once served humans extremely well. It was the sensitive people in the community who would have been attuned to the subtleties and nuances that indicated real and present danger: the slight movement of the grass, a change in temperature, an almost imperceptible sound. Listening to and respecting anxiety’s communications was a matter of life and death.

  The problem now is that, without the actual tiger around the next bend, modern humans attach their anxiety onto almost any source, and then call it intuition. It’s as if the part of the psyche that evolved to be hypervigilant to danger — the fight-or-flight response — doesn’t know what to do with itself. As its primary job has been taken away, it now swerves into the path of least resistance, and this often looks like scanning the inner horizon for danger: Am I with the right partner? (Is love safe?) Will I harm someone? (Am I safe?) Will I have enough money? (Am I secure?) Do I have a terminal illness? (Is life safe?) Is the planet going to be okay? (Are we all safe?) We then meet these questions with the same life-or-death mindset that kept us alive in the jungle or outback, and it feels like alarm and panic.
But we’re in a new era, and the primal alarm system that once served us very well needs to be modernized and rechanneled so that we don’t project anxiety onto others, ourselves, and the world. With millions of people suffering from anxiety worldwide, we’re being called globally to recognize that embedded inside it is a powerful invitation to evolve in a new direction as a species.

  Symptoms of Anxiety

  Anxiety manifests in a multitude of ways, but it most commonly shows up as intrusive/incessant thoughts, symptoms in the body, and compulsive behaviors.

  For my clients struggling with relationship anxiety, for example, the initial outreach email is almost always the same: “I’m in a loving, healthy relationship, but all of sudden one night I jolted awake with my heart pounding, I felt like I couldn’t breathe, my mouth was dry, and I had the thought, ‘I’m with the wrong partner.’ Ever since then I’ve been plagued by incessant doubt. And when I’ve Googled phrases like ‘How do you know when you’re in love?’ it only reinforces my anxiety. That must mean the thought is true.” (More on real love in chapter 15.)

  My clients struggling with pregnancy anxiety share: “I wanted to be pregnant more than anything, but the moment I saw the positive test result, I panicked. Now the thoughts racing through my mind day and night are so horrible. Thoughts like: I feel like I’ve been diagnosed with a terminal illness. I don’t want this. I love my life; I’m not ready to give it up. I feel like there’s an alien growing inside me. This must mean I really don’t want this baby.”