TRANSCRIPT
Lately, I have been going through these waves of really intense anxiety. Sometimes it’ll last a whole day and ruin a night of sleep for me. I’ll be up in the middle of the night for hours and wake up the next day exhausted. Sometimes, a good thing about being exhausted the next day is if I don’t take a nap, the next night I’ll be so tired I’ll just sleep right through. Maybe the next day I’ll be less anxious after I get a good night’s sleep.
But I’ve been thinking about the subject of anxiety and where does this anxiety come from inside of me. Sometimes I take a step back and I look at it and I say it’s not logical in a way. It’s like, it’s not intellectually—it’s like I shouldn’t be this anxious. What I’m going through, that it doesn’t serve me, it doesn’t really help me. And why am I like this?
Now, I’m not gonna say that all anxiety is bad. Sometimes anxiety can be incredibly motivating. Even this anxiety I have now, this very stressful stuff that I go through, it motivates me to look at myself even more, to try to make sense of it, to sort out who I am. So in that way, even this unpleasant anxiety that’s more extreme for me can be really motivating for me to improve myself, conscious relationship with me, my self-reflective relationship with myself.
But why am I this anxious? If I can look at it logically and say there’s no intellectually good reason for me to be this anxious, it doesn’t help me. Why can’t, you know, me looking at it intellectually in the mirror—why doesn’t that make it just go away? If I realize it’s bad for me, why do I still have it?
So this is what I came up with. It’s a combination of two things. The first thing is that my life actually is stressful right now. I’ve got a lot of stressful things that I’m going through. I’ve got some personal things that are pretty stressful in terms of my work. My living situation is in flux in some ways. I’ve been traveling a lot, so coming and going is very stressful. There’s financial stresses going on. So all this stuff in combination with pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure is just inherently stressful. These are stressors, especially in combination. Probably any one of them just on its own, yeah, it wouldn’t be that bad. I’d be able to deal with it, I’d be able to cope with it without much problem. But when I get like four or five different things that really are piling up, that is stressful for me. I really don’t like it.
But even still, when I look at it intellectually, I could say even all those things in combination, they are stressors, but they shouldn’t cause that degree of anxiety that I have. The degree of anxiety that I have seems to be out of proportion with just those stressors, even in combination. Even though the stressors are high, now does that mean that I have generalized anxiety disorder? Do I have a psychological diagnosis? Do I need to go see a therapist or a doctor and take pills even for it?
Now, back when I did go to therapy, the longest I ever went to therapy, I did get that diagnosis of generalized anxiety disorder because this has been a recurring thing in my life—at periods, just to go through waves of like sometimes periods of having a lot of anxiety that really can bother me. But I totally reject that diagnosis. I don’t think it’s helpful. I don’t think it explains anything. All it does is look at my life situation as a bunch of symptoms and the surface of my life situation, my reactions, how I’m feeling as just a bunch of symptoms on a checklist that they crunch. That’s a bunch of psychiatrists in a room decided if you have enough of these for a certain period of time, all arbitrary stuff, that this qualifies for generalized anxiety disorder. And then there’s all sorts of treatment that’s supposedly appropriate for this arbitrary diagnosis. I reject that, by the way. That diagnosis never helped me in any way, and I don’t have any personal connection with it. I don’t feel that way. But I do see that I have anxiety.
So what’s the second part? The first part is yes, I have all these stressors too for me, and this gave me a lot of sympathy for myself, empathy for myself for why my reactions seem somewhat out of proportion or at times a lot out of proportion to the stressors that I’m going through.
The second thing—and this is when I really just like my heart went out to myself—as I thought back to when I was a very little boy, age 0, age 6 months, age 1, age 1 and a half. I grew up in an environment that was in many ways very unpleasant. I had very insecure attachments with my parents. I had parents who fought right in front of me, loudly screaming, nasty. They never resolved anything. We lived in a one-room apartment when I was up until I was two-and-a-half, and there was no buffer between me and their fighting, their conflicts, their butting heads, their arguing, cheating, sexually cheating. There was cheating going on with my parents, that one of them was cheating on the other. There was lying, dishonesty. I believe there was substance abuse going on back then, and this was the environment that I was being raised in.
Now, and that wasn’t even the half of it. The other half of it was that I was constantly being abandoned by them. They were putting me in schools, they were putting me with an abusive nanny and leaving because they both wanted to go work and have their careers. They wanted to be the super parents in a way. They wanted to be the kind of parents that could not only have this beautiful little child but also have a good career and do all the things that they wanted. And I think, do I totally fault them for that? No. But what I fault them for was that they didn’t really protect me. They put me in the hands of people who more sane and rational parents would have seen this is not the place you put your child. They didn’t help transition me into a loving relationship with other authority figures. They put me in the hands of bad people. Some of the people that they entrusted me to were really sick and screwed up, abusive to me.
And so what I learned as a result of that was I went from one environment, a home environment that, some by the way, actually was loving sometimes. There was a lot of fun and caring, and you know, there was always, I believe, healthy food. And sometimes I had two parents who did a lot of fun things with me, a lot of attention, a lot of caring, a lot of nurturance. And then it could really flip where they would just be very different with all their fighting and stuff and all their really bad inappropriate behavior and also emotional rejections of me in terms of just sometimes being very, very cold, being very distant, not paying attention to me, not loving me. So it’s like the really good stuff could be totally taken away very, very quickly.
Even when they were there, like for instance, when they’re fighting with each other, they clearly weren’t thinking about my best interests because that totally stressed me out, especially to be in the same room with it, to feel the horrible energy and to hear it and to have nothing that I could do to make it better. I think I just had to shut down emotionally.
Now also, when they would put me in the hands of people who were abusive and not listen to my cries, not listen to my resistance—because I later was told I had a lot of resistance about being placed in the hands of these horrible people, horrible schools, horrible nannies—this was stuff that I really didn’t want, and they didn’t care. They were then, so for me, from my perspective as a little child, I experienced profound abandonment day to day, today.
And so what I got, what was deeply embedded in me in my first years of life was that life itself, the world, is not a safe place for me. Things can profoundly change. It can be horrible for me, and I have no power to do anything about it. And so what happened is that was embedded.
In my brain, that’s embedded in my neural pathways. That’s embedded in my psychological outlook on the world at a very fundamental level. Some part of me has, it’s more than a belief, it has a knowledge that the world is not safe because that was in many ways my primary experience.
The result of that being, even though I’ve grown, I’ve gotten away from somebody. These horrible people broke away from my parents so that I could learn to love myself better. I’ve learned how to create a much healthier, happier, more consistent existence for myself. I’ve worked out so many of my traumas. I’ve learned to get traumatizing people out of my life, largely really, or the ones that for whatever reason still do exist in my world, minimize the contact, have a lot of buffer. I’ve learned how to have much better boundaries. I’ve done so much healing of my traumas. I’m such a less screwed up person, so much healthier on the inside, so much more self-loving, self-respecting.
So I’ve really come a long way. But this is, this final area is this early, early childhood stuff which I haven’t fully resolved. And so where it manifests in my life is when there are multiple different stressful things going on in my external adult existence. And that at some level replicates the constellation of things that I was going through when I was very, very young. And it triggers something in my mind that I go back into being a child like I was and just feeling very anxious and overwhelmed.
And I see that, and the fact that I see that actually helps. It gives me much more sympathy for myself because I realize that I’m not crazy. There’s nothing crazy about that at all. That’s totally expected, that’s totally normal that I would have that. And it also gives me clues on how to deal with it. It’s like, wait a second, Daniel, I’m an adult. I’m not a child at the mercy of screwed-up parents in a screwed-up world and screwed-up nannies and screwed-up school and screwed-up teachers and screwed-up whatever. I actually don’t have to have so many stressors in my life. I can remove some of those stressors, and that’s actually what I’ve been doing. And guess what? I feel a lot less stressed.
And it’s actually helped me. Now, back some time ago, 20 years ago, I didn’t have so much insight into my early, early childhood. I think a big part of it was that I still needed to believe my parents were better than they were, in part because I still wanted them to love me. But in part, I also didn’t want to face all this stuff. Looking at this stuff is incredibly painful. Also, the world often doesn’t empathize with me, or I’ll speak in general when people really talk about their childhood traumas. So often people, even therapists, don’t empathize with it because it’s too painful to empathize with it. Empathy being, I feel what you feel. I can walk in your shoes. I know how it feels. I can be on the path alongside you.
A lot of people, quite reasonably, don’t want to walk on the path alongside of someone who’s going through or exploring really, really painful things in their childhood. And guess what? Right in line with what I’m talking about now, and I speak for myself as a therapist and watching other therapists and talking to so many people who have been in therapy and also having been a patient, that to empathize with someone who’s going through something very stressful or very horrible or uncovering or exploring historical stuff that’s extremely painful and horrible, traumatizing, that is a stressor for a person to witness that, to empathize with it.
So a therapist who really is deeply empathizing with someone who’s going through something very stressful, or even a friend who’s really being there for someone who’s going through something horrible, that’s a stressor for that friend. That’s a stressor for a therapist. And that is what I think so many therapists actually are part of schools of therapy that emotionally take distance from their clients. They don’t want to get too much into empathizing with other people because it’s painful. And in part because so many therapists themselves haven’t dealt with their childhoods much at all.
Now, you might say, oh maybe it’s inappropriate, Daniel, that you were a therapist if you hadn’t fully dealt with your childhood. And I could see where that argument is coming from. However, what I’ve observed is I dealt with it so much more than almost every therapist I knew. Not all, there were some things that dealt with it a lot, but most really hadn’t. And I think a lot of the therapists that I saw, how they had learned to function better in their life is to dissociate more from their childhood, to put more distance between themselves and the painful things that they went through. They were less empathic for the child they once were, and they considered that healing. They considered that a healthier way of being.
And I think a lot of people do in the world. I think many religions are based on this. The more you dissociate, the more you get away from the horrible things that you went through, the more you just blindly forgive everyone without even fully empathizing with what you yourself went through. The more you don’t have your anger, maybe you just push it down, bury it, bury your memories, don’t talk bad about anyone, be positive. That is a way to survive in the world. That’s a way to feel much less anxiety about the horrible things that so many of us have gone through, the horrible things that are going on outside in the planet.
The problem is, it’s not a good long-term strategy. Now yes, people may be able to live in a dissociated sort of bliss for many, many years of their lives or many decades of their lives. The problem is it doesn’t really work well for having deep intimate relationships, first of all with oneself, also with other people. To have real intimacy, dissociating from your historical background, the painful things that you went through, doesn’t really work to really connect with others. It doesn’t work to help us resolve our traumas.
But the real worst is when people haven’t really empathized with what they went through, haven’t exhumed their painful childhood stuff and made sense of it. If they have power over others in work situations, in relationship situations, but I think merely in having children, they pass this on to their kids. It’s unconscious. They don’t realize they’re doing it. They may not have any ability to take responsibility for it because they’re not necessarily even aware that they’re doing it because they’re dissociated from it. It’s an unconscious process, but it does harm other people nonetheless, especially other people over whom they wield power. And who wields more power over another person than a parent over a very, very young child?
So this gets back to the second part of why I can really succumb to having a lot of anxiety sometimes, is that my parents failed me when I was very, very young in so many ways at providing me a really stable, nurturing, non-anxiety producing environment to live in. They really screwed up in so many ways, and this set me up for a lot of problems as my life went on.
The good news is that, yeah, I started figuring it out, and I have taken so many steps to heal from it. And I have the tools within myself to continue to heal from it. So that’s the trajectory of my life: making more sense of it, making more understanding, and then also secondarily, as the result of all this, being able to share my life experience and what I observe as the result of my life experience with others, hopefully in order to be useful to other people.
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