I’m no stranger to anxiety

I’m no stranger to anxiety. I’m not sure that I could pinpoint the first time I experienced anxiety but I remember having days in elementary school where I felt so overwhelmed that the last thing I wanted to do was go to school and I’d break down in tears when it came time for drop-off.

I also remember in highschool and college describing it as a feeling of uneasiness and I’d say things like “I’m not quite sure what is wrong but something is wrong.” And as I got wiser (and went to therapy) it shifted to “I’m not quite sure what is wrong yet, but it’ll come out.” Like it would eventually work its way up and into my consciousness, if I slowed down and gave it time. 

Last year I learned a model/framework that made sense of all of that for me.

In the Ecosomatics Practitioner Training with Chandler Stevens we discussed the Freudian/psychoanalytic view of anxiety as the negation of affect. When emotions, “good” or “bad” cannot be tolerated or processed by the individual, the attempt is made to suppress them.

This occurs through muscular contraction, such as the experience of “I can’t take a full breath” because of tension in the chest or feelings of tightness in the throat. These physical contractions, tensing, and restraining are a means to suppress from others and ourselves the feelings/emotions/affect happening in the body. Think of the experience of contracting your face to keep from crying, it’s like that but full body. There are varying degrees of this dysregulation as well. You’ll hear people describe disorientation, blurred vision, tingling, dizziness, stomach upset, these are usually signs of a more intense dysregulation happening at an “involuntary” level of the nervous system. 

Anxiety is not a pleasant experience. It is no surprise that many of us spend so much time and energy trying to outrun/avoid it. But there is a lot to be learned from it if you can muster the courage to sit with it and see what is beneath it, your true feelings. 

Emotions show us what is important and in what way. But the energy of some emotions seem unbearable. We were either taught that they are “bad” or “wrong” and shouldn’t be felt/expressed or they are purely too big for us to handle alone. We cannot tolerate them so we do our damndest to shut them down by contracting and tensing the body. 

When you stop the contracting and the tensing you’re able to tune in and begin to listen to what is actually occurring within you. 

It is being what you are rather than putting on a show. It is true authenticity and it allows for the possibility of true connection and valuable action.