If anxiety had a face
I live with a loyal little monster
I’ve always prided myself on the ability to read someone as soon as I meet them, but the truth is, I got this monster completely wrong.
Okay, so she likes to ask lots of annoying questions. Likes to critique all of my choices and point out how I need to change. She’s rude, annoying and won’t go away when I need her to.
But I’ve realised, over time, that this monster is a friend. She’s actually trying to make sure I look after myself. Truly look after myself. She’s always been there, seen it all. She saw when I was 6 years old and felt like my needs weren’t important. She watched me mask my neuro-diversity. She saw me put other people’s wants and needs before mine, and enough was enough.
I feel bad, now that when my therapist asked me to personify my anxiety I saw a horned, red dark eyed monster. Because, she’s really fluffy and sweet, actually.
Anxiety is here to help.
This was the change in perspective I needed.
Survival Strategies
If you have experienced childhood trauma or childhood emotional neglect (CEN) or masked a neurodivergence from a young age you may have noticed behaviour patterns that may be unhelpful for you.
Do you worry constantly about disappointing others?
Do you prioritise everyone else and find it difficult to take care of your own needs?
Are you a perfectionist with little time or understanding for your well-being?
Or perhaps you are one step before this, and can’t recognise the moments that got you to this place of anxiety, exhaustion and unhappiness.
We create survival strategies in childhood that serve us at the time. They allow us to be seen or not seen. To be validated in ways we need. However, in adult life these no longer serve us. In fact, for many of us that is an extreme understatement.
These unhealthy patterns of behaviour are unlikely to be obvious to us at first.
We can’t see how our exacting standards make us unwell in the long-term.
We might enjoy being known for being a workaholic.
It can be helpful to rarely cry.
Our exacting standards got us where we are today.
It’s even harder to see these survival strategies when, on the whole, we had a happy childhood. Why go rooting around in there, there’s nothing to find?
Trust me. It’s worth getting yourself on the therapy train, and identifying the ways in which you don’t help yourself. Because let me tell you - your anxiety has been trying to tell you all about it for a long time now.
Hello anxiety, my old friend
So what would your anxiety look like if you gave it an image?
It could be anything. A colour, a place, a person, an animal. It will almost certainly come to you if you tune in.
What’s really important is that it is something we allow to evolve, and something we can learn to approach with humour and curiosity. Accept it’s presence.
And what if we engaged with it. What might it tell us? Well, there’s a few really great techniques for that.
The Techniques
Gratitude
Accepting with the monster like she’s trying to give me a message (but is crap at communication) helps me reorient the experience of anxiety.
My initial instinct is to run away from the scary, unpleasant thoughts and sensations that anxiety can bring up. Unfortunately, pushing anxiety away only feeds the “flight” aspect of the stress response, often making it even bigger.
Acknowledging the monster for making his best effort to protect me is a reminder that, in many respects, my mind is doing its job. It’s simply looking out for me.
Placing hands
When I get anxiety, my typical reaction of running away can be calmed with a simple physical action. If you place your hands where you anxiety can be physically felt, accept it and give it the curiosity it deserves it will almost certainly calm down. I always imagine it saying “phew! I thought you were going to run away again!” and I tell it back “don’t worry, I’m here and I’m engaged”.
It’s a good time to try and tune into what the sensations in your body feel like. Where are they located? Does it feel like guilt or shame? Is it anger or fear? Are you sad or lonely? Is this different to last time?
Writing
This is where the change comes in, and you get your anxiety to take a break from it’s desperate attempt to get your attention.
It sounds counter intuitive, but you’re going to write out every single possible reason you could be feeling anxious, and you’re not going to stop until the anxiety goes away. This can take anything from 1-20 minutes but it’s the best investment of time you could spend.
I tend to write this like a spider diagram, writing Anxiety in the middle and then scribbling all around it.
I start with the obvious ones that jump into my head. These could be work stress, worries about money, fears for my children. What is essential is to then expand on each potential stressor or worry - why is this stressing you out? What is your actual worry here?
I usually discover some fascinating insights about myself here, and see regular patterns that emerge. It’s free therapy, in many ways!
Keep going until you have it all down. At some stage the magic will happen…
Wisdom
There is this fantastic thing that our bodies do when we hit on the thing that our anxiety has been trying to tell us - it speaks back.
Björn Natthiko Lindeblad refers to this as Wisdom in his book “I May Be Wrong” - check out the amazing Happy Place podcast about his story here where he explains this sensation brilliantly: https://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Bjoern-Natthiko-Lindeblad-Podcast/B09SYNJCRD
You could also call it ‘tuning into your gut’.
If we are present in our bodies enough, we can hear it speak to us. For some this may come to them in words floating up from their bellies, for others it’s a peaceful feeling. For me, it’s a feeling of ‘correct’. A sensation bubbles up when I hit on the thing my anxiety has been pointing at, and says ‘yes, that’s the one’. It feels like comfort and contentment and over the next few minutes my anxiety has melted away to nothing.
The first few times you do this you’ll need to be in a quiet place, and with very few distractions. Over time it becomes easier and easier.
Once I started doing this exercise every time my anxiety came to visit, I never dealt with uncontrollable anxiety ever again.
and best of all…. I am actually able to welcome my anxiety monster because I know how to have a healthy relationship with her!
