I recently came across the most excellent 2019 BBC documentary Nadiya: Anxiety and Me offering profound insights regarding conventional treatment of anxiety and panic disorders. It follows the brave journey of UK celebrity chef and panic attack sufferer Nadiya Hussain as she seeks mental health treatment for her chronic anxiety for the first time, on camera. (more…)
As someone who has experienced a truckload of anxiety myself, I was very interested to come across the recent 2019 BBC documentary Nadiya: Anxiety and Me. In this video, I watch the documentary and capture my reaction to Nadiya Hussain‘s experience seeking treatment for her panic attacks; and I bet it’s not what the producers were expecting… (more…)
One of the dominant themes that my clients and other readers of this blog usually have that has undermined their self-confidence is a difficult relationship with their mother. When we have a good relationship with our mother from infancy through adolescence, our nervous system is wired for a sense of safety and we are prepared to take on the world as an adult. However, if we had a difficult relationship with our mother, this can wire our nervous system for anxiety and leave us feeling unsafe long into adulthood. Psychologists call this an attachment disorder, and the implications on the rest of our lives can be devastating.
A controlling mother can leave you feeling unsafe
Journaling is a great way to release unexpressed emotions that can otherwise accumulate and make us feel anxious. Here is an example of some free-flow journaling that I did last year at a time when I was feeling particularly anxious. It helped me identify and release how I was feeling, so writing it felt very cathartic.
I am so anxious sometimes that it’s literally hard to breathe. Why, why, why, why, why? Or more importantly, what can I do about it? Where is it coming from? I’ve been contemplating this recently, and here are my thoughts: (more…)
The main thing I got from Harriet Lerner’s book The Dance of Fear is that fear and anxiety aren’t just individual problems; they totally impact the way we relate with each other. Anxiety is contagious and gets passed around between us whenever we interact with anxious people. Families, companies, organisations, churches, countries and social groups of all kinds can become infected with anxiety that affects everyone in the group. When a social system becomes fear-based or shame-based, everyone in it suffers.
Fear can be like a dance, often involving other people
Since anxiety causes suffering, we naturally want to escape. One way of escaping is to dump our anxiety on someone else. Being a sensitive person, I’ve always been susceptible to having other people’s anxiety dumped on me, but it’s only now that I’m learning to recognise when this is happening.
This book helped me identify such a situation once when I volunteered to lead a public speaking training course run by my Toastmaster’s club. I had run it successfully several times before and we always got great feedback from the participants on how valuable it was. But this time I wanted to make it even better by talking more about how anxiety works physiologically, and throwing in some exercises I had learned during my acting classes to help deal with fear right up front.
Intergenerational Unworthiness Trauma is a term I coined this morning to describe feelings of unworthiness and insecurity that are passed from parents to their children down successive generations.
Parents who feel fundamentally unworthy create a lack of secure attachment with their infants, leading to children with insecure, avoidant or disorganized attachment styles. When these children grow into adults, they pass the trauma on to their own children through their inability to bond emotionally with them. Everyone in the family ends up with emotional abandonment trauma manifesting as core feelings of unworthiness.
In other words, parents who feel fundamentally unworthy, insecure or broken are unable to raise children with deep feelings of worthiness themselves.
The cycle repeats down the generations until someone recognises and breaks it by doing the emotional healing work to deal with their own traumatic attachment wound, so they can create a secure attachment to the children in the next generation.
I have experienced this personally, and believe it is the underlying issue that undermined my own self-confidence for so long, ultimately leading me to create this website. (more…)
Anxiety sucks, especially when we don’t know what’s causing it and what to do about it. When we feel anxious all the time for no obvious reason, it’s called generalized anxiety. However there are often things we can do to reduce, eliminate or manage generalized anxiety so that it doesn’t ruin our life.
There are many reasons why we may feel anxious. Solving this problem can sometimes involve trying a number of different approaches until we find one or more that work for us. Based on my experience of what works for me and my clients when feeling anxious, here are some strategies to try: (more…)
It’s Sunday morning. When I was a child, Sunday morning meant getting up unreasonably early (for a Sunday), getting dressed and heading to our local church with my parents to learn about God, Jesus and The Bible.
The church services felt long and boring with dull music, but fortunately I didn’t have to stay in them very long as us kids could leave part-way through to head downstairs to Sunday School in the basement of the church. Compared to the church service, Sunday School was much more fun. I ran riot a lot of the time, running around the building whenever possible and playing with the other kids. Mind you, compared to Sunday School, I imagined that staying home or playing with my non-church friends was probably even more fun.
In Sunday School I heard stories like Jonah being swallowed by a whale for disobeying God. God’s plan involved Jonah going to Nineveh to tell the people there how evil they were. Didn’t sound like such a great plan to me; who would want to do that?
This is a guest post from Jackie Cortez from The Prevention Coalition.
You don’t have to be fitness-obsessed or a health food nut to know that healthy habits play a big role in how you feel. What you do on a day-to-day basis impacts your energy level and general well-being, as well as your emotional state and confidence level. Healthy habits are important for keeping our lives in balance, and this is especially true for men who are in recovery for addiction. When you work on making these healthy habits part of your daily routine, you will feel better physically and be mentally prepared to handle whatever comes your way. (more…)
If we were surrounded by emotionally available adult caregivers as an infant, our developing brain and nervous system learned to regulate our emotions via a healthy emotional attachment to the adults around us. However if we were surrounded by emotionally unavailable adults who routinely dismissed, minimised or suppressed both their own emotions and ours, we experienced emotional abandonment.
Being denied the emotional connection we needed as an infant can have a traumatic effect on our developing brain. Emotional abandonment can lead to Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD) or what Susan Anderson calls PTSD of Abandonment in adults. The primary result is that we fail to develop healthy adult emotional regulation and can often end up feeling overwhelmed by our own emotions. This effect can last long into adulthood until we find a way to address it.
Emotional abandonment is a massive problem even in communities and families that are otherwise free of overt abuse. It’s fairly easy to recognise when you’ve been on the receiving end of physical, sexual or emotional abuse as a child and most adults recognise that reaching out for help is the appropriate, responsible and shameless thing to do.
However, with emotional abandonment the problem is fundamentally one of neglect and this is more difficult to recognise. We typically only have our own experience of childhood to compare against in identifying what is and isn’t normal or healthy. When you’re just a kid and everyone around you is avoiding emotional connection, it’s hard not to conclude that this is how to live. (more…)