For as long as I can remember, anxiety has been an emotion running in the background. When I was a child, this constant sense of unease and “waiting for the other shoe to drop” followed me from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed. When I heard my parent’s car pull into the driveway, I would rush to do something “productive”. I learned that as long as I was busy and doing a household chore, I was safe and could generally fly under the radar. With that came the underlying belief that I needed to somehow justify my existence with productivity. Looking back, this chronic anxiety kept me safe. It gave my child brain a sense of safety and control in an unpredictable, dangerous environment. As a child, it was important to be able to predict when the mood in the house shifted, to avoid attracting attention to myself, and to give myself a sense of security in thinking that I could somehow anticipate when the next blow up would occur. Many of the adaptations we make to survive in childhood follow us into adulthood, where they create less favorable results and take away from our quality of life. These adaptations that successfully kept us so safe at one point are now the very things that we find hinder us in our relationships, in pursuing our goals, and in feeling present and at ease in our day to day lives. These adaptations turn into patterns that continue to repeat until they at last have our attention, and we seek to learn the tools to resolve them. The chronic, low-grade sense of anxiety followed me into adulthood, where it manifested as perfectionism, hypervigilance, and a harsh inner critic. My body was living in a chronic state of fight-or-flight, attempting to avoid, escape, and snuff out the anxiety through over productivity and harsh self-talk. Life became a series of tasks to be completed rather than something to be lived and enjoyed. When I would attempt to relax, I would find myself wracked with guilt and anxiety. Since I was no longer keeping my mind busy with tasks, the anxiety that had been swirling in the background was free to emerge and take center stage. Emotions will continue to emerge, and often get louder and louder, until we allow ourselves to acknowledge them and feel them Attempting to relax actually created more anxiety, as the little child I used to be continued to sound the alarm in my nervous system with “We’re not okay! We’re going to get in trouble if we’re seen resting!”. Resting became a mental game of “I should be doing x instead”. For the first few years of our marriage, this anxiety would be projected onto my husband if he saw me reading a book or watching a TV show. I would scramble to appear busy when he walked in the door, and when he asked how my day was, I would rattle off a list of tasks and work I had done. The child I used to be was still there inside of my mind, terrified he would think I was lazy or that he would be angry with me for not “doing enough”. Interestingly, this is nothing like my kind, gentle, reserved husband, who constantly encourages me to relax. While I was attempting to push down the anxiety I felt inside, I was missing out on the opportunity to connect with my husband and see him for the loving person he truly is. Childhood Shapes How We Relate to Our Emotions Acknowledging and feeling emotional discomfort is a difficult thing to do. As humans, we naturally want to avoid the things that create discomfort and are unpleasant to experience. We might do this by using substances, doom-scrolling on social media, over-occupying ourselves with others’ lives, shopping, overeating, etc. We try to avoid the discomfort we feel inside by attempting to control the things that are outside of us or by numbing our emotions altogether. Later in life, we experience the result of the avoidance, numbing, and suppression. Ongoing underlying stress takes it's toll on the human body, and we can experience a variety of diseases, illnesses, and disorders that are rooted in long suppressed emotions. The coping mechanisms we relied upon to escape and suppress the inner pain we felt eventually reap more painful consequences, whether in unfulfilling, difficult relationships, financial struggles, negative affects on our health, etc. The thing is, when we numb the uncomfortable emotions, we also numb the enjoyable ones. We lose touch with our capacity to truly feel, and to experience life in the present. We learn to cope by disconnecting from ourselves. For many of us who experienced abandonment wounds in childhood, we end up abandoning ourselves all over again in adulthood in many different ways. This is how we learned to relate to ourselves, because this is the way we were related to in our earliest developmental years. When we cried or experienced discomfort and distress, maybe our caregivers dismissed, minimized, or even punished us, until we learned to bypass or suppress the emotion and feel something they felt was more palatable and agreeable. Like all children do, we grew up. We learned to stuff, numb, and avoid difficult emotions. We may have also learned to express them in unhealthy, unproductive ways that have yielded painful consequences in our relationships. Maybe we even developed some beliefs about emotions, like “Anger is bad and wrong” or “My feelings control my behavior”. Through no fault of our own, we become adults with the inner emotional toolkit of a child and discover that we were raised by other adults who also had the inner emotional toolkit of a child. This can be a scary prospect, to be an adult living in an adult world with adult responsibilities and discover that you have few functional tools in your emotional toolbox to navigate through life. Recognize Emotions Aren't "Good" or "Bad" Emotions aren’t right or wrong, they just are. It isn’t wrong to feel something, it’s what we do with the feeling through our actions that matters. Look to observe emotions from a neutral place. This can help to gently begin dismantling any lingering shame around certain emotional experiences, such as anger. Give Yourself Permission to Feel Emotions manifest as sensations in your body. There are observable, chemical reactions that take place in your body to create different emotional experiences. They are very much real, scientifically observable things. It can help to scan your body and notice any sensations that stand out to you and describe them as neutrally to yourself as possible. The idea is to teach your brain that emotions aren’t to be feared, they’re to be felt. Apply Self-Compassion and Validate Self-compassion is the ultimate soothing balm that many survivors of childhood trauma long for, especially when we were deprived of it in our early years. There is a part of you that yearns for it and recognizes that you both want and need it. Giving yourself permission to apply self-compassion can be a very soothing, healing experience in itself, as often, when we choose to treat ourselves with compassion, we are healing an unmet childhood need. If your child, spouse, friend, etc. came to you and shared with you that they were angry with their boss because he said something hurtful to them at work, that they felt insecure about the way their body looked, or that they were heartbroken because their pet had died, how would you treat them? Look at the circumstance surrounding the emotion you’re experiencing. Consider how you would respond if someone else came to you and shared the same set of circumstances. Acknowledge that you’re a human being, and you’re going to experience a wide range of emotions throughout your life. How do you want to treat yourself and regard your emotions for the rest of your life? How does the future version of you that loves you respond when you're experiencing a painful circumstance? Remind Yourself The Emotion Will Pass Once an emotion is felt, you’ll find that with some processing, they pass. They’re meant to pass. Think about how many emotions you go through in one day, and you’ll notice just how wide a range of emotions there really are, and how each one passes naturally until you experience the next.
Sometimes, when we have spent years dedicated to avoiding or numbing a painful emotion, there can be fear that if we allow ourselves to feel that feeling, we will be overwhelmed by it, or that it may never go away. The truth is, that every time we allow ourselves to feel and process a painful emotion, we open ourselves up to experiencing healing on a whole new level, sometimes in ways we’d previously thought weren’t possible.
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Hi, I'm Hazel!I'm an Associate Licensed Counselor in Birmingham, Alabama and provide Trauma Recovery Coaching worldwide!
I earned my M.Ed. in Clinical Mental Health Counseling at the University of Montevallo. My special interests include trauma healing, abuse recovery, and attachment work. Archives
January 2025
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Disclaimer: All content is for informational and educational purposes only. The opinions stated within my content are mine and they do not represent the ACA, APA, any other individual, therapist, institution, or organization.