The barbed wire of anxiety 😬

The pain starts in the belly and radiates outward like a roll of barbed wire. You’re bleeding and you’re not bleeding at the same time.
“I’m anxious,” I think.
This is new. Not the anxiety. But the identification of the feeling.
In the past, I had no idea how to identify it. My therapists would ask me, “How do you feel?” And I’d stare back at them, blankly. “I don’t know.” Years later I understood that most of the time I’m so overwhelmed with emotions that I can’t name a single one. They’re one big roll of…well, barbed wire. I’d feel like emotions sliced me up into thin, almost transparent layers of flesh. It was easier not to feel anything at all, to shut down. I had to learn to “sit” with my emotions. Oh, it was torture. It was Torture with a capital T.
I’m better now, after years of self-work. And yet still I struggle.
Anxiety slams me into my gut like a sledgehammer at the first sign of danger. And danger is—you guessed it—everywhere. The slightest change in the tone of a voice, the twitch of a muscle, the single out-of-context word in a text—any of these things can send me into a deep, dark spiral.
And then comes fear. Fear of what will happen. It’s so overpowering and debilitating, it seems insurmountable. Like looking at a lock of a prison door and knowing that there is no way you can open it without keys, and there is no way you can get the keys. So you’re doomed.
There is this helplessness and the desire to go limp and play dead. You know, the four Fs. The one that’s Freeze.
I did learn one thing in this terrible daily game (yes, it happens daily). It’s not me who is anxious and afraid. It’s the child in me. I’m an adult. No one can hurt me anymore. But the little girl inside me doesn’t feel safe. And as an adult, I don’t yet have the skills to soothe her and calm her down. The grip of emotion is so powerful that the adult disappears and the girl rules.
How to get out of this bind?
So far, with all the techniques I’ve learned, all the books I’ve read, and all the exercises and homework I’ve done with my therapists, the only thing that stuck with me is DISTANCE.
I have to walk away.
I have to physically walk away, to be able to sit alone and get in touch with that little girl. And even before I can get in touch with her, to be able to recognize that I need to walk away! It’s like having a nightmare during daytime. One of those when you can’t run away from a monster because your legs are full of lead and won’t move. Know that one?
The sucky part of this is, it happens so often that I have to permanently walk away. 😂 I mean, it’s funny and not funny. But if I do manage to walk away, I have to make that little girl feel safe instead of thinking, “Stop it! You’re such a baby! What’s there to be afraid of? Don’t you dare start crying! Don’t you dare! SHUT UP!!”
There is a lot of trauma in my past, but dwelling on it and rehashing it and analyzing it is not a priority for me anymore. The details don’t matter. What matters is how I face it now. I’ve never been able to see it this way before.
All that matters is that I feel safe inside me. And I don’t feel safe inside me. That’s the practice I have to develop. Daily.
So when anxiety strikes again, I know it’s only a feeling. It’s sitting inside me, like a toxic cloud, and if I give it enough time, it will dissipate and die. But if I don’t give it enough time, it’ll poison the next few hours. Or a day. Or even a week. This practice of letting it be and watching it together with that little girl is what I’ll focus on now.
Plus of course, writing it out to make sense of it. Hence, this little story about barbed wire (which is something else I’m working on—the violent imagery that comes me when connected with any powerful emotions).