Confronting Anxiety When You Know You Will Never Feel Safe
By: Heather Ashman
Tags: Self Improvement, Self, Anxiety, Anxiety Disorder, Mental Health

It's been said that controlling addictions to food and sex can be more difficult than controlling addictions to drugs and alcohol because while you can choose to abstain from drugs and alcohol and still have a fulfilling life, you can’t choose to not eat or have sex. I’m not going to argue with you over the sex one. Sexual release, whether with a partner or alone is a normal part of a healthy life. It is necessary for almost everyone to whatever degree their body requires.

Trying to control your anxiety when you lack a foundation of safety is similar. I cannot choose to feel safe in the same way a food addict cannot choose to not ever eat again. I have to continue to exist in a world that I feel is threatening.

While trying to unravel the different strands of my anxiety and identify triggers so that I can learn how to process them in a more healthy way, a problem that I keep encountering is trying to figure out whether the anxiety is a result of nature, nurture, or some combination of the two. While there are no definitive answers yet, my personal opinion is that it is a combination.

I think some people are born with a susceptibility to anxiety and their path through life can either hinder its expression or exacerbate it. I could be wrong. I’m sure there are people who had ideal childhoods and happy stress-free adult lives, yet still experience anxiety. Just as there are probably people who had horrific childhoods and awful adult lives but are calm and confident. But I think for the majority of people, some are born more susceptible to anxiety and shitty childhoods can shove them right over the edge.

The question becomes whether that damage can ever be mitigated and if it cannot, is it even possible to get a handle on anxiety?

My childhood was crappy, but not anywhere near as bad as many that I have heard and read about. My father left when I was four. My mother made sure that having a relationship with him after the divorce was impossible. I can count on the fingers of one hand how many times I saw him after he left her. She was manipulative and a compulsive liar. There was emotional abuse, but not physical abuse.

It was convenient for her to leave my care to people who were not safe. I came close to dying in car wrecks with unsafe, possibly not sober, drivers multiple times. I could have been shot by a child playing with an unsecured gun on one occasion when I was around eight-years-old. And the only reason I was not molested was that I recognized the danger and got myself out of the situation. I was seven.

When I told her about the driving safety problems she accused me of lying because I didn’t want to go there anymore. The gun and molestation incidents took place after she made it clear that my safety did not matter to her. I did not tell anyone about them. They would not have cared.

I was damn lucky to have gotten out of my childhood without being shot, molested, raped, or killed in a fiery DUI crash.

A childhood full of these kinds of experiences has pretty much guaranteed that I don’t feel safe. Ever. There is always a deep underlying feeling that I have to be on guard and protect myself because nobody else is going to do it. It is not a conscious thought that is always plaguing me. It is just a deeply held belief that seems foundational to my own view of life.

Triage

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

When you have no foundation of safety, it is difficult to build any emotional structures that would help fortify you against your anxiety.

The solution is to treat your anxiety like you are in triage. I suggest triage because, if your anxiety is like mine, there is never just one issue you are anxious about. There is a kaleidoscope of things that worry you and it may change on a day-to-day basis. Hell, during acute anxiety it may change minute-to-minute.

In anxiety triage, rate the things you are anxious about from least urgent to most urgent. You will need to decide for yourself how to rate them based on your particular flavor of mental illness. I have a family member who has anxiety and also OCD. Her rating of what is most urgent is not necessarily what I would rate most urgent, but she has to answer to her OCD.

Once you have triaged your anxieties, you will begin with the most urgent. You are going to identify triggers and treat symptoms.

I identify triggers and figure out ways to work through them. I’ve written about some of those before:

Personally, time is always a big issue for me. I am horribly anxious about being late, which I never am. I’m also anxious about things getting done on time. Since chores being forgotten or me running late is a trigger for me, I religiously follow a schedule.

My days, weeks, and months are scheduled out. My weeks are almost identical because that is a way for me to remove the anxiety trigger about not getting things done.

I’m not so hardcore about it that I can’t change the schedule as needed, but mostly I stick to it. Usually, if it needs to be changed, it is because of something my son has planned. When I have unusual things going on, I try to fit them in the framework that already exists. Why upset the schedule when I don’t have to?