Thoughts on Understanding Our Anxiety
By: Alex Rood
Tags: Self-awareness, Anxiety, Personal Growth, Growing Up, Deliberate Practice

External Anxiety

Internal anxieties can come from countless places and have an enormous impact on your energy, emotions, and actions. You know this. You just read the stuff above AND you actually live a life. What’s fucking crazy is that we are all aware of this in some capacity, but still think it’s ok to try to help or take on the anxieties of others. Ooops.

Taking on other people’s shit is the worst. There is no benefit. None. Someone who has anxiety and puts it on you isn’t growing, they aren’t getting better. They’re just being an unconscious, lazy fuck and have no respect for you. Sounds harsh? It’s not. Fuck those people. Trust me, I have lived the majority of my life wandering the miserable desert of soothing the anxieties of others, searching for an oasis of growth.

These external anxieties can come from anywhere, if you let them. Could be irrational places like your favorite sports team or more forgiving places like your spouse or work. The fundamental rule of refusing to accept the anxiety of others is a bit easier when you’re an adult and have a choice. It’s a bit harder, however, for a child who grows up in a family that can’t deal with their own shit. We’re going to hone in there a bit more.

Murray Bowen’s family systems theory is worth a deeper dive for anyone who, like me, has/had a fucked up family dynamic consumed by parental anxiety, that led to fucked up boundaries within an anxiety ridden family system. Dude knew what was up.

What I came to understand is that I have emotionally immature parents who couldn’t handle their own stress and needed to offload their shit onto my siblings and me. Their lack of differentiation, as Bowen would call it, If this doesn’t sound familiar, take a moment to really appreciate the freedom to grow that your parent(s) afforded you.

As the oldest child, I certainly played a role of soother, fixer, and helper because dealing with my parents’ anxiety seemed like a way worse option for us than learning how to proactively mitigate. Fast forward to adulthood where the energy to soothe, fix, and help becomes far less available despite the deeply ingrained patterns that have been created. The anxiety to soothe is now compounded by the anxiety to live my own life, in my own way, free of that role or desire to heal.

Before I go down the therapy rabbit hole further, this is meant to illustrate a very real and very common example of external anxiety that lives with us from childhood, through our development into adulthood. Much like internal anxiety, it is important to take the time to understand the impact of external anxieties and ask the questions that may be a source of insight to them.

Great, I’m an anxious person, thanks. Now what?

I would be lying if I told you that I’ve figured it all out. At 35, I still feel the weight of anxiety, mostly internal but external as well. I still struggle with needing to soothe my anxieties of failure, adequacy, and trust. I still struggle with boundaries and wanting to soothe the anxiety of others, particularly my immediate family members.

In My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem (if you haven’t read this book, I highly recommend it), he talks about the importance of deliberately dealing with your own trauma and how us not passing trauma on to others is the first step in healing it for ourselves. This process is no different for anxiety.

Deliberately working through our own shit so as to not pass it on is doubling down on the growth process. You begin to grow yourself by clearing the space to do so in your nervous system. This will then allow the space for the other to grow as well.

Growing up is fucking hard. Working on ourselves, understanding ourselves, yup, you guessed it, fucking hard also. Self inquiry and awareness allows us the space to see anxiety as it exists in our reality. From there, a deliberate approach to understanding ourselves can be the path toward maturity. Through a process of being deliberate about ourselves, we stand a chance at not becoming total immature douche bags, mindlessly operating through life as pseudo-adults. It’s up to us if, when, and how we start this journey.

Get on it.