Before we jump in, just a quick reminder that I am not a therapist. There are no credentials behind these musings. I have been greatly impacted by the periodic times in my life when I’ve been in active therapy. I’ve worked closely alongside Licensed Clinical Social Workers. I am also a big believer that everyone would greatly benefit from talking through life’s hard stuff with a licensed professional, if you have the means and privilege to do so. If you’ve found this corner of the metaverse, I’m glad you’re here. I earnestly hope you pick up something helpful or find yourself leaning into life’s unknowns with a bit more ease. Mostly, I hope you find my ramblings relatable, because knowing we are not alone is such a powerful antidote for fear. And with that, let’s get started.
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As a communications professional, I am trained to deliver clear messages without letting my personal feelings get in the way. Yet, there are several places where this skill is completely unhelpful, like, say, in therapy when, rather than an effective communications tactic, it becomes false protection against vulnerability.
During an appointment a few years back, I was calmly talking through the details of an emotionally turbulent situation. I’ll spare you the details, but let’s just suffice it to say that what happened had broken me wide open. We’re talking fetal position ugly crying, and I was more than ready to stop picking at the wound. That’s what therapy sometimes feels like, right? As if you’ve put on the Band-Aid, then are asked to remove the bandage, talk about how the hurt got there in the first place, put the Band-Aid back on until next session, take it back off, look at the wound a little more deeply, put the bandage back on, come back together, and repeat the process. But then at some point, you realize it’s working. Because, in most cases, we didn’t sufficiently clean the wound before we put the Band-Aid on way back when. So now, it’s taking a little more time to peel back the scar tissue, flood it with oxygen, and heal the hurt at its deepest layer.
So, back to my appointment. There I was talking through the timeline of the thing that had happened that had rattled me to my core with an incredibly incongruous amount of calm and poise. My therapist gently stopped me to point out the splotchy redness creeping up my neck. I immediately felt tears welling up in my eyes. There I was, the dutiful communications director, sharing the timeline and recap like a pro, and preventing any emotional distress from interrupting the flow of my story.
But my therapist wasn’t into it. She wanted me to slow down and dig deeper into the emotions bubbling up from below the surface. I wanted to keep the telling going, not keep stopping to talk about how I felt about it. How was she going to have proper context otherwise? But no… my histamines had to have it their way and come crawling out into the open.
My therapist said, “It makes sense that you’re struggling. Take your time. There’s clearly a disconnect between your head and your heart. Your heart is demanding to be heard by showing up on your neck as a flush response, but your head is looking the other way, laser focused on details and attempting to override your feelings.”
She had located the chink in my armor and cut straight to the truth of my emotional pain, reminding me that the story wasn’t the point. The most important component was me and processing through my feelings about what happened. And for the remainder of the session, she helped guide my head and my heart into reconnection.
Fast forward to today. After a lot of work, it’s gotten a bit easier to catch myself when I’m sliding into a head-heart disconnect before I’ve gone full tilt. I’ve learned that when I’m in integrity with myself, my rational and emotional spheres are in alignment, flowing together like a mighty river. No debris, no fallen trees. Just clear, swift-moving water. Then, inevitably, stuff happens, and if I don’t process and move through it (rather than trying to somersault over it), anxiety comes calling. Within our river analogy, think of anxiety as a beaver – showing up uninvited and collecting as much rubble, sticks and mud as its grubby little paws can hold. Then it begins packing all of that gunk smack dab in the middle of our crystal river. Anxiety isn’t trying to be a pest. It’s actually trying to protect us by creating a calmer space and slowing things down, reshaping the river into a languid pond.
Here’s where things get tricky, though. If left unchecked, the dam gets wider and more tightly packed until it’s watertight. This is when the head gets cut off from the heart. These two parts of us were never meant to be separated. The head cannot survive without the heart, and the heart can’t survive without the head. So, they try to reach around the impasse, eventually flooding the riverbank and eroding the barrier. Anxiety suspects the dam is failing to hold, so it escalates into overwhelm and then panic, desperate to maintain control. Eventually, the river bursts through and leaves a mess behind for the cleanup crew… you.
It’s typically at this point in the story where we can start to look back and see where things went awry. So how can we repair the head-heart disconnect before the dam breaks?
By never letting the dam get built in the first place.
Sure, it’s easier said than done, but there are a few tools I’ve added to my toolbox along the way that help me keep the river flowing.
I’ll get the hardest one out of the way first: Don’t run from the feeling. Don’t numb it or mask it. Instead, get curious about it, call it by name, and see if you can discover what it is trying to teach you.
To pique my curiosity, I imagine I’m meeting this feeling for the first time. I swivel around it and examine it from all angles. That way I can encounter it with a fresh perspective, rather than bringing all of my preconceived notions about the feeling to the table. Zen Buddhists call this technique “Beginner’s Mind”. I sometimes imagine myself as a little kid about Kindergarten age, when I was an actual beginner at just about everything, including the words I was learning to describe it all.
As a writer, I love language, but in this exercise, allowing myself a limited vocabulary can be really effective. You may be surprised (as I was) to learn that there are only six core emotions – happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, and surprise (so creatively and accurately depicted in Pixar’s Inside Out… a must-watch!). Note that “anxious” isn’t on the list. In my experience, anxiety is more like the flashing red lights trying to get me to pay attention to a different emotion I haven’t yet identified.
When I’m trying to identify the emotion I am feeling, I try to limit my internal search terms to this list of six as another way to keep my language “small,” steer clear of the fancy adjectives, and get as close as possible to the feeling itself.
For example, rather than saying, “I feel a harbinger of doom descending upon my soul,” as a beginner, I might say, “I feel afraid.” Or instead of “I feel as if there is a mighty flood rising behind my eyeballs and seeping out of my pores,” as a beginner, I might say, “I feel sad.”
Once I’ve identified the emotion, I then ask where I feel it in my body. This step helps localize the sensation and help keep me grounded in the moment. Maybe I feel it in my chest or my stomach. Maybe in my neck and shoulders. Or my back or head.
Next, I try to assess the physical sensations of the feeling. Is it warm or cold? Tight or trembly? Is it a jumping-out-my-skin feeling or more of an inward crumpling? However it is showing up in that moment, that’s my answer.
Lastly, I try giving the feeling a voice. To again quote my therapist, “If your tears could talk what would they say?” Or that tightness in your chest, what is it trying to tell you? What is the message the sensation is carrying and trying so hard to get me to pay attention to?
So, to recap, my first tip is don’t run from the feeling. The three steps to help stay with it are to identify it, pinpoint where you feel it, and then listen for the message the sensation may be trying to deliver. Even when your feelings feel overblown or out of whack, it helps to remember they exist in service to you, and these three steps are giving them their due (annnnd as a major bonus, quieting the anxiety storm in the process).
My second suggestion is: Remember that chaos is temporary, and you are still yourself amid the storm. When I’m in the throes of anxiety, leaning into it feels completely counterintuitive. My instincts are screaming “Run for your life!” but if I can pause and locate that still, small voice within, the turbulence around me begins to slow. I am a very visual person, so I imagine my innermost self, deep inside my gut, sitting on the floor with her eyes closed, legs crisscrossed, calm and meditative, still and relaxed amid the presence of the Holy Spirit. If you’ve ever been SCUBA diving, you know the surface waves can be going strong, but once you jump in and sink into the depths, calmness awaits. Similarly, when chaos finds you, try go inward and find that sacred stillness inside.
My next suggestion is: Get it out. Different methods are effective for different people, but my personal go-tos are: 1) praying aloud to unburden my heart, 2) journaling my scariest, heaviest stuff as a way to download the weight into pixels on a screen or ink on paper, and 3) talking through it with a professional. If that’s not available to you, share what’s going on with someone who loves you who you trust to listen and hold space. Figuratively, “getting it out” magically works to literally lessen your load.
Two more to go. Next up: Be open to all treatment possibilities. If you are fortunate to have the means to seek therapy, I say go for it. There are lots of options out there. For me, personally, I have had the most success with EFT, short for Emotionally Focused Therapy. I’ve also benefited from CBT (or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy also known as traditional talk therapy). Medication is also on the table. Early in my anxiety journey, I was a major (and I mean major) pharma phobe. I didn’t even want to take ibuprofen for a headache if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. But there came a time when traditional therapy wasn’t fully closing the circle for me. I wanted a higher quality of life, and that meant being open to all the tools of modern medicine. So, at the advice of my doctor, I requested a referral for a psychiatrist and was given a thoughtful prescription. Did I have a panic attack before taking it the first time? Sure did. But… once I pulled on my big-girl britches and got fully on the regimen, it was life-changing. In my case, I wish I had added medication to my toolbox years earlier.
Medication isn’t for everyone, and it certainly needs to be managed by a prescribing physician. There is no shame in needing it. It’s not a shortcoming. It’s a responsible, eyes-wide-open move to regulate a chemical imbalance, much like a diabetic needs insulin. Accepting that reality took me a long time. My sincere hope is that someone out there will see themselves in my story and find a shorter route to wellness.
Okay, last tip: Once you’ve built your toolkit, use the tools. Sounds like a no-brainer, right? But how often do we put off doing the things we know we need to do for ourselves? I am great at pulling out all the tools during the crisis, but once I’m feeling better, I stow them away. I think I no longer need them. I think I’ll be just fine without them. Spoiler Alert: Wrong, wrong, wrong. Learn from my mistakes: The key is finding what works for you and sticking with it regularly to maintain your progress. Feeling great should be a signal to keep going because it’s working! You may need all the tools in the box one day, and just one or two the next. I aim for a daily practice – that way if I get it in a couple of times a week, I can feel good about it. Just keep the toolbox opening and closing as regularly as you can, adding to your box as needed and retiring tools over time that no longer serve you.
A wise woman once told me: “Anxiety is a signal that you have stepped away from your truth.” I love that. Anxiety as a signal. A navigational beacon on life’s waterways. It’s never fun when the sirens start wailing and the lights start flashing, but… if we can pull our fingers out of our ears, open our eyes, and acknowledge anxiety’s presence, we then can relax below the waves to the core emotion demanding our attention, listen for its message, and find our way back to joy.
And with regular maintenance, the words of that old hymn will ring true: “When peace like a river attendeth my soul.” It is well. It is well. It is well.
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