Declaring War on Anxiety

 

How to fight back against the Delusions that Groom Us

 

 

 

 

‘We would rather be ruined than changed.

 

We would rather die in our dread, than climb the Cross of the moment and let our illusions die.’

 

WH Auden

 

 

 

 

 

I have spent almost 26 years now, working in 24hr Intensive Crisis Intervention, overseeing a team running holistic residential communities to provide a safe and healing home context for young people damaged by acute childhood abuse, neglect and trauma.

 

It has been a fascinating, challenging and deeply humbling career path, and one that has impacted and changed me completely on an individual level. 

 

Recently, I have started to increasingly reflect upon some of the things I have seen over these years, and to try to write about them for my son and maybe for others.

 

 

Crisis Intervention is unknown to almost everyone - both in terms of its existence and delivery; and the gaping societal wound it attempts to soothe. 

 

Many things are hidden from view in modern culture; maybe most of all the aching wreckage of young lives rendered paralysed by years of formative abuse, self-harm, neglect and aloneness. 

 

Consequently, what we do as a team and collective is completely different to therapy, psychology, social work or the NHS. 

 

It is not a clinical setting and it is not delivered via standardised sessions or in the context of boundaries. 

 

This work is based entirely upon shared vulnerability, relationship and community. It is a war of attrition around the clock against terrible suffering, darkness and abuse that can only be waged with the weapons of hope and trust; and the quiet inner celebration of minuscule wafer thin victories. 

 

There are none of the careful mechanisms or safeguards that clinicians, therapists and professionals utilise every day in what and how we do what we do. 

 

Instead we are all in this thrumming communal home together; and we must find a way between us to live, to grow and to try to heal. 

 

We all share the risks, wounds, aspirations and victories. We are a living thing. 

 

No-one gets left behind, simply because there is no behind, and many days I wish that there was, and that I could wait there and punch the wall.  

 

But I cannot. 

 

There is just us, on the line together, every hour of every day.

 

I often tell people that what defines my role and distinguishes it from any other career or job that I have come across, is that despite thousands of hours, weeks, months and years of intense and visceral execution, one does not accumulate any expertise, power or solutions.

 

Instead one learns to simply hold uncertainty and vulnerability close, and to try to balance the thudding within one’s chest by biting down on to hope and never letting it go. 

 

We laugh a lot. We argue about desperate decisions. Occasionally one of us will cry quiet tears in the office. Then someone else will make tea… and after a gap, someone says ‘fuck it’..      and everything begins again and we start over. 

 

I would struggle to find the words to express my great gratitude and joy for this life, for this work and to have done something that I have loved and struggled with so deeply for this quarter century. It has rendered me such an odd and peculiar person and imprinted me in ways that I certainly do not understand; and maybe never will.

 

And now I find myself faced with the obscene spectre of being mostly old, and reflecting upon some of the things I have seen over these years, and trying to write about them for my beloved precious son. If they are helpful to others, then I will be so very glad. 

 

 

 

Today, I wanted to write a little about anxiety and the battle against it, and to suggest what may be helpful ways of looking at this ubiquitous modern affliction that so blights our young people. 

 

One of the ways that we can fight anxiety is to remove the word and concept altogether. This is because a huge amount of what we might assume to be anxiety, instead tends not to exist other than as a spurious concept we put faith and belief in – and to our great detriment. Indeed, the fetishisation of anxiety into something that grows unencumbered, inflated wildly by our labels and attention, might be the biggest threat to the future wellness and growth of our young people today, all over the world.

 

Instead, what might it look like if instead of thinking of yourself as anxious; you had to focus on the specificity of the two main foundational beliefs that masquerade as anxiety; dread and shame?

 

Often I encourage people to ask themselves repeatedly when they experience an emotion that feels like anxiety; ‘Is this actually dread - or is it shame?’ 

 

This question is painful, complex and difficult to pursue, but if we bravely ask it persistently in our most anxious moments, we may stumble upon revelation of extraordinary healing power.

 

If our negative thoughts and feelings tend towards an overwhelming fear and anticipation of bad things happening to us over which we feel that we have no control; then we are experiencing dread.

 

If instead, painful feelings tend towards a sense that we are bad, inadequate and not who or where we should be in our lives and behaviours, then we are experiencing shame. 

 

While both of these feelings may of course appear to result in one another and feel inextricably linked, in fact it is remarkable how much we can gain by bravely separating and specifying them as follows:

 

 

Dread tends to flow from the root belief that the world is not a safe place for us, that something terrible and exposing is about to happen, and that by creating and anticipating worst case scenarios and then avoiding them at all costs, we can take some level of control. This is a delusion of course, and we have the overwhelming daily living proof of its folly - but it is hard to leave behind as a belief. A speedy way to evidence the self-lying inherent within dread, is to keep a simple record of that which we have been worried about happening to us in life, and then comparing these worries to what did actually happen. Instantly it becomes clear that a thumping percentage of daily dread is a deception. However, such evidence in my experience has never brought peace or relief - because dread is not logical in its inception or cause and thus cannot be eradicated by logic. It requires something else. 

 

Shame tends to flow from the root belief that we are bad, damaged and most of all inadequate, and that the worst case scenario already exists within us. Shame is very different to the emotion of guilt - which is the knowledge that we may have done a bad thing. Shame is the inner root belief that we are a bad thing. It is not anticipatory in the way that dread is. It is more like the deep inner sense within that we are perpetual bearers of a huge internal overdraft of appalling expenses that count against us, and render us always in the red, debt ridden waiting room of life, about to see the bank manager. Like dread, shame is not logical in cause, and once again will not be healed through logical thinking or exposition. It too, requires something else.

 

So what are the roots of these dark enemies of our lives?

 

Dread tends to be implanted by past life experiences that have breached our personal safety boundaries and through which we have been infected in our psyche and beliefs with thorns that have taken root. Dread often takes hold when it is revealed to us that the possibility of horror happening to us is a reality. It is a lot like PTSD, in that; when we have experienced the awakening of our real vulnerability to lived severe trauma, and now that we know that such things are possible; our psyche can never revert to its original shape. In the tumour it has been bent darkly into, lies future dread and its anticipated possibility. 

 

For example: a mentee of mine was once on the tube in London and the train stopped in a long section of tunnel between Victoria and Green Park. The lights flickered and then went out and the crowded and hot carriage was plunged into darkness. Then a voice over the tannoy crackled; ‘there is an electrical fault. We may be here for some time.’ A very strange feeling came over her and she felt swallowed by a peculiar panic. She actually felt nauseous and lost her footing and slumped down. Despite the train eventually getting to the next stop, the experience impacted her in a very strange way. The next time she had to fly or was in any confined space, she felt that same physical sensations rising within her as she boarded and sat on the plane. She said that if the dread continued, she concluded that she might get up mid-flight and try to open the door and throw herself out, just to avoid being trapped in a place of confinement; experiencing such a level of agony.

 

How peculiar. How strange, that in her mind, she had to fight a compulsion to do something that would end her life as a result of the gravity of fear within her rising up - possibly killing others around her - but in a way that she would be in control. 

 

Illogical.. but completely real to her in the moment. This is how dread controls humans in practise. And her natural response was then to avoid flying at all costs. As she did, the dread spread its tentacles into other parts of her life until she couldn’t easily drive or leave home. This is how dread works. It is a cancer and a bully. Its seeks to infect every part of our lives if it can. As we recede from it, like an infection; it grows within us. It will never stop all of the time we are retreating. 

 

In contrast, Shame tends to be implanted by experiences that have scarred our beliefs about ourselves, and through which we have been infected in our psyche with specific convictions about who it is that we are, that have taken deep root. 

 

For example: one man I worked with grew up in a religious background in which a set of values and behaviours were taught that were a little like a tightrope. As a young child it was made clear to him that being a lovable and acceptable person to his parents and to God was predicated on his ability to remain on this tightrope of moral behaviours. Every day he would have to undertake the perilous climb and balance carefully. But if he erred in thought or deed; it was a long way down; and then he would be out of the love and favour of God and his parents; and would have to start the perilous climb upward again; and fast. The consequence of such a belief system in any human develops naturally and quickly into a shame that becomes ubiquitous on some level throughout life unless deep healing is achieved.

 

 

As will be obvious; this phenomenon is not limited to religious contexts. Countless people I have worked with since; from all walks of life and backgrounds; have experienced the fearful navigation of just such a tightrope in their story and experiences through being parented carelessly; and know this shame only too well. 

 

In fact, many of us navigate the tightrope of fear daily in our job or relationship. But it tends to instil a peculiar type of shame; because we have attached on numerous occasions to the knowledge that we are not enough. That in our nature and behaviour, we fall below a standard that we should be reaching. If this has become a core belief, then much like our response to dread, we can feel in control by expressing it early. In this way we can deceive ourselves into thinking that we maintain a level of control over our fate and emotions by actually playing the ‘shame card’ over ourselves - and this is why so many people with this wound describe themselves as being awful people.

 

 

We often perceive that it will save the time of us being exposed - but this is actually a kind of visceral narcissism of which we remain blissfully unaware. Because we are feeling bad already, we feel more than justified in responding with some sort of our own control and telling the story of ourselves in this self-cursing way.  

 

All such behaviours render us perpetually vulnerable to a set of negative feelings that in some people are all consuming. They may feel like anxiety but are actually shame based. Like dread, shame is cancerous and the more that we massage it in our thoughts, the more it breeds in our feelings and actions. It will never stop all of the time we are stepping backward. 

 

 

 

Overcoming

 

Overcoming both dread and shame takes courage and resilience, but it is totally possible and open to all for a set of very good reasons. And a fascinating phenomenon is that when we start to fight back, even the tiniest brave steps make enormous changes in outcome.

 

This is because both dread and shame are living things. Spirits, or ghosts if you like; that have taken up residence in the basements of our minds.

 

Though we believe with all or hearts that we are ‘anxious’ in our identity, in truth these parasites depend entirely upon our willing acceptance to keep them in power in our lives. 

 

They can only rule through our submission to their subtle bullying and the ways in which they carefully make us belief that we need them in our lives and values. They know that if we lose faith in them, and employ that faith into real hope, that they are finished, but more importantly, they know that humans are completely unaware of this truth and remain easy to manipulate.  And it is for this reason that so few people experience real healing from what they believe is anxiety within their identity; because they believe it is a condition - rather than a ghost and a living thing.

 

But if we turn against our fears and name them and declare all out war upon them, they know only too well that their eventual destruction is absolutely assured. 

 

How is this possible?  Only through taking every thought captive; courage and the appropriate application of war. 

 

 

Fighting Dread

 

The only way that I know of to overcome dread is by a twofold process. 

 

Firstly, you must start a real relationship with it, naming it as hated enemy and learning to communicate.

 

Secondly, and most importantly, you must contradict the things that dread tells you in your actions in every possible way.

 

Choose a name that contains as much contempt and anger as you can, for the voice that speaks dread within you. If you have history with a school bully called Paul, or were sexually abused by a David, then call your dread that and always refer to it in that name. Or choose a character from a film or book that you hate. 

 

Whenever a dread-filled thought rises up, say ‘ah hello David it’s you, you c$%t.’ You probably find this word deeply unpalatable; and that is exactly why you need to use it. Because you will need to direct your anger and opposition and learn how to speak to and bully David within you. You need to learn how to beat and smash and drown and strangle and torture and eviscerate the thoughts and fears he whispers and peddles to you. And you need to do it a lot - until you enjoy it. 

 

If you do this repeatedly, you will win. Your dread will recede and become a thing of your past. It will take time and faith and be a bloody process. But you will find yourself being ‘helped’. And you will overcome. 

 

Here is an example. I have a friend who is a young woman who had been experiencing a terrible fear of sickness in public. As she walked to college every day, she would be overtaken by the dread and horror of vomiting in public. I asked her where would be the worst place to be sick like this; and she said that it would be the cafeteria. I told her to use the above process and start to war against the dread of this (who she called Carol.) I would get her to swear at and ridicule Carol all the way to college and then, most importantly, I gradually taught her to tell Carol that she was deliberately going straight to the canteen and was staying there all day. This was brave. She had previously avoided the canteen at all costs. But as she threatened Carol with this decision and then on shaky legs walked towards the canteen, something astonishing happened. She felt Carol weaken her vice-like grip on her thoughts. The first time, she could only stay for 9 minutes. But she had taken control and over the next weeks, using this process she kicked the crap out of Carol and overcame her fear of sickness. She won. 

 

If you first name, turn against dread and expose it as a ghost and enemy; and then in faith-filled action habitually contradict its lies to you; it will lose its throne in your mind.  

 

You will go to war; and in these ways, you will be helped to be victorious and it will change your life. 

 

 

 

Fighting Shame

 

The only way the I know of to overcome shame is through another twofold process: childhood trauma substitution and then the appropriate expression of anger and violence. 

 

You need at first to find someone that you love in your life, but that person has to be vulnerable. If you have your own children, then this will be pretty easy. It might be a younger sibling or grandchild or a kid who you absolutely love and feel protective of. 

 

Then - and you need to spend time on this - you need to relive and reanimate your childhood experiences and memories of shameful trauma down to the details, and you need to insert the vulnerable loved child into each and every one; in your own place. You need to live out the experiences you have had of shame and trauma; but instead of yourself, substitute your beloved one as the victim, and then you need to watch each and every one in great detail and repeatedly. This is extraordinarily powerful for a very good reason. It is because shame tends to be rooted in the suppression of appropriate anger in one’s childhood. It is like a punch turned inward, perpetually winding oneself, instead of striking back at the inner dark voice shaming us. 

 

If you do follow this process faithfully and honestly, there will be two main results. You will likely feel a retching, choking horror at what happened to your childhood self, almost consuming you. Gradually (if you are doing it right) you will feel rage. It will hopefully be a rage unlike that which you have ever experienced. You will feel it rise up from some deep burning volcanic river within you. 

 

And then you must build a mechanism by which you can safely express that rage. You must find something to hit or to destroy - but it must be a thing that you can act out on. Many people hit a punchbag or pillow. Other clients I have worked with who are dancers or runners or swimmers literally dance or run or swim out the rage in action; again and again. You may have to do this process over week, months and even years. 

 

But if you bravely do this, by discharging this deep rage a very strange thing will happen… you will feel yourself being helped within, to overcome the rage completely, and then you will feel the very tendency towards shame that has been so deep within you, dislodge completely and recede. You will find that you can completely defeat it within your own mind and heart through faith and discipline and courage in this way of practise. And over time and sustained effort; you will be helped, and you will win. 

 

 

I want to finish by making one final point, just in case it is helpful; 

 

Often when I speak of these things, people will lower their eyes and mumble about ‘forgiveness’, and ‘acceptance’ and shift uncomfortably in their seats.  

 

But in my own experience (and it is just my own) this simply won’t do.

 

Because the staggering power and life-changing detonation of forgiveness in human life, has to be extended to something that is a real faced enemy.  

 

There has to be a cost. 

 

And the greater the battle and pain, the greater the power and testimony of ultimate forgiveness, and the greater the fruit. 

 

I have seen this more times than I can ever remember. 

 

But I also cannot tell you how many well meaning people I have worked with that never experience overcoming, because they lack the dogmatic courage to first bravely contend; and then to sweat and bleed and weep in the battle for their heart and mind in the way I have described.

 

To pretend that we must not fight and face and stare down these spirit enemies within our will, consigns so many to a lifetime of avoidance of that very Rock that we so desperately need to be broken onto and into. 

 

In contrast if we are not careful, we are hoisted onto a throne of complacency, elevating us to a cushioned place that initially feels comfortable. 

 

But so often, we become transmitters of the dread and shame that we have suppressed to those that we assume that we love. 

 

Our anger and carefully hidden resentment bubbles just out of sight, until the inevitable swerving corners of life lead to combustion.

 

May this not be you or me. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Epilogue:

 

 

I have fought dread and shame many times in my life in so many countless seasons and contexts. 

 

And I know that what I have written might on first impression, sound naive, simplistic and even trite. 

 

If this is the case then this article and approach is not for you – I hope that you will forgive me.

 

But in writing like this, in this style; my greatest hope is that that some of the ideas and concepts might be a help and be a blessing - just as thinking and fighting in this way has so powerfully helped me.

 

If even one phrase or sentence or idea helps you to think in a way that empowers and encourages you, then I will be so very glad.

 

Much love to you as you fight alongside me and so many others in this battle. 

 

May you experience winning over fear as you go to war with them.

 

In doing so, may you bless all of those around you in your Victory.

 

It may be the most powerful thing you ever leave to your children – as you sever them from a haunting inheritance and draw them into the bright path of future hope that you have fought so, to light.

 

I want to end on a note of vulnerability. 

  

I am extraordinarily blessed in that I come from a loving and nurturing family. My dad and mum have stayed happily together, and I have two wonderful sisters.

 

But when I was very young, I experienced some things that scarred me at a very deep level, when I was away from my parents and family and anyone who could have protected me. 

 

I was unable to express any of this to anyone, and for many years I have suffered from night terrors that have affected and haunted me as a result of those things.

 

During one particularly bad spell in my 30's I wrote this final poem.

 

I hope my words express my deepest feelings for me – but I also hope that you might you feel them for you; and for those that we love as we navigate these complex things.

 

May we allow our experiences of suffering, moment by moment, battle by battle, victory by victory, to carve deep within us, a channel that can increasingly hold Joy.

 

 

 

 

Sleeplessness. 

 

Covered in familiar shards of twisted thought. 

that pierce the skin. But not too deep

to warrant bathes and salve. 

From far within

I search to find

a safety valve

that might slow and ebb this constant tide

of slow distort. 

 

Hour upon hour, life upon life. 

shadow enemies dice and devour

my peace with silent knife.

 

This well worn path; 

I see my boyhood footprints 

small and soft, beside me now 

And wonder that I am returning here

as if he were calling 

and I, so familiar to this way of fear

feel again I am falling,

falling.  

 

I have so much, I am so much. I am not a victim. 

Kindness surrounds me like a moat. 

 

but in these desperate hours, I am far, so far from all hope 

and utterly remote. 

 

still, though these constant dreads allay me 

strangling my fevered mind above,

yet I long that far below me,

I may leave a trail of love. 

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