Anxiety Rx by Russell Kennedy
"It’s not your fault; it’s no one’s fault, Love Dad." - Beverly Lorne Germa, January 12, 1987
So here it goes. Are you ready for a consistent and predictable definition? Please stay with me, as your quality of life depends on it. Anxiety is a thinking process of the mind. That’s it. Ready for another revelation? Anxiety is not painful. This may surprise you and may even cause you to doubt my credibility. If you feel resistance to this concept of anxiety being a painless thought process, let me assure you making this distinction has allowed me (and many others) to heal from chronic, relentless, persistent worrisome—or fear-inducing—thoughts. Quite simply, anxiety itself doesn’t hurt. The painful part comes from anxiety’s evil twin: alarm. And I would tell you that you are confusing anxiety (the process that produces potentially fearful thoughts in your mind) with a painful feeling in your body. The thoughts themselves are not painful.
"All anxiety is separation anxiety." That, along with many other things Dr. Neufeld said, has stuck with me to this day. Anxiety and alarm almost always result from a break in attachment during childhood—in other words, an experience of separation. When we are separated from our attachment figures, either physically or emotionally, our bodies go into a state of alarm. This is an activated state, a fight-or-flight type reaction the body mounts automatically when we sense real or perceived separation. However, instead of fighting or fleeing, that activated response is initially not about fighting or fleeing at all. It is an activated reaction to mobilize us to pursue a lost connection. That’s right, the reason for our fight-or-flight reactions is usually not about a threat to our physical safety. In our modern world, it is much more often about a threat to our emotional safety.
If you struggle with chronic anxious thoughts, it is highly probable you have a version of this state of alarm in your system, likely from a time in your life where you felt separated from your attachment figures and you were unable to close the gap.
What we call anxiety is a combination of an alarm state in the body and anxious thoughts in the mind. I have found immeasurable relief in addressing the alarm of the body separately from the anxious thoughts of the mind. A considerable part of my healing was due to using the term anxiety simply to refer to the anxious thoughts of the mind. In this way, I divorced anxiety of the mind from the alarm state in the body. In distilling alarm and anxiety down to their essence, I was able to break the cycle by showing the component parts were separate and therefore separable. I will continue to use the term anxiety in this book only to refer to the machinations and worrisome thoughts of the mind.
The reason you became anxious is that once upon a time you left yourself, often to look after a parent or it was just too unbearable to be in your body. As a result, you learned to judge, abandon, blame, and shame yourself (in short, take JABS at yourself). Those JABS insidiously set traps or blocks to self-compassion and self-care—blocks that prevent you from having a mind and body that are in sync. As a result, you are blocked from becoming securely attached to yourself, and this separation energy creates what you have called "anxiety." To heal, you need to reestablish this secure attachment to yourself so your mind and body get back in sync.