Anxiety

What it is and how to use it to heal

Once, in New Zealand, while I was studying abroad, I saw two girls walking toward me. They had antlers on their heads and were dressed in scant, red velvet… “Christmas costumes? … But it’s July…” I was confused.

I wanted to say hi and ask what was up. As soon as the thought crossed my mind to introduce myself, my whole body started shaking. I managed to push through the feeling and ask where they were going. They told me that in New Zealand, they have Christmas parties in winter, which is in July because of the southern hemisphere—duh. They invited me to the party, but I could feel my panic coming, and so I lied and told them I was busy.

I kept moving, and felt like I would puke… I simultaneously felt like I had let myself down by not going, and was stoked that I’d actually said hi. It was a huge win for me, because normally I would stuff down my curiosity under layers of fear.

I look back at that story today and marvel at just how much primal fear was coursing through my physical body. Where did that fear come from? Why was I so scared to talk to these strangers. Today, I feel totally confident to introduce myself to nearly anyone.

What’s changed? What was happening in this situation? What is anxiety? Don’t worry, we’ll get there.

For now, basically, in that moment, I was projecting onto these girls my own lack of self-worth, self-belief, and self-love. Inside, I felt like an uncool, ugly, unlovable, good for (mostly) nothing person, and so I assumed that they must also see me like that. “How could two cute Kiwis ever want to talk to me?”

Why would I ever think so negatively about myself? And why might you?

As a child, my parents separated when I was very young, and fought a lot. There was always tension. My mom and I moved around twelve times before I was twelve, and I went to many different schools. Between the moving and living between families, I was always on the go, always in the middle of worlds.

During this time as a child, my subconscious self was learning coping skills: protective mechanisms like how to make new friends fast (people pleasing), how to stay safe in the midst of emotionally turbulent conflict (manipulation), how to make people with differing beliefs happy (self-abandonment), and more…

As a child, I didn’t know that I was doing it, but I started to use the protective mechanisms instead of my real sense of self to make decisions.

What I’ve noticed in working with hundreds of clients, is that there’s a point in their lives, usually between 10-16, where they go through a similar transformation: All the trauma they experienced as children produces adaptive (meaning useful) skill sets, like mine, but eventually, those useful protective mechanisms become maladaptive (meaning harmful).

This happens when the skills that are learned become compulsively overused, and a person starts to identify with their external layers of protection instead of their internal sense of self. I believe this is triggered by our growing ability to use intellect rather than intuition to make decisions. When the intellect expands in our teen years, the ego kicks in and takes control, and we lose access to our true self.

For me, this turning point happened in middle school.

At around 12 years old, I transitioned from a small private school to a bigger public school. When I did, the parts of me which actually did thrive in childhood—my love of play, my curiosity, my innate sense of wonder—all started to fade. When I looked around, I didn’t see people who played Dungeons and Dragons or Magic the Gathering like I did. I didn’t see people who wanted to climb trees or make believe. I saw people wearing makeup and talking about their clothes. I heard people stress about grades. I watched brainwashed children regurgitate all sorts of racial and sexual slurs at each other (and me). My new ‘friends’ pushed each other into lockers and threw each other down the hill in the back. The girls I liked didn’t like me back. I was somehow different than these people.

I felt utterly alone. My nervous system went into sympathetic activation—panic. I wasn’t safe. So, I shut down.

Who I was as a child was suddenly crushed under the heavy foot of social conformity and comparison. This was the breaking point.

In my state of helpless shock, my ego kicked in, and brought to bare all those protective mechanisms it had been collecting over the years: people please, manipulate, self-abandon.

My identity started to split. I had the self I was at school, where I quickly learned how to play the game: Say awful things about other people, bully people you hardly know, suck up to teachers to get good grades, be cool not lame—do whatever it takes to not feel alone; fit in at all costs.

Outside of school, I discovered porn. Somehow I figured out that when I watched it, the hard emotions went away. I didn’t really know what I was doing, because I was still a kid, but when I felt alone, I turned to porn. When I felt sad, angry, or guilty, I watched porn. I learned to numb the parts of me that felt emotion, because that emotion was dangerous… it would make me admit to myself that something was wrong, and then I would stand out, and I would risk feeling alone again.

(Later in life, I would expand my numbing mechanisms to include into drinking, smoking weed, playing video games, overworking, fantasizing about romance, sex, dating, and escapism novels.)

When my identity split, I lost a fundamental, and very important thing: My self-trust.

I stopped trusting myself because I wasn’t in 100% alignment with my core, authentic self. I knew deep down that I was subtly and slowly abandoning myself, putting the facade first. And so that real version of me started to become smaller and more silent. I started to see myself as an object inside a system of comparison, instead of a whole and unique soul. I began to identify with the ways in which I had rejected my own truth, and so became the feeling of rejection itself.

I started to feel alone, isolated from the world, disconnected. Now, even at home with family, and with old friends, I turned down the dial on my authenticity. I withdrew into porn, video games, and TV. I became faded, less vibrant, mute, numb.

My ego maintained firm control over this new facade because it had built a story that I needed to fit in and be accepted to feel safe (watch the movie “Inside Out 2” if you want a visual representation of this).

At this point, my choices lost heart and soul. They became educated, strategic, and intellectual—designed to keep me “safe,” but not to really express myself or feel ALIVE. My ego brain took hold of my joystick, and was playing not to win, but to avoid danger. It was all a fear response.

Over the next decade, the ripples of this split started to play out in a endless race to prove myself, and my enough-ness, my belonging-ness. But, because I was playing from a place of fear, I was effectively doing the opposite. Because we all fundamentally belong, and are already enough, there is no need to prove anything, and any act that comes from the desire to prove ourselves is destined to fail.

In striving to validate the bottomless void of my own fundamental not-enoughness, everything I sought wasn’t coming from a place of genuine desire, but from the avoidance of pain. I thought that if I could prove to the world that I could pull the hottest girl, achieve the best career marker, or accomplish some great feat of courage, ‘they’ would welcome me, and I would finally feel safe. I put my sense of wholeness outside myself onto some mysterious “they.” The danger is that no one outside ourselves can ever truly make us feel like we’re enough.

So, no matter how much perceived ‘success’ I accumulated, it was never satiating.

Whenever my real and authentic self came into my consciousness, my ego’s need for external validation automatically suppressed my internal feelings, because they risked the whole system collapsing, which in my fear, I believed would lead to an utter lack of safety and belonging. When that real part of me raged and kicked at his cage, my ego compulsively numbed my truth using any means necessary, for the truth still hurt too much to admit: I was living a lie.

But eventually, despite my ego’s best attempts, my anxiety actually became the doorway into my truth. At age 19, I had my first panic attack and a thought was struck into my deepest knowing: “I don’t know why I’m alive.” This thought began the journey that is still unfolding today.

In New Zealand, at 20, I first learned how to meditate, and I suddenly became aware of my own suffering. Where before, I was unconscious, now I was conscious of what was going on, and I started to ask questions of myself. I started to FEEL again, and that made me anxious. What’s crucial to understand is that anxiety isn’t the split in self, but the awareness that the self is split. Anxiety is an invitation to become whole and to learn to feel safe inside one’s self.

This is why asking those girls what was going on was such a big deal. Before that moment life, I would have suppressed my curiosity for the sake of externally sourced safety. My social anxiety was actually a sign that I was becoming aware of how my behavior wasn’t in healthy or in alignment with my deepest self.

Here’s a poem I wrote while I was in New Zealand:

Through the Cracks

Slipping through the cracks,
Glimmers of what could be.
Walled off from the beauty,
The beauty of being free.

Curled in a ball, practiced for years,
Unable to escape the paralyzing fears.
These fears for so long thought to be
Ways to be free, to be me.

Those walls weren’t safe,
They were a cage I was locked in.
Now, today, I must be a mage,
I must free myself, break out,
I must turn the page.

Each blank page is rife with chances,
Each new day full of potential dances
With destiny, with lovely ladies,
With my heart, with destination Hades.

Life is for living, I keep saying,
And yet here I am praying
That someone will come pull me out
And with my old life, make a route.
I can’t do it myself, I think,
I would need to push myself to the brink.

It’s a decision, Faolan.
Do you want to be free?

In order to come out of my shell, I had to honestly look at myself in the mirror, and tell myself the blunt truth: “I’m not happy with the life I am living because I’m not being me. I don’t feel free or safe in myself.”

This began the long process of healing my relationship with myself, which is still ongoing today, almost seven years later.

To heal, it’s a matter of learning how to feel whole, safe, and loved internally. To let the fear ease away takes time. Essentially, we are rebuilding trust with ourselves. And this is scary, because as we heal internally, and allow the light to come back in, we illuminate all the darkness that has sustained over the years.

In recognition of the years of darkness, we feel this loss of our life force, and the grief of years of living out of alignment. Because some part of us knows that we will have to confront this deep pain, we may resist accepting the healing process, but this will only elongate the time lost that we will have to grieve later.

Eventually, it becomes unavoidable that we must create real change in our lives, and we accept this fact. This scares us, too, and so our anxiety expands for a time, but we also feel a new, deep and heartfelt sense of relief, as if after years of holding our breath, we can finally let it out.

We look around and notice that our external world was built to make us feel safe, not to feel alive and vital. At this point, we finally acknowledge that safety might not be the most important thing, and we become willing to actually take the risk of launching into the unknown and letting go of our past.

It becomes apparent that our relationships have been keeping us small and “safe.” Our career fed us food, but not purpose. Our self-talk asserted our fears rather than our dreams.

All that must change, and so even more grief floods us, as we admit that we must leave behind the life we’ve invested decades building.

We leave relationships, communities, and jobs. We break ties with friends or lovers, or even family. We lose parts of ourselves, too, and in the chaos of change, we become, as Steven Pressfield puts it in The War of Art, ‘unrecognizable’ and “alone, in the cold void of starry space, with nothing and no one to hold on to.”

At first, it feels bleak. But slowly, we start to realize that with all that letting go, we’re creating real space inside ourselves and in our lives to let in a new life. We make new friends who baffle us with their openhearted generosity and love. New visions and dreams call to us, which wake us up with excitement in the morning because they’re real and aligned. The natural pain of life doesn’t go away, but we accept it as part of the wholeness, and so let ourselves feel finally safe to be who we are. Life feels abundant. As a client of mine beautifully put it: “I feel at home in myself for the first time since I was three.” This is the end goal, and this is what makes it all worth it.

So if you’re feeling anxious, notice that feeling with love and curiosity. See how open you can be to your own fear and pain. Ask yourself: Am I being all of myself? Am I unabashedly showing my true colors? If I felt 100% safe, who would I be? If I were truly aligned with my soul, what would I change? If anything were possible, what would happen? And notice what you feel, what you see… Would you change?

Maybe anxiety isn’t a bad thing… Maybe it’s just a sign that who you really are wants to come out, to be released into this world, and that that scares you.

I want your real self. Bring it all. The world can handle you. You’re not too much. You’re enough. You’re a beautiful incarnation of light and life and literal stardust. So, feel welcome in this life, not as you think you should be, but as you truly are.

Blessings,
Faolan

PS. If something you’ve read here resonates, please know that I offer coaching to integrate your authentic self into your life, and to support you on the healing journey. You can reach out if that is of interest.

PPS. If you feel someone in your life could benefit from reading this, please share it below.