My Journey with Anxiety: The Reckoning

Last week I wrote about my anxiety here for the first time and whoa it felt good. Thank you all for your supportive and loving comments, they meant so much to me and have encouraged me to keep sharing my story with you.

So for about the last 5 years my anxiety that started as a little seed of doubt and fear grew into a monstrous bossy pants woman that drove my car wherever she wanted. (When I say “car” I’m referring to my life and living according to my true self and values). I see now that this seed was watered and taken care of by trauma, grief and negative stories… in that environment, of course it was going to grow.

It wasn’t until this year that I felt the reckoning come. I call it “the reckoning” because there were a few moments that I felt like a mirror was held up in front of me and I didn’t like what I saw. That mirror being my children…they are great little mirrors. Waylon my oldest especially shows me things about myself that I don’t like. I saw myself transferring my fear to him… He could see my terror when I panicked and in turn would freeze up when his own 5 year old fearful monster took over. This crushed me. Me! The woman that wanted to keep him from fear and pain, the woman that was almost killing herself to do so was the very person that inadvertently was teaching him to fear. (Kleenex moment, phew!)

Oh yes this is when the reckoning happened. This is when I decided I had to do something about this monstrous anxious woman that was driving my car, so I did. I started reading a book called “Heart Made Whole” by Christa Black Gifford and I learned that my heart was broken. It was broken because it was fragmented into many different sections, all of them trying to compete for my attention. The part of my heart that always won my attention was the part I call my “guardian”. My guardian had been working overtime for many many years just trying to protect me from pain and, Lord bless her, she did a good job… she just never stopped working. Ahhh!!! The tears come as I write this just thinking of how hard she worked. She was the accidental monster that fed my anxiety, but what she really wanted was to protect me from pain. Pain my friends is not the enemy the enemy is escaping from it. When we escape from our pain we do weird things like drink and eat too much or too little, binge, fight with our partners, lack patience with your kids, obsess over wars that aren’t our own and we numb out. We make bad choices and we turn away from our true self and end up in a metaphorical ditch instead of on the road towards our life goals. Learning about my heart pulled me out of that ditch.

I dove deeper. I joined Christa’s online course called “Master Heart” and started to mediate. What?! You mean you can use your imagination for good? Yes, for so long my imagination was only used for constructing up car crashes and cancer diagnoses that I forgot it could be used for good. Oh the sweet things I saw while mediating… they were transformation and real! I hold onto this visions like gems in my pocket. I just have to put my hand in my pocket and touch those beautiful gems and remember them when fear approaches. I have to remember that life is good and that my pain won’t kill me; it can actually become my greatest strength.

Next week I’ll be going even deeper into my journey of healing, how I walk this walk daily, what I do when I get off track and how I’m teaching my children to know their own hearts.

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