In this day and age, anxiety is all the rage. By that I mean, every other person in our generation either says they have anxiety or has anxiety and is so dissociated they won’t admit it. I’m kidding. I don’t think everyone has anxiety, but I don’t hang out with those people so I don’t understand them. (The more times you say “those people” the more points you get).
I’d like to offer the perspective that anxiety is a social construct and of course, as is the theme with all of my posts, there’s nothing wrong with us for “having anxiety.” I cringe even at the way “having anxiety” sounds. Yes, I have definitely and probably frequently said that I “have” anxiety. But do I really? And what does it do to our minds to associate our selves and sense of self with “anxiety”? Why is it that anxiety has seemingly increased in our generation? Well, I have no stats and I can’t back anything up (why did I even go to grad school?), but my view of psychology and history tells me that the generations before us did not use the words anxiety (much like they did not use the word “trauma” but that does not mean they did not experience it…too many double negatives). Anyways, they were probably so dissociated that they couldn’t reflect on their feelings, including their rampant levels of stress. By the way, they probably called anxiety “stress”.
In any case, what is my point? Positioning anxiety as an individual-level problem – which is what we may be doing when we say that we “have” anxiety, can cause us to feel that anxiety is our problem, our shame, our fault. And it is not! First, what do I mean by individual-level problem? An individual-level problem is a problem that the individual is responsible for dealing with and altering themselves. In the U.S., it seems that everything is an individual-level problem, including individual comfort and safety, which is inherently a collective, relational phenomenon.
Let’s think for a second about the “universal” human experience, if there even is one. Anxiety is not a bad thing. Anxiety is universal and natural. I remember reading Freud a few years back (perhaps someone will offer some horrible comments about the man, as I’m sure he offended the masses somehow) and he was writing about how anxiety is the epitome of suffering and suffering is a natural part of life. The main causes of human beings’ suffering – or anxiety – are about the natural course of life – that which is inevitable – death, aging, loss, and change. He basically said that we come into the world with a certain amount of anxiety because at some point we learn that we are going to die. Pretty understandable that we react negatively to being brought to a place only to unpredictably lose our lives. Anxiety is natural, because suffering is also natural.
Now let’s think about individuals’ specific anxieties. Anxiety is a valid message from our bodies. We experience anxiety when we do not know what to expect from a situation – when there is a perceived possible threat to our social, emotional, or physical safety and discomfort or fear around dealing with it. What is called chronic anxiety happens when we, over time, are placed into situations where sometimes, we have a pleasurable experience and sometimes we have a painful experience (and it feels outside of our control). Most naturally, when we approach similar situations again, our bodies react to tell us that an out-of-control type of pain might be coming – so you might want to exit or change the situation.
But because the mainstream view is about “having anxiety” or having an anxiety “disorder”, we often don’t get to the part of the conversation where we discuss what the anxiety is telling us. An increase in anxiety is always telling us that we want to feel safer in our bodies for some upcoming potentially threatening situation. We can choose to care for our bodies at the individual-level with body-based practices, for example, and, we also often must address the actual situation that is perceived as threatening. It is not completely up to us, we who have been overwhelmed by unpredictable, pain-pleasure-pain-pleasure-pleasure-pain-pain cycles, to “fix” ourselves in the absence of environments or situations molding to us. It is the responsibility of both the individual and the social setting to work in tandem with one another to co-create spaces where comfort, safety, and eventually pleasure are expected.
So, yes, we may “have” anxiety, and anxiety is also a universal experience that is completely normal. So is anxiety really a personality trait, a disorder, or an intrinsic part of who we are? Or is that framing of anxiety a cultural invention distracting us from meeting our needs? Can we accept our anxiety, while at the same time listening to the messages of anxiety that ask us: What do you need? And what do you need from the spaces that you enter? Perhaps in some ways our anxiety can be a gift to us, allowing us to become leaders of spaces that respond to our individual and collective needs. And, indeed, as we listen to every bit of discomfort and anxiety we experience, and insert in all of the missing pieces of the spaces we’ve never had, we will naturally create the spaces we have always wanted.
These ideas and questions are central to Raw Movement, an approach to inquiring about and experimenting with co-creating spaces of deep connection through collective (movement) practice. If you’re in the practice of creating grounding, deep connection, home, family, and desire to experiment with co-creating spaces of deep connection, find out more about Raw Movement (soon) at: www.rawmovement.org.
This writing is a part of my Conversations on Deep Connection series. If you’re also in the practice of creating grounding, deep connection, home, family and would like to get notified of new conversations, click here to get notified of new conversations.