So Let's Talk About Anxiety!
There are three sources of anxiety that I have witnessed over the years with working with clients and with myself:
The first source of anxiety, in my opinion, comes from abandonment of self, or probably better understood as avoidance of our feelings. We have traumas and other unpleasant events happen to us in life, which understandably, we have a hard time accepting. So we avoid these realities and the resulting emotions that would normally come with unpleasant events. Quite right; some realities suck- but when we are ready, we have to accept and experience fully what has happened to us and the resulting feelings about it. In our culture we do not seem to fully understand how normal it is to feel; something happens and we feel about it, to feel is paramount to our well being. If we don’t experience ourselves we begin carrying around a lot of baggage, and that baggage eventually starts to get heavy. Also we can’t feel fulfilled in life until we fully feel our experiences thus far. Take the curious journey of self-exploration and excavation. Let’s move toward normalizing our feelings vs. making them the enemy. Let’s make the move toward feelings not being good or bad, but merely informing us about ourselves.
The second cause of anxiety would be “chasing tales/tails”, which is chasing the stories the mind tells us. Let's be clear, listening to the stories the mind tells us is directly related to avoidance of self because the mind, since childhood, has been trying to protect us from our feelings. Now we need to say to The Mind, "good job for helping us survive childhood, but dude you are running a muck and wreaking havoc, let's save you from doing all the work, Mind, and balance you out with some emotional processing."
Be the CEO at the head of the table of the self and curtail that investment in the mind. In childhood we very often didn’t have a parental figure mirroring emotional processing, so we couldn’t understand what was going on with this feeling stuff. The Mind had to essentially hijack us, shifting its focus to creating beliefs about why we were feeling the way we were, which has now become our unfortunate identity. So stop allowing the mind to continually lead us down the rabbit hole; when we believe what the mind is saying , it gives it validity and this is when we get off course. Don’t feed the anxiety monster (the mind) by believing what it tells you, it only gives it more power, hence more anxiety.
The last cause of anxiety in my opinion is ruling out physical causes of anxiety. This source is little talked about but needs more attention. For example there can be issues with the thyroid gland, adrenal glands, hormones and other factors of physical imbalance in the body that can be at cause of anxiety. There is very interesting research on gut flora and anxiety, the whole gut brain barrier concepts. Also there could be issues related to the MTHFR Mutation, with this your body may not be detoxing and processing things as it should. I did a lot of work out West with functional medicine doctors in ruling out physical components to mental health concerns, If you’re interested in ruling this out, I would connect with a functional medicine doctor; I can also direct you in the right direction as well.
Another factor at possible cause is side effects from medications, or withdraws from some medications. Lastly, what I have seen personally and in others, at cause for some symptoms, is a rising of consciousness
impacting us on many levels of our being. If this strikes a cord with you feel free to look up ascension symptoms. I am also available to assist people through this process as well. A disclaimer on the physical causes for anxiety, it’s a good thing to know, but don’t ignore the first two causes because most issues are rooted there. I know it can be easier to seek external fixes vs. doing your internal work, but its time to feel!
So to recap the three main causes of anxiety I have noticed in working with clients- avoidance of self and feelings, allowing the mind to take you down the rabbit hole by reacting to the mind as if it is true and lastly, physical imbalances and ascension symptoms.
Tami Hubbard MA LPC
