Learnt Fear Has a Beginning and an End
Oftentimes, when it comes to working through anxiety, what people will teach you is that you need to change your thinking or focus on working on changing your thoughts.
But if you’re feeling anxious or you have those moments where your feelings become all-consuming, whether it’s panic, worry, or overwhelm, you’re not going to get very far trying to work on changing your thoughts.
The reason this happens is that when you were younger and you found yourself in these various different types of situations where you had these strong feelings come up, the feelings weren’t able to complete themselves.
Think of a feeling as having a beginning and an end.
If you’re young and you experience something traumatic or overwhelming, what will happen is that feelings will come up in response to what you’re experiencing, but you won’t always be able to express what you’re feeling fully.
Think about a baby who cries and cries and cries and cries until they don’t need to cry anymore, and then the next moment they’re laughing.
That’s the way we normally deal with our emotions when we’re young: we experience them from start to finish.
But when you grow up in a household where you are not able to show how you feel, or it’s just too overwhelming for you as a child, sometimes certain feelings don’t complete themselves, and they get stuck.
So what happens is that in the future, when you find yourself in similar types of situations, your body gets triggered, and you end up feeling the same feelings again.
Feelings that are in response to the past; not necessarily what’s happening in the present.
But the reason these feelings are coming up again is so that they can be resolved.
The feelings need to be felt thoroughly, and this is something that I help my clients do when I’m working with them.
We integrate these feelings that are incomplete and stuck in time.