What My Own Anxiety Journey Has Taught Me About Helping Others

I am no stranger to Anxiety. It has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. It is one reason that brought me into the counseling field.

I’ve made a lot of progress in my life in overcoming the hold my anxiety had on me, and while I know that journey will never really be over, there are many things I have learned along the way that help inform how I show up for others. I want to share a few of those lessons here:

Anxiety is not our adversary

The anxiety means well. Humans don’t usually do things that serve no purpose or are of no benefit to us. Anxiety is no different. Anxiety generally develops because that was what the nervous system deemed the best way to keep us alive. At the end of the day, that’s what it wants. It wants you to be safe; it wants you to be OK and it will do whatever extreme thing it feels like it needs to do in order to achieve that. Anxiety is actually on your side. Berating and rejecting parts of ourselves that are responsible for our survival doesn’t really help the situation. However, understanding these survival mechanisms and working with them from a place of leadership and compassion, does help. 

People with anxiety are not weak

I have gone through many phases in my Anxiety journey. Early on, I felt completely helpless and unable to stop the spirals and I knew even at a young age, that if I let it, my anxiety would completely control my life and I would never get to do any of the things I dreamed of doing one day. I didn’t really see a way out other than white-knuckling it through life. I learned through the white-knuckling that if I could force myself to do something that my anxiety didn’t want me to do (like leave the house, go to school, etc), I could get through it but not without a tremendous amount of energy and effort. Dealing with anxiety day after day takes an enormous amount of physical, mental and emotional energy. The amount of effort it takes to push through and do what appears to be easy and effortless for most people is no little thing.

Things can actually get better, for real

There was a time in my life that I thought gritting my teeth and struggling through life was the only way to live a normal life. I knew I could force myself to do things, fake it and pretend I wasn’t struggling, but it never occurred to me that I could actually do things with ease, peace, acceptance and even contentment and joy. It clicked for me one day when I was reflecting on how far I had come by pushing myself and yet I was still exhausted and miserable. I realized in that moment, “Wait- What if this isn’t the end result? Maybe there’s more?”. Living with anxiety takes management, but it does get better: Not just better on the outside, fake-it-till-you-make-it-better, but really, truly better, for real.