With COVID-19 looming upon us, the past few days have progressively brought a collective hum of anxiety. Most of us are hulled up in our homes, working from home, losing paychecks, and watching our stocks dance like a kite in a storm. We're worried about our futures, our elderly, and how we're going to get the toilet paper we need from the grocery store. Some of us are finding ways to enjoy the change of pace, while others are in a constant spiral of worry and panic. And while it'd be nice to distract ourselves from existential dread, that's challenging in confined spaces and social distancing. Maybe it's time we learn how to create a home for our anxiety instead.
Oftentimes, our first reaction to anxiety is to push it down, distract, and reframe. While maybe helpful for a few minutes, it's not a great long-term strategy for coping with anxiety. Perhaps the worst, and also common, response is to label emotions as "negative" or "bad" and beat ourselves up over being anxious. While some emotions are certainly more painful than others, emotions, unlike actions, do not have any moral value and thus cannot be bad, good, right, or wrong. They just are, and we have less control over them than we'd like to believe.
If mindfulness has taught us anything over the past few decades, it's that fighting anxiety, even during a pandemic, is often ineffective. In fact, many times it's counterproductive. Imagine being in a tug-of-war between yourself and anxiety. Where is your focus? It's on your anxiety, which means less room for the things most meaningful to you. And there are no guarantees of winning over anxiety especially if winning is predicated on anxiety's termination.
The Buddha recognized this during his enlightenment. As a boy, he grew up in a utopian environment. Unbeknownst to him, his caregivers intentionally sheltered him from any kind of trauma for years in efforts to keep him naive and unaffected by the pain and suffering of life. Eventually, he found his way out of his little utopia and bore witness to suffering, death, anxiety, and life’s absurdities. Through a series of events, he eventually learned the path to inner peace is not by avoiding trauma but moving through it to a place of acceptance.
Trauma impacts us all at different levels. It's not only relegated to survivors of abuse or violence. Trauma's ubiquitous presence cements into every moment of pain we experience simply through our own existence. Mark Epstein, a famous psychiatrist, calls trauma "the bedrock of our biology," and we often resist it in an effort to sustain our egos from feeling vulnerable (Epstein, 2014). This resistance has a way of coming around and unexpectedly playing itself out again and again in our lives. Ignored trauma, no matter how small, blows up on other people, leaving residue everywhere, and re-traumatizing ourselves and those around us. Make no mistake, people don't clean up residue. Like radiation fallout, it never really goes away. We either integrate it in a healthy way, or we keep shedding it all over our relationships.
A healthy integration of the smallest and largest traumas starts with acceptance and non-judgment. We have to learn how to find a relational home for them. I think mindfulness and internal family systems (two similar forms of psychotherapy) have a lot to offer in this conversation. Both teach us, in their own way, to have compassion for our painful thoughts and feelings and that part of self we'd rather ignore. This way of relating to that exiled self starts with the recognition that all thoughts and feelings are trying to protect you. They just don't always have the best protective strategies.
Consider the anxiety surrounding our current COVID-19 status. We worry about our loved ones, money, jobs, wedding plans, trips to Italy, and whether we're going to get that $1,000 check from the government. All those worries are trying to prepare us for the worst. Even if that anxious part of us isn't all that helpful, its intention is good.
So how do we build a relational home for our anxiety? It's important to treat that anxious part of self like a loving parent treats their 12-year-old child. Show appreciation for its concerns and what it's trying to do for you. Seeing your anxiety as something to be ashamed of or a lack of trust in God is never helpful. You're a human being, and you're allowed to experience emotions largely outside your control. A healthy mind isn't the absence of painful thoughts and feelings. It's the ability to engage in what's meaningful and live according to your values while experiencing painful, neutral, or pleasant emotions.
Jeremy Safran, another therapist and professor, talks about meeting a prolific Tibetan Buddhist lama named Karma Thinley. Thinley walks up to Safran and asks him in broken English how Western psychology treats nervousness.
Safran responds, "Why do you ask?"
The lama says, "I've always been a nervous person. Even when I was a little boy I was nervous, and I still am. Especially when I have to talk to large groups of people or to people I don't know, I get nervous."
Safran drew a blank. What did he have to offer Karma Thinley, a respected teacher who had the most sophisticated Tibetan Buddhist meditation techniques? Most Western psychology turned to Buddhist meditation as a valuable treatment for anxiety. How could Thinley, of all people, experience such trivial forms of anxiety? Isn't he supposed to be the wise lama above it all? Is he not as enlightened as everyone presumes? And then Safran stops his racing thoughts and realizes, "awakening" does not mean the end of suffering; it's a different way of relating to our everyday traumas.
Upon this realization, Safran writes, "I felt a sense of warmth coming from Karma Thinley and I felt warmly toward him. I felt young, soft, open and uncertain about everything I knew." (Epstein, 2014). Building a relational home for suffering invites connection with others and stops the cycle of residual trauma.
Maybe our time in quarantine can be an opportunity to build a relational home for anxiety. Consider this an invitation to drop the shame and the fight against pain, worries, anxieties, and fears. In the stillness of the following weeks, consider what it might be like to accept anxiety and appreciate its intent. Don't deny its presence, distract, or bully it out. Welcome it in like that 12-year-old child who sometimes gets on your nerves, but you ultimately love because they are deeply a part of you. Maybe then, after we come out of our shelters, we can learn to relate to each other in a way that's "young, soft, open, and uncertain" about everything we know.
References
Epstein, M. (2014). The trauma of everyday life. New York: Penguin Books.
