Hi, it's Lynn, your adulting coach. As a mom, I've watched anxiety have a dramatic impact on all of our six divergent children. I've experienced it myself, and I watch my members at the art of adulting. Find anxiety gets in the way it just prevents them from solving so many of the, the challenges that they face. It just is a block. So I figured we need to figure this out.
I've studied a lot of teachers. Here's list, just a partial list of the folks that have really helped me understand about the root cause of anxiety. And they all have amazing insights. And they've all been really helpful.
Yet, it wasn't until I read Russell Kennedy's anxiety RX book and took his course that I found a wrapping for all of what I was learning. The way that he explained his own experience healing from anxiety helped. In fact, before I read his book, I didn't think you could really heal yourself from anxiety. Now I'm beginning to believe that it is possible indeed.
So, here's what's going on, what's creating anxiety? That's what I'm going to cover in this episode. Then I'll go into what what do we do to figure out what is going on, and then the now what, what are the actions we take, and what are the results that we can get?
So, Dr. Kennedy is convinced that unresolved pain gets stored in the body as an alarm. There's a lot of medical research to support this.
And he believes strongly that simply changing our thinking patterns won't heal us.
You know, I've been trying that for years myself. Why don't I just change the way I'm thinking and then I'll be better? And the problem with that is it is a short term bandaid on a deep wound. We need to heal the wound, and then we can use the thinking to move on.
So the alarm energy is stored in our bodies from old wounds. That means that as a child, we experienced trauma. We all experienced trauma. It's no one's fault. It's just the way the world is set up. And it gets stored because we don't have the resources and the skills yet as children to address those traumatic experiences. So we push them down into our body and they stay there and they get triggered by new things that have happened. We refer to our childlike ways to resolve them because that's the best we could do. And it's still an often in many cases, the best we can do until we really go down there and process what's going on inside of our body.
So when we go into protection mode from the trauma, our brain and our bodies are separated. We just try to logic our way through it. And that emotional experience just gets pushed further down into our body.
But what's happening is our childlike parts are growing more and more alarmed as we grow into adulthood. We often see our artistic graduates shrink their lives in order to manage it because the alarms are just growing in intensity.
We know that shrinking our lives is their lives or our own lives, isn't going to increase our independence. Independence isn't going to help us create and build the life that we want. So we've got to figure this out.
To heal, we need to reconnect the mind and the body and join our present day adult, our wise adult, with our childlike parts.
All right, so the foreground of what happens is that fight-flight alarm. It affects us right in the body. Something happens that signals a warning in our body, and then we go up into our brain and try to figure it out.
But what happens is we often don't have the tools yet to figure it out. So we just push it down into our bodies. And that's where it becomes chronic.
The foreground alarm plus the background alarm equals chronic alarm. That's why it seems like we're always in a state of anxiety, producing all those emotions like fear and disgust and shame that really block our brains from solving the problem in a wise way. Dr. Kennedy uses ALARM as an acronym to suggest the number of ways that we could have experienced trauma when we were younger and just didn't have the tools. Abuse, physical or sexual, loss (and we all experience losses even if it's loss of a toy or you know, a beloved pet. Loss is part of life.) Abandonment where we didn't feel understood by our folks or other caring people in our lives, teachers. You know, we just felt like they weren't there for us. We were rejected. We weren't good enough. We've gotten that message enough, especially in the school systems. Or maybe we were forced to mature too early because of whatever dysfunction was happening in our families. And all of that turned into shame that we couldn't just manage life well. So those are the possible alarms that could have happened during our childhood. Again, we've all experienced some kind of alarm.
Trauma is a fact of life. Peter Levine suggests but it doesn't have to be a life sentence.
We can figure this out. We need to figure out what past emotional pain is asking for our love and attention now. And when we find it, and we process it.
I like to ask the three questions while I'm processing it. What happened? So what? What story did I make up about it? And now what? What am I going to do about it? What's the result?
It really helps us resolve those that past emotional pain. We can integrate both that body and that mind and our soul where we want to be where our essences where our true heart lies. It helps us integrate, all have that together.
The alarm that we feel from whatever that trigger is that reminds us of a past trauma is not an enemy to be defeated, but instead a childlike version of ourselves that deserves compassion. Why did that happen? And what can our wise adult from today help our younger childlike part figure out what happened? And how can we resolve it together so that that childlike part is, is nurtured and can rejoin with the adult part?
We often get mad. We use medications or addictions or distractions, particularly in the form of screens these days, to just distance from the pain from the alarms. Not a good long term strategy. Maybe it was a good one back then just to get through the situation but today we want to find that those things that happened, that we still store inside ourselves in our bodies and address them with compassion, using our wise adult to heal those wounds.
And that's how we heal from anxiety. It can be done. When we distract or reject or worry our alarmed inner child feels even more threatened, shutting off all of the smart things that we could try to help ourselves feel better.
But when we neutralize and integrate those old ones, they move from the body to the mind where we can sort them out and grow from them.
It's a wonderful source of continuous improvement to become to be better at adulting. As we process what's going on, our negative emotional energy can be metabolized, digested and neutralized. And that energy then can support our wise adult self.
We actually feel our way through it. Not something we were often encouraged to do in our youth, because the culture just doesn't didn't support it. But it's this last 30 to 40 years or so of remarkable research. It's all come together to help us figure out how we can live a life without the anxiety.
Oh, sure. We're going to have the occasional, you know, serious challenge. We're going to have a lot of ups and downs in life. But we will know that we can handle it, that we have the tools that will help us get through it and to the other side, so that we can learn from those challenges and grow into the person that we're meant to be at our heart center. And to build the life that really helps us flourish together.
So, through this process, we can quiet that inner critic, the jabs that it sends us, the judging, the abandonment, the blame and the shame. We can look at all of that and heal. This alarm anxiety cycle puts us into projection mode. We want to move to connection mode.
Please join us in the art of adulting where we take this theory and apply it every week. And practice the skills that will help us, the tools that will help us become heart centered, mind and body strong and truly where we want to be in life.
Bye for now.
