I Made Peace With My Anxiety, Can I Make Peace With Yours?
Differential healing in relationships
Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
Self-help is a funny thing. It both defines and sickens me. While I firmly believe the only healthy growth is the personal kind, I also wish I could leave it alone. Sometimes, I secretly envy the rugged hypermasculine individuals who cry ‘woke’ and ‘sissy’ to those of us trying to be better people.
Sometimes I wish I weren’t so taken with enlightenment. Healing. Being a better person.
Not everyone is. That’s all I’m saying. Some of us want to grow, change, and heal. Others couldn’t care less. And that’s ok.
Except that different attitudes toward healing can complicate relationships. For example, my first wife didn’t believe in anxiety. She thought I was making it up. This created a difficult healing environment for me.
When one person is healing, how do we deal with other people’s trauma? Specifically, when recovering from anxiety, how do we deal with the anxiety of our partners?
This is probably a terrible analogy, but maybe it’s like a recovering alcoholic being around people drinking. It’s hard enough to heal when you protect yourself from the trauma. But what about when you can’t avoid it?
Anxiety is contagious — especially for us touchy-feely empaths who can’t help but sense other people’s emotions. Other people’s moods can alter our own. When we are wrestling with our anxiety, how can we protect ourselves from others’?
Guilt, guilt, and more guilt
Even asking this question out loud makes me feel guilty. How can we, the recovering anxious people, ignore the same struggle in others? For the most part, we can’t. How, then, do we make room for our spouses, children, parents, and partners so they can be anxious without it affecting us? Do you know what exacerbates anxiety? Guilt.
When we sense anxiety in other people, we make things worse. Do you know what else exacerbates anxiety? More anxiety. What’s worse than feeling anxious? Feeling anxious around other anxious people. I’m convinced that a lot of the anxiety related to flying is due to the intense anxiety saturating airports. People are in a hurry, late, and worried they will miss their flights. They are apprehensive about flying 30,000 feet above the ground in a rocket-fueled pile of metal. Their minds are riddled with so many TV shows featuring plane crashes. Airports are breeding grounds for anxiety.
Anxiety is contagious and exponential
When my wife is anxious, my nervous system lights up. Her anxiety stimulates my anxiety. Even when I don’t know if she’s feeling anxious. We don’t have to be talking. We don’t even have to be in the same room. I can feelit. And feeling it is all that it takes.
Despite my best efforts — and it takes all my energy at this point — to mitigate my anxiety, I don’t have enough bandwidth to process more. It is as if I am barely below the threshold most of the time. One tiny bit more anxiety and boom! I melt down.
When just a little bit of my wife’s anxiety puts me over the line, I often take it out on her. It’s a terrible thing. I often blame her, if only in my head, for making me anxious. Of course, I know it isn’t her fault, but this is how it feels. My reactions stimulate a mutual blow-up, and everyone feels worse.
Anxiety presents as anger
Anyone who spends enough time feeling anxious gets pretty damned sick of it. Overstimulated, undernourished, and tired is a bad combination. Anxiety is like a petri dish for other negative emotions. The sense of overwhelm stimulates our human need to blame others. To transfer some of the pain elsewhere, ANYWHERE. Often, this is to those we love the most.
It isn’t surprising that relationship-based shared anger is a massive problem. Mutual childhood trauma, life experiences, and poor communication are a recipe for discomfort. And relationships pour gasoline on the fire.
Self-help is group help
What we get wrong is that our healing should be private. Don’t most of us experience therapy, growth, and healing in our minds? How much do we share with others? Our loved ones?
I am guilty of overemphasizing the self part of self-help. As my kids grow and develop responses to their childhood trauma, I wonder if I could have been more open about my healing when they were young. When I learn something new in therapy, I think about sharing it with my wife — most of the time, I don’t. The timing seems wrong. It is awkward. I figure no one cares.
Self-help and personal growth become like masturbation in a way. They are things we do alone. In private. By ourselves. Maybe it shouldn’t be this way. My wife and I could certainly share more about our separate journeys.
Not everyone wants to heal
Everyone is on a different journey. Some don’t care about healing, others are obsessed with it. When attitudes toward healing differ greatly in a relationship, talking about it can be challenging.
People in relationships may have similar presents, but they have unique pasts. While our shared experiences contribute to the power of our relationship, the past can diminish or even negate these gains. When past traumas overwhelm and trigger, we spend more time in maladaptive behaviors than working toward mutual goals. I wonder how differing healing paths contribute to arguments and divorce.
At the very least, everyone is on a different path. Combining our personal healing journeys with others is the next echelon of human evolution. How do we interact with people different from us?
Tolerance and acceptance
It is possible that one partner does not want to heal their anxiety and/or is not interested in better communication. This forces the healing partner toward tolerance and acceptance. You can’t make someone change. Relationships don’t improve when one party tries to force or coerce the other. When communication results in an impasse or disagreement, the other party must concede.
Tolerance and acceptance help retain healthy relationships when parties disagree. We are all dissimilar in many ways. Learning to accept the things that are different and tolerate those that are difficult is critical. Otherwise, the relationship will suffer.
Communication
I’ve been writing a lot about communication. I think we suck at it. I wonder how often two people have had a conversation and both felt simultaneously understood and that they accurately understood the other person. Language has become overly complex. Instead of making it easier to understand each other, this complexity often makes it more difficult
I wonder how often two people have had a conversation and both felt simultaneously understood and that they accurately understood the other person.
Communication is, quite literally, a two-way street. Effective communication requires both parties to make an effort. We are responsible for both speaking and listening effectively. Only when everyone involved does this can we hope to understand each other.
Of course, not everyone has the same capacity to be effective. This is where tolerance comes in. We must meet each other and be met where we are. And we’re nearly always going to be in different emotional, sociological, and developmental places.
There’s no easy way to put it. We need to become better communicators, better speakers, and better listeners. Doing so will require significant effort from both parties. Your spouse might not be interested in better communication. You have to make peace with that.
Beyond familial relationships
This article applies to any relationship. In an era of unprecedented polarization, we must improve communication, tolerance, and acceptance.
Expressing our needs and meaning so that our audience understands us is something we can all strive for. Similarly, learning to listen to others and ask questions to ensure we hear them accurately will only help. We must improve these skills and urge others to do so if we expect humanity to survive.
When we encounter those who won’t communicate or listen, we must figure out how to let them be. We are all different, and this is good. Despite current and historic efforts to homogenize, we don’t want to live in a world where we are all the same. Accepting and tolerating diversity is adaptive.
Learning to communicate with, accept, or tolerate our fellow human beings is essential to a healthy future. First, we heal ourselves, then we can heal each other.