This post is about how almost wilfully ignorant the mind can be about what is happening to the body and how it can refuse to get on board with helping it. In fact, it doesn't know what the body is doing. It's like passengers talking to a driver - one is saying go left and the other go right. It's also about how the strategies and patterns the body develops to try to help itself to safety, one of the most basic drivers of human behaviour, can eventually backfire.
I have been a closet “anxious person” for decades, closeted to myself. It’s unrecognised, internalised, masked, even to yourself in some cases. One lives with the physiology of threat without the narrative. The body carries around vigilance and develops patterns and strategies to to adapt to that. The mind thinks something else altogether is going on. It’s as though one hand is waving “I’m raising a family in Scotland” the other is waving “Let’s be really careful about who we let in”.
“Getting on with it”
The first inkling that I might be more anxious than normal, was not, bizarrely, when I was sent to see a specialist for my physical symptoms when I was working in high pressure jobs. I just didn’t think about it then. I went along, listened, must have talked and just carried on with my life. It wasn’t that I denied anything was wrong. I had gone to get help after all. Life was difficult with these physical and emotional symptoms. It’s just that I don’t remember it defining me particularly: “Oh, I’ve got anxiety”. God, of course I didn’t tell a soul I was getting help for palpitations and shaky hands and I had to wear a hat all the time. No, I just got the help and carried on and thank goodness at that point my boss who talked harshly to people and glorified in being tough, went on maternity leave.
I do remember the first and the last thing the specialist said. The first thing was: you don’t breathe. What does he mean?, I thought. Much later, maybe in yoga, I understood that some people could breathe from the belly, but I had no concept of how to do this and couldn’t, for a long time, years probably. I just didn't have that degree of relaxation. I remember being plagued by pain in the shoulders from that era. The last thing he said was: don’t leave it so late to get help, in the future, a lesson I never took on board - again, because of anxiety I see now.
Recognising “unusual” behaviour
I can remember realising my anxiety was too much, not normal when I had a significant overreaction to my son unexpectedly vomiting at the beach aged about two. I also had a newborn. I panicked, took him there and then to the GP who said it was me who had the problem and told me to come back. At this point, one could ask, not normal for whom? Someone with no support, a toddler and a newborn, plus a host of other things he certainly didn’t know about?
I had to drag us all there for an 0830 appointment, having not slept again. We were slightly late and he refused to see me. He also said not to bring the kids. I didn’t have any options so that was the end of that.
An unconscious cost/benefit analysis
Thus began - had already begun, in fact - a very rocky two decades with my GP practice, rated the worst in the area. I am largely mute there. It’s involuntary. I am simply terrified of the environment. I know it reflects twenty years of problematic encounters there amplified by the sense of threat coming after the attacks by the Ladon last year and social services this years. Selective silence after repeated invalidating encounters is a shutdown response. There is a cost to entering that environment. The body learns not to speak where cost exceeds safety.
Before I had kids I didn’t consciously really admit to myself how much anxiety I was managing.
I must have just thought it went with the territory of having demanding jobs. I didn’t really have time to think. In eight years, I worked for six companies, all but two global players and travelled all over Europe, repeatedly to the US and to South Africa, not to mention holidays abroad, in Thailand, in Brazil. In five years in London I moved five times. In perhaps four years before that it was another seven houses. I travelled for work a lot. In my last three years there I was studying after work for a degree in philosophy. In my last year I was also pregnant. At this distance anyone can see it was too much.
Even so, it wasn’t that that was the trouble, or so I still believe. Maybe it was, maybe it was all the moving, the adapting to different environments, but I’d done that all my life. What really caused the problem, was bullies. Dogmatic, unreasonably demanding, controlling, dangerous people. They tended to be manipulative, ambitious, or exploitative. They were by no means everyone but every company I worked in or once, a client I worked for, had them. I was helpful and conscientious but if I got in the way of whatever these people wanted, I just came a cropper every time.
Beyond that the roots go into childhood. I was bullied as a child and I was raised in a way that did everything but encourage me to stand up for myself. The body is constantly receiving stimuli. The brainstem compares incoming stimuli with stored patterns signifying safety or threat. You think you, your mind, is in charge, but everything to do with threat and safety is happening on another level.
Walls
Eventually, I just shut myself off from the threats, that is to say, the people that I couldn’t choose to be around who might harm me. At first, it was to raise the kids. Their father was largely absent for twelve years, until just before COVID. The house was large, old, needed attention and constant repairs. The kids needed an adult all the time they weren’t in school. That was me. So I stayed away from paid work. Distance meant safety after much harm. I shut myself up in a small town in Scotland in my mid-thirties. I said it was to be near the parents and it was. My children had great relationships and some wonderful times with them - we all did. But I remember trying to explain taxation to my two year old in the car and thinking something wasn’t quite right.
Perhaps deep down, I was doing the only reliable thing for my system to feel safe. I hated the question “What do you do?” because my stumbling, evasive answers looked like avoidance. The reality was I was exhausted all the time. I haven’t slept well - regularly slept enough or slept through for at least twenty years. I fight for sleep in dribs and drabs over long nights that gnaw into my days.
I tried my very best for my children, though looking after them alone was often hard and there were a lot of other issues. I hadn’t realised I’d shut myself up with a whole bunch of other problems. But I made sure I was available to them all the time. They came first, always. I went to everything at school, we did after school clubs, then we did free play. They tried all sorts. We did homeschooling and flexi schooling and full time schooling. Weekends and school holidays were full of play and exploration and the outdoors. They had healthy meals, fresh air, and lots of reading.
With nobody else buffering the edges, I made my own buffer and even then it was a pretty rubbishy dyke. I didn't have much spare energy or raw material for building.
Intruders
Wounding people still got through from time to time over the years. The council education department was one of those - not a person, just a brutal, faceless entity and shoddy in every way. My son’s last primary was ranked one of the worst in the country and yet I was hounded, harassed and isolated by that department, and made to feel as though I was going mad, for complaining about nothing as important as education, but about the pre-requisites for that: a safe environment, were bullying is properly addressed medical conditions are properly managed. It anyone had been watching it would have looked like David and Goliath, with no ending appropriate to a famous Bible story. In this version David gets stamped under Goliath's foot. It happens all the time when vulnerable people are up against a monolith, so, most people, most of the time, quite rationally, don't try.
Stuck?
Those problematic intruders apart, I seemed to have found a workaround where I could survive in partial isolation from the world. I had built walls to survive. I still went out from them, have fun, and I could go back behind them too. But as the years passed I had a nagging sense I might also be walled off in a sense and, stuck. I wasn’t sure because there was a lot about society I recoiled from. The reasons people stay in, are part of society, didn’t on the whole, seem attractive or relevant to me.
I didn’t choose my walls because I preferred emptiness. I was, am, a social person. I like and enjoy people when they aren’t threatening and I like to help, in whatever way, if I can. If the environment feels safe, I can function well. You wouldn’t know. That’s the point. One can become so adept at masking it just doesn’t show or doesn’t show as anxiety. It might seep out in other ways.
It gnawed at me. I had years of higher education, an impressive CV, was multi-lingual and had picked up another array of skills since leaving work, some hobbies, some practical related to owning and repairing an old house and raising children. Yet I just didn’t put myself out there. I was hidden away and a large part of it was avoidant, fear based. Another part sought company, conversation, dance, laughter, fun. There is a point when coping strategies harden into identity, when resilience becomes a shell to hide inside.
There is no arc, no rising and dissolving of tension in this story, just a lived paradox.
Well, no arc yet.
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