Watching worries ebb and flow
We’re guessing if you’re reading this book, you have some interest in the topic of anxiety, and maybe you or someone you care about struggles with the problem. You’ve come to the right place. This book gives you strategies that help people manage their anxiety. However, you should know that sometimes people start on the path to change with the best intentions, but as they move along, they suddenly encounter icy conditions, lose traction, spin their wheels, and slide off the road.
This chapter gives you ways to throw salt and sand on the ice and keep moving forward. First, we explain where anxiety comes from. When you understand the origins of anxiety, you can move from self-blame to self-acceptance, thus allowing yourself to direct your energy away from self-abuse and toward more productive activities. Next, we show you the other big barriers that block the way to change. We give you effective strategies to keep you safely on the road to overcoming anxiety. And finally, if you need some outside support, we give you suggestions on how to find professional help.
Digging Out the Roots of Anxiety
Anxiety doesn’t come out of nowhere; rather, it typically stems from some combination of three major contributing factors. The primary villains underlying anxiety are
Genetics: Your biological inheritance
Parenting: The way that you were raised
Anxiety-arousing experiences: Unpredictable, upsetting, or scary events
Studies show that of those people who experience unanticipated traumas or unpredictable events, only a minority end up with severe anxiety. That’s because anxiety stems from a combination of causes. So, someone with resilient genes may experience bad parenting and a series of anxiety-arousing events yet not suffer from serious bouts of anxiety later on. Someone else with less resilient genes could develop serious problems with anxiety. Furthermore, someone with anxiety-prone genes could have a great childhood and relatively few anxiety-arousing events and live a life without significant problems with anxiety.
Some people seem almost immune to developing anxiety, yet it’s possible that life could deal them a blow that challenges their coping abilities in a way they couldn’t expect. In the story that follows, Liz shows how someone can show resilience for many years yet be tipped over the edge by a series of noxious bullying from her peers.
Liz manages to grow up in a drug war zone without developing terribly distressing symptoms. One night, bullets whiz through her bedroom window, and one pierces her abdomen. She shows surprising resilience during her recovery. Surely, she must have some robust anti-anxiety genes and perhaps some pretty good parents in order to successfully endure such an experience. However, during high school, she is targeted by bullies for her success in her high-school band. Her antagonists post photoshopped, embarrassing pictures of her on social media. She withdraws and starts avoiding friends. Her anxiety causes her to drop out of band, and her grades slip. She just doesn’t have the resources to face this onslaught of stress.
Thus, as Liz’s example illustrates, you can never know for certain the exact cause of anyone’s anxiety. However, if you examine someone’s childhood relationship with her parents, family history, and the various events in her life (such as relationships, accidents, disease, and so on), you can generally come up with good ideas as to why anxiety now causes problems. If you have anxiety, think about which of the causes of anxiety have contributed to your troubles.
What difference does it make where your anxiety comes from? Overcoming anxiety doesn’t absolutely require knowledge of where it originated. The remedies change little whether you were born with anxiety or acquired it much later in your life.
The benefit of identifying the source of your anxiety lies in helping you realize anxiety isn’t something you brought on yourself. Anxiety develops for a number of good, solid reasons, which we elaborate on in the following sections. The blame doesn’t belong with the person who has anxiety.
It’s in my genes!
If you suffer from excessive worries and tension, look at the rest of your family. Of those who have an anxiety disorder, typically about a quarter of their relatives suffer along with them. So, your Uncle Ralph may not struggle with anxiety, but Aunt Melinda or your sister Charlene just might.
Maybe you’re able to make the argument that Uncle Ralph, Aunt Melinda, and your sister Charlene all had to live with Grandma, who’d make anyone anxious. In other words, they lived in an anxiety-inducing environment. Maybe it has nothing to do with their genes.
Various researchers have studied siblings and twins who live together to verify that genes do play an important role as to how people experience and cope with anxiety. As predicted, identical twins were far more similar to each other in terms of anxiety than fraternal twins or other siblings. But even if you’re born with a genetic predisposition toward anxiety, other factors — such as environment, peers, and how your parents raised you — enter into the mix.
It’s how I was raised!
Blaming parents for almost anything that ails you is easy. Parents usually do the best they can. Raising children poses a formidable task. So in most cases, parents don’t deserve as much blame as they receive. However, they do hold responsibility for the way that you were brought up to the extent that it may have contributed to your woes.
Three parenting styles appear to foster anxiety in children:
Over-protectors: These parents shield their kids from every imaginable stress or harm. If their kids stumble, they swoop them up before they even hit the ground. When their kids get upset, they fix the problem. Not surprisingly, their kids fail to find out how to tolerate fear, anxiety, or frustration.
Over-controllers: These parents micro-manage all their children’s activities. They direct every detail from how they should play to what they should wear to how they solve arithmetic problems. They discourage independence and fertilize dependency and anxiety.
Inconsistent responders: The parents in this group provide their kids with erratic rules and limits. One day, they respond with understanding when their kids have trouble with their homework; the next day, they explode when their kids ask for help. These kids fail to discover the connection between their own efforts and a predictable outcome. Therefore, they feel that they have little control over what happens in life. It’s no wonder that they feel anxious.
If you recognize your own parenting style in any of these descriptions and worry that your behavior may be affecting your child, flip to
