Anxious aloneness

photo by Noah Silliman - unsplash

It’s the being alone with it that is so painful. The gripping anxiety. The incessantly circling thoughts of doom and disaster. That time in the middle of the night when there is no defence against the heart thudding certainty of the wrongness of everything. The moments on waking when the spiders of terror start wriggling in the stomach, startled by the interruption of unsettled dreams.

There is plenty to be anxious about. My mum would say ‘there’s no point in worrying about something you can’t do anything about’. Family wisdom, passed down in vain hope of it being helpful when a parent has no idea what else to offer. Of course, not being able to do anything about something is a fertile ground for anxiety. Helplessness is terrifying.

There are some important things about anxiety that many people don’t understand. There are three (at least) aspects to it that make up the whole experience.

1.     The thing that we are anxious about – climate crisis, exams, a relationship going wrong, something we wish we hadn’t said yesterday, any number of things are ripe for worry.

2.     Our own particular nervous system and history of stress - our vulnerabilty to anxiety is the result of both genes and lived experience. If we did not feel safe and held as a child then we will always have a tendency to anxiety. If we are neurodivergent or traumatised we will have extra sensitivity to what is going on around us.

3.     The support or lack of it from those who care about us. How much we feel accompanied and how much we feel alone with the things we are worried about. If there is someone who listens to our anxiety and accepts and understands how we feel then we feel safer. Without that, things are much worse.

It is this last one that seems to be the best kept secret. And this is the one that is most within our reach to do something about.

The heart of all anxiety, the dread root of it, is that we are alone.

For most of us, we have always been alone, raised in a culture that has forgotten that our deepest need is to be close to others, part of a community, sure of our place. ‘Lifelong loneliness’. When I first heard that phrase from Sarah Peyton, I breathed out with relief at the resonance of it. Yes, that is how it feels, that I have never had the accompaniment I need. Not because my parents didn’t love me but because, along with most parents in this culture, they had no idea of the depth of security a child needs, and because they had so little support in offering it. Sarah Peyton also introduced me to the phrase ‘anxious aloneness’ as part of the human stress response. When we are stressed, we need others to help us manage it and help us feel safe. Stress is relational, our felt safety depends on other people.

We live in a time and place where the dominant culture says that children need to be trained into life in the ‘real world’. They need to learn to ‘self-soothe’ as soon as possible, sleep through the night so that their parents can get to work and get their lives back. Parents are told that they need to punish and reward their child in order to get good behaviour. And of course that continues in school. Only yesterday my daughter learned in her psychology class that babies should be punished for poo-ing on the floor as part of potty training. What a dangerous, disgusting lie we are all being told. This behaviourist culture has created a deep scar in our nervous systems that we are then told either that it is normal or that we need specialist help (depending on its severity and who is listening).

The first and most important step in supporting our children and other loved ones with their anxiety is not to leave them alone with it.

To offer them warm accompaniment, to sit next to them, breathe with them, put a hand on their back and let them know that we are there. This includes taking them seriously, listening to their anxiety and responding that ‘of course, that makes complete sense’. If we can hold back on the fake reassurance, the dismissive advice, the practical solutions and just acknowledge the burden of worry that they are carrying, simply accept and welcome what they are going through, we will be offering a rare and precious gift.

It is hard to do this if we haven’t had it ourselves. If we are to learn to listen to others we need people to listen to us. It is a new experience for most of us and we can’t do it alone. We can start to grow a deeper acceptance of ourselves, a new inner warmth and compassion, but this happens most effectively in the presence of others. We need communities of practice, listening partners, sharing circles to learn how to listen and how it is is to be accompanied in our emotional experience.

Being seen, heard, understood and welcomed are profound human needs, often missed in childhood in our cultures of separation. We can reclaim this core part of our humanity and transform our relationships. We can’t solve the problems of the world overnight but we can stop leaving each other alone with them.

If you’d like further support in how to talk with children struggling with anxiety, particularly around climate change, then please watch my free talk. You can find it here.