Anxiety is a Messenger

One of my telltale signs of stress is my mind parachuting into the future, fully amped to engage future scenarios that haven’t happened yet. The impact of this anxiety-fueled thought experiment is that, as I drill through possible outcomes, I experience the full impact of them on my nervous system. My heart races, my stomach drops, my mouth goes dry, my breathing shallows.

When anxiety runs the script, all future scenarios skew negative. This negativity dominance is adaptive because it orients our attention towards survival threats. But in today’s world, this negativity dominance catapults our bodies into an endless cascade of stress hormones and with exhausting impact.

Anxiety activates our nervous systems into a stress response: fight, flight, freeze, or fawn/fix. For those of us with complex trauma, anxiety can also be past-facing, an emotional hangover from earlier times and a clear sign that our minds and bodies long to fully heal.

How do we know when anxiety might be related to complex trauma, and not based on the present? There’s already plenty to be anxious about in the present without needing to excavate the past. Trauma-related anxiety often overwhelms our internal capacity with racing thoughts looping worst-case scenarios and a sense of driving urgency that doesn't match our external circumstances.

Anxiety is the emotional outcome of sustained vigilance — the constant feeling that something terrible is about to happen. Vigilance (or “hypervigilance”) is a trauma symptom because our bodies still experience the traumatic event as present-moment, not past memory.

Anxiety can amplify our emotions to the point they feel overwhelming, uncontrollable, and often uncontained in their intensity. Feeling this way, when others around us don't, can be extremely isolating. Those of us with complex trauma and anxiety often try to mask just how bad we feel in order to fit in, hoping no one will notice how overwhelmed we are.

Even when our minds manage to focus and our emotions feel relatively calmed, anxiety from unresolved trauma stays in our bodies and becomes impossible to ignore. Tight and bracing lower bellies, clenched jaws, and throat heaviness are common, and it also becomes numbness or even dissociation when the intensity has gone on for too long.

We might try to manage anxiety with tools, events, and medication — which all have a place. Yet often, these treat the symptoms and not the source.

I prefer to approach anxiety as a messenger that needs attention. Our anxiety doesn't need fixing or managing. It needs to be heard and responded to, on its own terms. When we do this, anxiety no longer needs to sound the alarm to get our attention because we're already listening and learning how to give ourselves what we need.

Our minds constantly make meaning, searching for reasons why we feel the way we do. When we feel anxious, our minds eagerly assign external causes like current geopolitical events, challenges at work, or high-conflict people in our lives.

It’s easier to look outwards than look in.

But when we focus only on external stressors, we solve one thing and another quickly takes its place. Our anxiety needs something to orient towards and grab onto, and it will keep fixating on external things until we go to its source.

Why (and How) to Listen to CPTSD-Related Anxiety

For those of us with complex trauma, anxiety can be an emotional flashback to childhood experiences of terror and abandonment, when we were unable to escape bad situations and our minds worked overtime to help us through.

Anxiety, the well-dressed chaperone of our childhood wounding: competent, protective, and biased towards action. Our anxiety prefers external action. Its way of dealing with unprocessed pain is to distract us because it doesn't want us getting too close to the pain and wounding of the past.

Trauma-related anxiety prefers that we maintain the status quo, even if uncomfortable, and never risk healing. It remembers the vulnerability and lack of support we had in the past and doesn’t want to go back. It doesn’t see the resilience and resourcefulness we have as adults, or the support around us now in the lives we’ve worked so hard to build.

Anxiety still carries traumatic memories of overwhelm and aloneness. This is why it's disrespectful to manage anxiety by self-shaming it.

The only lasting solution I’ve found, for myself and the people I work with, is to befriend it.

Befriending our anxiety looks like bringing awareness to the experience of it and listening with no judgement or agenda. Choosing to listen to it creates an authentic relationship to this aspect of ourselves. From this place, new choices and paths become possible.

This kind of listening is a foundational part of the work I do with people to heal complex trauma from childhood that's getting in the way of their relationships and the lives they want to live.

Anxiety asks us to show up and look at where it's pointing us to heal. Here are some ways it might be showing up for you and the people you love.

Five Ways Anxiety Shows Up with Complex Trauma

Complex trauma deploys anxiety as a deflection strategy that tries to protect us from pain by focusing us on 'what's wrong' externally instead of the traumatic wound inside. 

When we understand what our anxiety is trying to do for us, we might even appreciate how hard these parts of us have worked, for so long, to keep us safe.

Let’s explore different ways anxiety can show up, so we can start to listen.

1. Vigilance

"Forewarned is forearmed," is what anxiety might tell us, anticipating negative outcomes to prepare ourselves to feel less hurt or disappointed. The problem is, this kind of ongoing alertness to threat is difficult to turn off and makes it challenging to relax and enjoy relationships.

2. Panicked Urgency

"I don't feel good. Get me out of here," our anxiety might shout, flooding our body with a stress response that hijacks our rational and relational wisdom. This kind of anxious intensity often takes us by surprise, until we train ourselves to notice the alarm bells and respond better.

3. Despairing Collapse

"No one is coming for me. There's no point even trying," our anxiety might weep. When anxiety persists, our bodies go into maintenance mode because we can no longer sustain the high activation. We shut down with frustration and futility, feeling that continuing to fight the anxiety is a losing battle.

4. Control

"Do this and I'll feel better," our anxiety might insist. When anxiety starts to give orders to the people we love, we use the strategy of control to keep it away. But when we can’t control everything or everyone, the anxiety is waiting there to meet us, stronger than ever. Only now, we’ve strained the relationships where we used to enjoy connection and care.

5. Explaining

"If you understood, you wouldn't do this," our anxiety might plead, bargaining with others in a bid for them to soothe us and resolve our anxiety. But convincing others to share our points of view doesn't create more love, safety, or belonging in our relationships because it doesn't address what's beneath the anxiety 

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Simply listening to our anxiety is enough to begin a new relationship with it.

Once we see these experiences as traumatic remnants from the past, we can choose to meet them with care, listening to where they’re pointing us for support.

If we continue to try to fix or manage anxiety without listening, it often amplifies to make us listen, creating a negative feedback loop of high-intensity and often intolerable discomfort. The way through is to turn inwards with clarity and curiosity, with determination to respond to what needs healing.

Anxiety is a powerful messenger, when we're brave enough to listen.