Anxiety is one of the emotions that I have to consciously think about how to express. I have to imagine what people look like in the movies when they're scared, and then I try to reproduce it. I can show many other emotions naturally, without thinking about it: happiness, anger, disgust. But fear I have to consciously simulate. (I suppose if I was in a bus going off the edge of a cliff or someone stuck a gun in my face, my repressive instincts would be overcome and I'd look terrified, but in normal situations it doesn't come out.) I think I've internalized the ability to hide it, to camouflage it as annoyance or boredom, so thoroughly that I have to layer a bad acting job over my lockdown of the natural expression.
I didn't know this until I got in group therapy and realized that many of the other people in my group (the women, in fact) didn't register the fact that I was feeling a lot of anxiety, even though I talked about all the time. When I talked about it, they didn't see any reflection of it in my face or body language, so what I said didn't register. I could say that I was feeling anxious, I could tell them about situations where I was paralyzed with anxiety, and still the absence of the expression they expected outweighed what I was telling them. They even accused me of withholding and not being open about my feelings until I learned how to act it out for them. I had to fake it to be accepted as authentic; my words were not enough.
This knowledge has proved to be very important to me. I realized that in many situations where I have mentioned my fear of something without expressing it physically, people have assumed I was lying. For example, when I talk about my fear of the financial consequences of a purchase, if I don't show fear, my wife may assume my fear is not real, and I'm making up an excuse because I want to spend the money on something else. Also, in situations where everybody else is feeling and expressing fear, if I don't consciously produce an expression of fear, I will come off as apathetic and detached.
It's very, very frustrating. From a young age we learn we are punished for showing fear, conditioned to hide it, and then later we realize there are situations where we are punished for our inability to show it.
This really resonates with me. I'm often frustrated with a feeling that I'm saying things to people and yet still not feeling heard. This speaks a lot to what might be helpful.
I'm sure you've worked plenty of time thinking about this already so I feel dumb trying to supplement that at all, but I'd assume you're probably repressing some level of emotion just because the physical expression of anxiety isn't so much a learned behavior coming from your prefrontal cortex but more like a low level hind brain thing you have just by being human. Between survival instincts and social instincts we have very physically based "emotions" and playing the odds here, I'd wager you and others that comment, having similar experiences, that you developed this coping mechanism at a young age.
Apologies if I'm reading too much into a simple comment saying you're misunderstood at times.
I feel terrified, my body temperature goes up, I often sweat, and I have an overwhelming urge to censor my speech which tends to make me censor my thoughts as well. It's an exhausting emotional experience, and it feels and behaves just like fear, not like any other emotion, except when there's anger mixed in. The only difference is, I'm maintaining enough control of my face and voice and body to fool a lot of people. Probably not everyone.
I understand this is not the point of your story, but I hope part of the lesson here is just how fallible body language and facial expression can be. I'll bet a lot of these people believed they were good at empathizing, when in fact they were only good at empathizing with similar experiences or body language expressions.
I have the opposite problem: I don't know what anxiety is. Supposedly it's an emotion people have (and it's certainly possible I feel it too,) but I have no way to identify my feelings as anxiety because nobody has ever expressed the meaning of that term in a way the conforms to any feeling I have ever had.
I originally glossed over your comment pretty quickly, but the more I think about it, the more I realize this is true in practice for me as well. I know what it feels like to feel joy or sadness, but for me anxiety is more often a collection of things I observe about myself than something I feel. This is partly because my anxiety is so often coupled with depression, and partly because anxiety pushes your brain into a fight/freeze/flee trichotomy, and the "freeze" and "flee" responses can feel pretty emotionally blank when the fear is distant or ill-defined (like a deadline or social rejection as opposed to a grizzly bear.)
Again depending on the fight/freeze/flee response, my anxiety can manifest as stiffness in my body, requiring special concentration to force myself to do normal things, or it can manifest as a jitteriness, like when you drive a car with a lot more power than you're used to and every time you touch the accelerator it surges forward in an alarming way. It can be accompanied by elevated body temperature, even sweating.
The way I differentiate the paralyzing kind of anxiety from depression is that depression paralyzes with lack of energy and an inability to believe that anything you do will come out well. Anxiety paralyzes with stiffness and a blank mind that is too twitchy to make plans.
Paralysis is the flight/freeze response to anxiety, but it also has a fight response, where I single-mindedly execute the next thing to do. I can get a lot of things done this way, and sometimes this is the only thing that snaps me out of procrastination, but sometimes the "clear next step" I'm unthinkingly executing is not the right thing. And when it becomes unclear what the next thing is, I'm back to being paralyzed.
Likewise, in social situations, anxiety can make me talk a lot (for me) and become much more open and engaging, and it can be a great thing to get me over the hump to knowing someone well, but more often it just makes my mind blank and makes me so slow to say the things I want to say that the moment passes. From the point of view of my social anxiety, I guess that's a win, preventing me from engaging more than superficially.
One of the few times in my life where I have palpable anxiety is when I go for on-site interviews. Most other things I'm a cool cucumber. I think there is something to having feelings but not recognizing what they are, but there is also the other side which is people are different and different people feel things more keenly than others.
Yea. There a lot of flavors to anxiety, and the word itself is almost too generic to be meaningful. I experience it as a kind of "wiredness" or "on edge" feeling. The somatic experience tends to precede the mental one too. So, I'm with you, I think people tend to oversimplify "anxiety" and that it's actually a complex of zillions of little micro-disorders that share some rough features.
What I’ve heard from my therapist is that anxiety is often a cloud that covers the real emotion underneath. I experience anxiety when I’m really upset because I don’t know how to express anger. But sometimes it is sadness or fear. Anxiety is basically an evolutionary adaptation — we no longer are being hunted or having to hunt for survival, but our minds still think danger is present.
A thing I love about my therapist is, that I tell my anxiety stories exactly like you, without much emotion and pretty clear and to the point. Still, in that moment, I experienced heavy levels of anxiety, but I can't just reproduce that at a later time (that sounds odd to me anyway). But he takes my word for it and works through it with me. Never in my therapy did he not believe me, just because I didn't tell it with a terrified look in my face.
Yeah, that's the great thing about group therapy. It's designed to work through interpersonal things that come up with regular people who have no training and are just as concerned with their own problems as you are with yours. This was something that never came up in ten years of individual therapy. I'm not sure if my individual therapist was aware that it could be a problem, but she was the one who suggested I do group therapy, so maybe she was. I should ask her.
In my experience, they can sometime help and sometimes they can't. If they understand your issue, it can be easier and quicker to talk through your issues with a friend. Deep, buried anxiety issues are not understood by people that don't experience them. I, a completely healthy young man, constantly worrying about my heart, was met first with concern, then with dismissal as my issues didn't disappear after a week or so. You can become very annoying to friends. People who understand might be better. In my opinion, a therapist is the best, everything is inferior to that.. But that's just what worked for me.
It would be cheaper, but you'd lose your friends, unless they understand why you're talking about the same miserable repetitive shit every week, intentionally working through the worst of it, often resulting in everybody walking away feeling exhausted and dragged through a sewer, which you might inexplicably count as a success. Nobody will tolerate this unless they are really sold on the value of the process, or are miserable enough that they're willing to try anyway.
Seriously, it's so, so different, and most people in group therapy are having difficulty maintaining social connections already, because sharing emotionally icky stuff is a really hard thing to get right. Some people aren't good at recognizing boundaries and get ostracized because they overshare. Other people undershare because they aren't sure where the boundaries are or don't have the sophistication to share within boundaries without accidentally crossing the line. How to talk about your issues with various people (coworkers, family, friends) is a common frustration that gets talked about in group. No matter how progressive your social network is about whatever issue you have, people still conform to the law that if you make them feel good, you will see more of them, and if you make them feel bad, you will see less of them.
For example, one woman in my group was left by her husband after she discovered he was cheating with a woman twenty years younger than her. He had told this woman he was divorced and fathered a child with her. What her husband became widely known, and the women in her social group were, theoretically and vocally, supportive of a woman in her situation. But her social opportunities dried up overnight. Nobody was comfortable with the fact that she was miserable, that she couldn't afford to go to fancy brunches with them, that she was now selling her house and taking classes in the afternoon to get a nursing certification while they were sipping chardonnay and worry about hiring a new maid. None of them wanted to be face-to-face with a reminder that they were aging and their husbands might have a hot young sexual outlet somewhere, and that their lives could fall apart for the same reason. Some of her most loyal friends would meet her occasionally to express sympathy, but it just happened to always work out that they couldn't invite her to anything with other people. You'd be surprised how thin people's support is, and how strong their tendency is to assume that if being around you makes them feel bad, and other people don't make them feel that way, then you aren't doing what you need to do to deserve their support.
Even in intimate relationships, people don't always process why they're feeling the way they do. When someone says, "It's okay, whatever you're going through is okay, I just need to feel like you're here for me," they might not realize that they equate feeling like their partner is there for them with feeling safe and secure with their partner, and they don't feel safe and secure when their partner expresses anxiety.
I didn't know this until I got in group therapy and realized that many of the other people in my group (the women, in fact) didn't register the fact that I was feeling a lot of anxiety, even though I talked about all the time. When I talked about it, they didn't see any reflection of it in my face or body language, so what I said didn't register. I could say that I was feeling anxious, I could tell them about situations where I was paralyzed with anxiety, and still the absence of the expression they expected outweighed what I was telling them. They even accused me of withholding and not being open about my feelings until I learned how to act it out for them. I had to fake it to be accepted as authentic; my words were not enough.
This knowledge has proved to be very important to me. I realized that in many situations where I have mentioned my fear of something without expressing it physically, people have assumed I was lying. For example, when I talk about my fear of the financial consequences of a purchase, if I don't show fear, my wife may assume my fear is not real, and I'm making up an excuse because I want to spend the money on something else. Also, in situations where everybody else is feeling and expressing fear, if I don't consciously produce an expression of fear, I will come off as apathetic and detached.
It's very, very frustrating. From a young age we learn we are punished for showing fear, conditioned to hide it, and then later we realize there are situations where we are punished for our inability to show it.