I am a person who was chronically terrified of being alive for most of her life, and I still find that most advice and ideas on how to manage "anxiety" are the same: Ignore discomfort.
If you are scared of something, do it anyway. If you feel anxious, you must do things that make you scared. Get out of your comfort zone. Tell your fears they are wrong. Act as though you are not afraid. Ignore, ignore, ignore, silence, silence, silence.
It hurt me-- it is a horrible psychological weight to carry for a child to be certain that she will suffer unbearably over and over and that she will never deserve sympathy or compassion for it-- but it is also fundamentally incurious and disconnected.
If your body expresses something that is inconvenient or hard to understand, just silence and ignore it, because the things the body wants are wrong and the things the body communicates are false.
Look, I got to thinking about this when reading scientific articles about nutrition.
So much research is conducted about why people eat foods that are Wrong and Bad. But the research is conducted around an already-known truth, like a tree that has grown around a metal fence: people eat wrong and bad food because people like pleasure and avoid discomfort, and "bad" foods are pleasurable whereas healthy foods are not.
I feel a hole big enough for the wind to howl through: the joyful table, the raw ecstasy of staining my fingers with raspberries in the thicket, the peaceful bubbling of soup on the stove, salsa canned from vegetables in our garden. Stir-fried wild mushrooms, pawpaws messily devoured in the woods, the fragrance of soil and green and growing things. Curry powder. Smoked paprika. Ginger. Allspice. Garlic and onions hitting a hot pan. Nourishment. Connection. Caretaking. Safety. Pleasure. Pleasure.
Why does nobody ask, What is the goodness of food? What makes food good? Why does nobody say, Let's explore and study that goodness. Let's understand it deeply. Let's investigate the pleasure we feel, the condition of satisfaction of the things our bodies crave and need, the sense of belonging and interconnectedness that is present when good food is shared among friends. What does it mean to be nourished? To be satisfied? To feel peacefulness and comfort in the act of eating?
Comfort must be one of the least understood things in the world. No one is curious about the secrets it may hold.
Why was I burdened with the obligation to get over my fear and never encouraged to explore what would it mean to feel safe?
The goal of the therapy and medications was clear, to get my fear to a manageable enough level that I could "function" "normally." Safety was not part of it, the feeling or the reality.
The physiological functions and maladaptive thought patterns of fear were exhaustively discussed and explained to me. They only talked to me about the fear. How to ignore it. How to dominate it. How to force the physiological process of it to stop. How to manage it. How to understand and confound its patterns.
No one talked to me about safety. How it unfolded in the body. What it felt like. How to recognize when I was feeling it.
It was an attitude of profound incuriosity. I was never prompted or encouraged to ask, and no one else in the world seemed to ask: What does it mean for a person to feel safe? What does it feel like when I am safe? What things create that condition of safety? What are my safety needs? How is safety felt in my body? What can my body tell me about what I need to feel safe?
It is this flat, dull insistence that forcing oneself into what causes pain and discomfort automatically orients one in the direction of growth, whereas comfort and pleasure provide no information or guidance.
It is assumed that we all have abundant access to our comfort zones and abundant indulgence in pleasure, and therefore it is impossible that our knowledge of these things might be lacking.
