“Thank you for witnessing me, and not trying to fix me.”

I want you

to knock

gently on

your 

own door

and stand there 

astonished.

- David Whyte

I consider myself a connoisseur of anxiety. My first memory of an anxiety attack was at the beginning of third grade. Our class was taking a math test—I think it was just an assessment to see where we were with our math skills. It was slow going for me but I was making my way through. At some point I looked to my left and saw the girl sitting next to me flying through the test, practically finished, while I still had pages to go. 

I panicked. I remember looking up at the clock and realizing I wouldn’t have enough time to finish. I looked back down at the test and remember feeling so worried I couldn’t concentrate. I asked to go to the bathroom and all I remember is walking down the hallway thinking, “What the heck just happened?” I had never before experienced this strange feeling I’d later come to know as anxiety.  

Just a few months later, my parents took me out of that school and placed me in a different one. I came home on the first day at the new school and immediately realized I had brought home my pencil box . . . but the teacher told me earlier in the day that I should leave my pencil box in my desk at the end of the day! Once again, I panicked. 

I remember my mom telling me it was no big deal, that I’d return the next day with the pencil box and all would be well. But I wasn’t having it. I felt I had messed up big time, and on the first day of school! What would the teacher think the next day?! I couldn’t go to sleep that night and so my mom let me sleep in their bed.

I don’t remember what happened the next day. My memories of the rest of 3rd grade are pleasant: the teacher was kind and I made friends. So, what was that all about? Throughout the rest of my childhood and adolescence I found ways to cover up and manage my anxiety, through humor, bravado, distraction, and, later in high school, cannabis. 

It wasn’t until I took an involuntary month-long break from cannabis at age 19 that I realized that yes indeed I had a steady hum of anxiety in my chest and that cannabis did a good job of quieting it down. Once I noticed this anxiety, it was too loud for me to enjoy cannabis again. So from age 19 to about age 37, I just learned to live with a hum of anxiety in my chest. 

By age 37 I had been a parent of a childhood cancer patient for 3 or so years and I was also about a year into my second PhD program. My baseline hum of anxiety was growing and I also began to notice that all of the childhood cancer parents we were working with in our nonprofit were also filled with anxiety. This anxiety thing had to be fixed. 

Over the next several years, I dove into meditation and mindfulness-based stress reduction and later into therapy to fix this hum of anxiety in my chest. With each new anti-anxiety tool under my belt, I noticed that the hum would calm down a bit, but it was still ever-present. Nothing seemed to “fix” it until I came across a therapist doing something called “emotional processing” that involved simply slowing down, finding the core feeling one is experiencing, exploring it, and crying it out.

I jumped in head first and spent a few months with her doing exactly this. It was astonishing. There was no fixing or solving or rationalizing or correcting. It was simply witnessing the intense feelings that were long suppressed—feelings like helplessness, inadequacy, aloneness, and unworthiness—and allowing them to move through my body however they wanted: weeping, tension, releasing, sighing, deep breaths, stretching, more weeping. 

This was just the beginning of a long journey that has led to my work today as an emotional health coach. Over this time, the lifelong hum of anxiety in my chest began to transform into a warm, calm glow. Anxiety wasn’t banished forever, but rather came at appropriate times and felt like a storm passing through. And when I later added parts-work (Internal Family Systems) to my tool belt, I began to see these storms as panicked inner parts of me who needed to be seen, heard, witnessed, and held. 

No more fixing them or rationalizing with them (and certainly no more ignoring and avoiding them). Now when I feel anxiety rise, I close my eyes and find it in my body. I ask: what do you want me to know? I wait and allow all the panicked, catastrophic worries to flow. I wait and ask: is there more? When this scared part has said and shown me everything it’s holding, I get a sense that it is relaxed and relieved. I can almost hear it saying, “Thank you for witnessing me and not trying to fix me! I just needed you to know what I’m really worried about. I just needed you to know . . .”