My own Journey with Anxiety

In my mid-twenties, I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. In truth, I have always been a ‘Nervous Nelly’.

 My childhood photos carried the traces of worry. The area between my brows was always gently knitted, and I looked to the side, not straight at the camera.

 I was chubby. A story circulates in my family about how my mother and I had to shop in a dozen stores on High Street before we eventually found the one dress that fit me.

 I startled easily - even when a family member entered the room.

 The noise at large family gatherings overwhelmed me. It made me sick to my stomach and take to bed. I fell sick just before important holidays and stayed home, nursing bouts of vague illness, always accompanied by nausea and lightheadedness.

My mother practiced every elimination diet she knew of in an effort to rid me of my periodic coughs and colds and everything in between: no cold drinks, no cold fruits, no fried foods, no ice creams, nothing from street vendors. We were the model of the temperance, and I learnt how to live without. To this day, I do not have food cravings (except when pregnant).

I was fortunate to be living in a two-family household. The other mom came from a long line of Chinese doctors. She applied acupressure with a chopstick to relieve me of many symptoms quickly along with herbal cures, and I got better without too many drugs.

Eventually, my early childhood illness gave way to school and all its joys. Rides on the school bus. Getting out of the house daily, and travelling through different neighborhoods. Learning a new language. Expanding my mind. Excelling in school. Becoming a leader. Listening to stories friends told at recess and watching people.

My periodic illnesses receded into distant memory. I became my mom’s pride. She told everyone how well I did in school. The annoying part was listening to my mother drum into me, “You’re the eldest child. When the first dish is bad, the rest of the meal is a disaster.” I was to be the model child, the standard bearer. The one who swallowed tears. “You can cry at my funeral,” my mother told me. I upheld stoicism while my siblings laughed and cried freely.

 The better I did at school, the more I felt the pressure to maintain my standard of performance.  The imagined difference between being top of the class and second was devastating. Before each test, I worked off tension by running and biting my nails. After each test, I was convinced that I had done badly. The emotional roller coaster of performance anxiety is tiring!

By my early twenties, I was starting to feel chronic fatigue. While other students hung out at the pub between 8 and 11pm, and studied afterwards, I seized the three hours after dinner to study. My body crashed if I stayed up past midnight.

I was convinced that I lacked stamina. I saw myself as a wimp. I approached every activity with a mental energy calculator. Within ten years, early fatigue had become chronic fatigue. I fluctuated between periods of all-out effort and burnout. Within another ten years, I had developed hyperthyroidism. These symptoms healed with a variety of therapies, while the underlying pattern of energy lockdown remained.

When I came across Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child, I saw myself in it. The archetype of the gifted child who becomes hostage to her primary caregiver’s unconscious emotional pain and needs, rang true for me.

A mother’s love is complex. She can devote herself completely to her children while smothering them at the same time. Mine was a ‘Perfect Mom’, working tirelessly to manage every aspect of her children’s lives, from grades to marriages.

Healing begins when we recognize and confront the pain that our mother/primary caregiver did not love us unconditionally when we were children.

We lose ourselves when we mold ourselves into the ideal self that answers to our parents’ pain. It’s a lost paradise, never to be recovered. I grieved, little by little.

It takes time to allow memories and feelings of fear, confusion, powerless anger to come to conscious awareness, to allow them into the body in order to release them. It is easier to rationalize than to feel. It is easier to feel numb than to feel physical and emotional pain when we allow ourselves to feel.

My earliest loss of self took place in my mother’s womb. It’s not a secret - my entire extended family knows it and accepts it as a matter of fact. Knowing and feeling my loss is the vast distance between the head and the heart and everything below it.

My parents raised me as an honorary boy. They were mourning their firstborn son who died days after birth, and I am called “Brother” in my family, a placeholder and a lure for a future son. My official Chinese name is masculine, typically given only to male heirs. My most basic anxiety is metaphysical - am I even supposed to be?

It took a long time to confront the fact that I was provided for and valued, but not loved or accepted for who I am - a girl. Most of the time, I felt something was stuck in my throat, wanting to make its way out, but couldn’t.

As a homeopath, I was taught that we heal the whole person by addressing his uniqueness, his Original Self, uninfluenced by family, culture, society or external circumstances.

Yet, over the past few years, I have witnessed profound healing in my own clients when I put this belief aside and get down to an individual’s embodiment of the collective - one’s family history, the circumstances in which one was conceived, the dynamics of the family.

This, I now believe, is the ground from which the individual rises. When I gave the remedies that are not individual, but universally shared in our experience of incarnating and remedies that address the patterns of generations, I found that clients healed faster and their relationships improved. Sometimes, I even gave the individual and the collective remedies together.

When they feel rooted in themselves, they are able to regenerate. They flourish in their individuality. They move forward with greater ease and confidence, in their professions, in their personal relationships, in creating the lives they want for themselves. They gain clarity - this is who I am, and I accept myself. 

“I’ll have what she’s having!” I organized a small healing circle to take these remedies myself.  

The first thing I noticed was a sense of ease. I could tackle tasks that I had put off because they felt too overwhelming. Then I had a strong felt sense of I am. No qualifiers, no descriptors, just the simple, “Here I am!” It’s a delicious sense of being. It’s like playing peekaboo with a baby who’s discovering object permanence. The anxieties of performance melted. I don’t have to do anything, to scale greater heights, to improve my results. I danced instead of meditating in the morning. Wow, I am!

One day, I had a dream of being buried in sand with only my head above ground, listening to my favorite teacher lecture. I was seventeen. I dreamed of travelling and longed to study philosophy at Oxford. The world was opening up. But only from the neck up. Someone buried in sand is weighed down, immobilized.

The next day, quite spontaneously, I felt like a whole ocean was churning. When energy rises from the depths, it cannot be contained. I broke down. It came from a place so deep I can’t even fathom its origins. It did not feel like grief for a situation. Grief so deep, so wide, there is no beginning and no end. It’s not directly related to my parents as such. It’s not just for me as such.  It felt like grief from the ages, from my whole line of ancestors, coming to the surface for release.

As I mourned the child that was not allowed to be, I recover more of myself. Broken, but still beautiful. I started to write again. I started to write spontaneously, without an outline, both professionally and personally. The writing writes me. The insights surprise me - writing, for me, is a bit like pulling pieces out of thin air, shaping a felt sense into words. I trust. I surrender.

Bit by bit, I reassemble the pieces of myself, like the Japanese kintsugi art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer or precious metal. The work honors the process of wear and tear, and is witness to the process of becoming whole again. It is a beauty rooted in appreciating what is broken, subject to accidents and trauma, a metaphor for life itself. Pristine beauty is like a kiss of the gods. Imperfect beauty is kissed by time, by Nature’s wheels of change.

The Original Child is perfect, and the recovered Inner Child is awesome. It is the power of the phoenix rising from the ashes. It is the power of redemption, in the oldest sense of the word, of buying one’s freedom.