It can feel hugely confusing to make sense of why you struggle with anxiety, especially if it feels like there’s no ‘obvious cause’. It can lead to spirals of comparison, self-doubt, self-pitty & overwhelm leaving you believing ‘I’m broken’, ‘I’m not good enough’ or ‘why me?’. The first step to overcoming anxious patterns is to understand your struggles, patterns & emotions now in the context of your life experiences. This helps you to move from a place of ‘I’m broken?!’ to ‘OHHH there’s no wonder I get so anxious’. Your brain is actually always responding in the way it’s been taught to. Good work brain!!
The most formative years of our life are between 0 & 7 with the earlier years (0-2) being the most significant in terms of our social (relational) & emotional development. Clients often say to me say ‘but I can’t remember any of that?’ & my answer is always, just because we can’t remember it, it doesn’t mean it didn’t impact on us! When we dig deep, we often have a sense of how we might have experienced life as a child based on what we do know & the relationships/experiences we have with our parents/cares today.
By the age of 7, a script has essentially been written in our subconscious mind about how we see, feel, experience & respond to ourselves, others & the world around us. This script we continue to repeat, replay & live out until we intentionally choose to work through our early childhood experiences & re-write, process, heal & work through the beliefs, stories & patterns that continue to play out in our inner & outer world. It’s life long work & it’s not linear, go gently & be kind.
So, here are 5 of the most common contributors to anxiety that you probably haven’t thought about… (these are ESPECIALLY relevant if you struggle with anxiety in your relationships e.g. confidence, self-doubt, feeling like you aren’t enough).
The amount of cortisol in your mums system, directly impacts on the amount of cortisol in your system. Similarly, the experience she had throughout pregnancy & birth is also the experience you had – how stressful was it for her? Were you premature? How healthy & well were you as a baby? Are your parents/carers also your biological parents/carers?
Our sense of safety, love, comfort & belonging with our parents/carers (particularly mum) directly impacts on our sense of safety, love, comfort & belonging for & within ourselves.
FEELING love is different to KNOWING you are loved – we usually all believe we are loved by our parents but that doesn’t mean we felt it all the time. That means…Did you feel connected to her & did she feel connected to you? Was she attuned & responsive to your needs? Was she able to be present & patient with you? Was she BEING with you or just doing things for you? Did she have the capacity to love you fully? How much time did you spend with your parents/carers in those early years versus paid professionals?
Up until the age of 4 (& beyond to varying degrees) children do not have capacity to regulate their emotions – we are purely emotional impulsive beings at this point & the part of our brain which does help us to rationalise, be logical, have empathy & regulate our feelings etc has not yet developed.
How your parents/carers supported you in the moments of sadness, fear, distress & discomfort directly impacts on how you now meet yourself in those moments now… whether you feel overwhelmed, confused or self-critical in those feelings or whether you are able to tolerate, regulate them & be compassionate.
Did you receive a calm, supportive, comforting & loving voice from your parents/carers? Were they the calm in your storm? Were they able to tolerate your distress & ride the wave or were they fearful of it – did they try to distract you when you were upset, avoid you becoming upset or supress your upset when it happened… did you have experiences of being left to ‘cry it out’ or experiences that were shaming such as being shouted at, told off, told to stop crying or being sanctioned & chastised/name called for expressing your feelings (babies & toddlers never express emotions in a way that feels polite, respectful & easy for others!!). How did/do your parents/carers express or regulate their emotions? What were they modelling?
Our experience of our home, our parent’s/carers relationship to each other & our relationships with our parents/carers directly impacts on how safe we feel within the world now & how calm/regulated our nervous system feels.
Did home feel like a safe, calm, consistent & happy place? Or was there a lot of stress, shouting, arguing… a fear of being told off/getting it ‘wrong’, a fear of triggering an argument, walking on egg shells, the anticipation that your parents/siblings may argue or a sense of inconsistency where sometimes it felt totally fine & other times it really didn’t?
Our experience of how our parents/carers respond to us when we made mistakes, got it ‘wrong’ directly impacts on our confidence, how we feel about taking risks & how we feel/talk to ourselves when we make mistakes.
Many behaviour management strategies used with children (especially historically) are shame inducing (because on the surface they might ‘work’ for all the wrong reasons!). They usually lead to a feeling of ‘I am bad’ (shame) rather a feeling of ‘I have done something bad’ (guilt – which is healthy). This often includes the use of ‘naughty steps’, being left to ‘calm down’, or being shouted at/called names, compared to the ‘better behaved siblings/relatives’ or being shown the distress you’re causing to others. Experiences of shame stay stuck in our system & trigger a fight, flight, freeze response in which our behaviour either escalates (fight), we attempt to run away from the situation (physically or emotionally through dissociation – flight) or resort to people pleasing, appeasing & supressing our emotions (freeze). In these scenarios we are rarely actually soothed & instead have just given up in order to be loved by our parent/care giver.
Remember, we are ALL (including parents) doing the best with what we know & have capacity for at the time, depending on our own past & present life experiences. Parents always have good intentions & understanding your experience of being parented isn’t about proportioning blame, it’s about understanding how younger you experienced life & internalised those moments.
I’d love to hear your key take away from this blog post & if you would like support working through your early childhood experiences or making sense of your anxiety, please get in touch at becky@beckyrodrigues.co.uk or on Instagram @thisisbeckyrodrigues
Shared with love, Becky x
