Most of my clients enjoy doing therapy with me because they say I am real, personable. I was told just this week, and it is not a unique statement, that I am the best therapist they have ever had. I receive this compliment frequently and I try not to take it to heart because I want to always stay open to growth, change and self examination, but this is what people say. I try and note all positive and negative feedback.
The type of therapy I facilitate the most efficiently is with people who present with anxiety of all kinds. A large percentage of people have no idea what is going on with themselves outside of having enough discomfort that they don’t want to live with anymore, so they seek out help, and a small percentage encounter me quite by accident. Well, maybe not that big of an accident because my marketing is fairly on point.
Clients looking for help dealing with their internal world of anxiety often have complex family situations that they grew up in that impacted their development such that they have created schemas, AKA mental maps, of the world that are no longer useful and working against them. I have to speak in generalities because, while, a large percentage of clients presenting with anxiety definitely DO have some sort of childhood thing serving as the catalyst, I have learned that is not ALL, but it is A LOT. There are those who have a genetic predisposition that is the cause of a chemical imbalance but I won’t get into that here. I do want to recognize that fact though. If you want to know more about that type of mental health issue, Jordan Peterson has quite a lot to say about nature verses nurture on his podcast.
Anyway, it is no surprise that most therapists find themselves interested in a certain population because they have lived some version of the story they are helping their clients trek though. The same goes for me.
The purpose of this blog is to help you understand, through my lived experience, what your journey could look like and give you some clarity around your human experience because, after ten years in practice as a therapist, I have learned that the human experience may vary in context but not much in how it feels given certain variables.
The pictures you see on this page are me as a kid. As I look at these pictures I can still feel the anxiety that pulsed through my whole body allllllll the time. I didn’t have a label for it as a kid but looking back I was definitely anxious. I spent a lot of time with other family members or family friends as a kid. I was passed around a lot and people who knew me growing up have told me, in not so nice of ways, that I was an angry kid. Early in my development that confused me. I knew it was an accurate assessment because I remember being angry on top of anxious but I didn’t know why.
I look at the little girl in these pictures and notice a flat affect and I can see, and can now label the feeling of not feeling like I belonged, not anywhere. It is no one’s fault but I wasn’t wrong. Without any words, I was picking up a LOT of emotional energy about me and my parents.
A pattern I have seen play out in families is the normalization of a F*&K$d up situation. I mean, parents can pass almost anything off as normal and extended family ignores the most obvious toxic patterns. This is not exclusive to toxic patterns, I have seen this phenomenon with physical and s3xual abuse as well.
I was the product of an affair between my mother and father that lasted 7 years, assuming this is the truth. My mom gave birth to me towards the end of their affair and, as I understand it, I was kept a secret from my siblings on my dad’s side for years. One of my sisters who is about a decade older than me recounts how she was confused about seeing unexplained baby toys in dad’s car when she was a kid. I am impressed he even had a baby toy in his car. I have 0 pictures of my father cuddling me and 1 picture of my parents together with me as a child. The union definitely was wrought with shame and was not celebrated.
However, my parents did manage to get married and I was provided an intact family for a short time of which I am thankful for. One of my mom’s husbands that is the father of an older sibling said that he would have adopted me if my biological parents would not have married. While this is very kind, few people are capable of understanding how the thought of that needing to be an option cuts deep. That is not information that I needed. In fact, I have been told at parties, family events, rides in the car and even my own father’s funeral, information that I didn’t need. Four decades later the story is still a sensation I guess…
So I move through life with the weight of my parent’s shame on my shoulders. I am sure if a family member is reading this they may call me dramatic, but that is not the case. It is a hard fact that I have suffered and have at least been misplaced because of their choices and the circumstances of my birth. These things happen. As an adult I understand this. As a child, I internalized what I was sensing in my environment. That’s simple neurobiology.
I am not a victim at all, I work, love, thrive and I am a productive member of society but recognizing this fact has helped me make SO much sense out of and label the anxiety that that little girl in the pictures has carried all of her life. Because it has a label I can address it when it pops up from time to time and put it to rest instead of letting it run my life.The fact that I have been able to master this and teach others how to do it is why I love my job so much. There is so much hope for recovery. The human brain is so resilient.
Change is hard though.
Changing how you interact with and feel through your environment takes a ton of effort. Psychological change is nebulous, abstract and hard to pin down. It is so much harder than quitting chocolate! At least you can see chocolate!
Creating change in yourself takes a massive amount of motivation and awareness. You have to constantly be on the lookout for any maladaptive thinking connected to your old way of life AKA paradigm. I explain to people who I help what the process looks like and what they are asking for and that it is one thing to know how you want to feel but it is another to tackle your mindset daily and shift incrementally to a new reality.
No, you don’t just feel something new one day. You actually have to rewire your brain. Psysiologically. Buckle up. He77, go get Neurofeedback to give you some help because that 5h1t is hard.
I have made a huge effort to replicate my process and recently spawned from my brain the process of change as I see it. (Turns out it’s not that unique. After a google search it is similar to other processes so I guess I’m on to something here)
- Discomfort
- Awareness that I don’t have to live like this
- Awareness that there is a choice to make but not knowing what that is
- Feelings about the task at hand, confusion, education
- Defining the choice
- Practice
- Gaining comfort with new habits
- Revision and refinement
After realizing I didn’t have some sort of inherent screw loose I started my journey by learning the facts:
-My parents are alcoholics. That has a huge impact on a child. Backed by research.
-I am the youngest of 6 in a blended family with 5 different bio parents.. Cluster F
-I am the product of an affair. The whole family system was impacted.
-My parents both were married multiple times. Seeing my mom in abusive relationships made a mark..
I wanted to know what is, what isn’t and what my choices were. I had a lot of feelings about this, it seemed like the equivalent of hopping in a spaceship in order to fly to an unknown planet with no name, no map and no idea what to wear. I was lost but on the hunt for something. Basically, I was existing in one paradigm and wanted to learn what other realities were available to me.
After a lot of reading, therapy, podcasts, exposure to healthy people and meditation I defined the problem very clearly and the choices I had available to me:
-The little girl inside me did not feel like she belonged and, therefore, did not have worth (label the feeling)
-While it was definitely a sticky situation and the fact of the matter is that I was born into a complicated AF family system, I could develop my own world where I would be valued and thus belong, free of the shame of my birth circumstances (power of choice)
-Work on challenging my own belief system (re-wire how I relate to the environment to get different outcomes)
– Due to the facts of the matter I had very poor boundaries. I was tasked with defining and learning how to recognize healthy interactions and eliminate unhealthy relationships from my life. This part has been the hardest and most vital step towards a new reality. (more re-wiring and forming a new reality)
I can say that I am finally at a point where I have boiled down the incessant anxiety into something that is obvious and simple. It no longer feels like some nebulous feeling that takes over. It doesn’t feel like a reality that is even real at all anymore. When it creeps in, I know it is my nervous system reacting to an imaginary threat because I do belong, I do have choices and I am emotionally safe. .
This is the goal of therapy. This is the path I walk my fellow humans down that have attachment trauma like me.
Kristen Neal is a Licensed Professional Counselor and Clinical Director at Greenway Therapy . Learn more about her on her BIO page.
