Anxiety is hard to understand if you have never experienced it. It’s like the instant before a car crash. You realize you have no control to prevent what is about to happen, and your only certainty is that it will be catastrophic. There is no escape.
The problem with anxiety is there is no car, and there will be no accident. You just feel suspended in a state of overwhelming fear while you wait to see what is going to destroy you. It can last for years.
In a codependent, anxiety often presents as thematic fears about how they are viewed negatively in the eyes of others. Nervousness over an upcoming interaction, ruminating about recent conversations, or panicking over something from years ago are all normal.
Maybe you agonize over giving gifts of equal thought and value to everyone at Christmastime. Or break into a light sweat trying to remember if you gave your direct reports exactly the same amount of attention, quality of motivation, and compliments.
An anxious hard codependent may externalize their fears and require their children, partner, friends, coworkers, boss, and everyone to soothe their worries. Anyone caught relaxing or playing or enjoying the simplicity of childhood will be accosted with all the things they should be worrying about instead.
Children’s laughter is cut short as they are given cognitive tasks, indentured to figure out how to be a better person, how they can help prevent their caretaker’s distress, and how they can be more like an adult.
Anxious soft codependents are the perennial insomniacs who lie awake figuring out when the next shoe is going to drop. They repeat old conversations in their mind, looking for the slight they may have caused someone, and how to either repair or prevent further fallout.
They constantly apologize and blame everything on themselves to defuse situations. They truly believe everything is their fault. Anything else would mean the treatment they received by someone they loved was inappropriate; an intolerable suggestion. Anxiety becomes the easiest way to make sense of reality, and fear becomes who they are.
——————-Reality Check——————-
Fear is just a problem propped up by smaller parts.
Every fear can be reduced into two types: the fear of death, and the fear of abandonment. Both are easy to dismiss.
Fear of Death: Once you accept that you are going to die and integrate this fear into who you are, you are free. Your character can never be destroyed, and any fear related to death can never touch you. You’re welcome.
Fear of abandonment: Try to imagine the result of the worst-case scenario, the one where all your fears come true. Use every mental trick to convince yourself that it is possible, provided it be physically possible in the current world (no aliens, magic, or time travel). Where do you end up? In a jail cell? In a cold apartment in the war zone? Living on the street, begging for food?
I challenge you to find me a realistic scenario in which you are truly all alone.
International captives in North Korea have reported making friends with their guards, even teaching them yoga. In solitary confinement in the United States, prisoners found a way to communicate via flushing messages down the toilet. In the movie Cast Away, Tom Hanks finds companionship with a volleyball.
No matter where you go, you will always have society. Even if you are all alone after you die, you share the same fate as every human who ever lived and are thereby permanently connected to all of them.
Once you resolve your fears, or continue in spite of them, having an anxious heart becomes a choice. You will believe this when you start helping yourself out. Not out of your fear, but out of yourself.
For anxious codependents, fear is the primary vice. It is how you chase the illusion of control. Of certainty. But these things exist within you already. They lie in the heart of virtue. If you honestly do your best, that is the hook you hang your hat on. If someone else doesn’t think so, they can get stuffed.