When Rage In Your Life Is Really Anxiety

    How often do you confuse anger for anxiety? How often do you threaten, punish or shut down your anxious child or yourself? I had no clear recognition of anxiety when I first became a parent. I was blind to it because I had always lived it. It was second nature to me and I had no language around what it was or what it looked like. In my family of origin the anxiety was extreme. Both my parents have now realized they suffer from Post Traumatic Stress and they were suffering from that while raising five children. Four of those children suffer from a genetic illness called Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (EDS) and one of the markers of that illness is anxiety.

    As a result I called anxiety ~ anger. While growing up anxiety looked like emotional explosions, tantrums, and yelling; subsequently I thought those things needed to be quieted and controlled in my children because they overwhelmed me and they triggered me. Slowly, over time I realized that all these forms of anger I was seeing and had grown up with were actually something called anxiety and it was extreme. What a sense of freedom it was to give anger its 'real' name. What a sense of grief as well. Anger is ugly and threatening, but anxiety is tragic. Often when people around us are angry they pin blame on anyone but themselves and that causes chasms in relationships that are sometimes deemed uncrossable. There are so many reasons why a child or an adult has anxiety. It can have to do with just the day to day things happening in life at that time or it can date as far back as our time spent in utero.

There are pathways in the brain that are created, highways, and sometimes we are navigating them on autopilot with no self awareness and seemingly no capabilities to turn off the auto pilot and gain control.

  For my two children who struggle with anxiety it started from their time in utero and has been built upon from things that have happened since. They struggle with it in completely different ways and this is so key in understanding anxiety

Anxiety has so many faces.

   You may think you had this one volatile and abusive parent and a parent that was just the opposite. Chances are you had one parent that showed anxiety in the fight way and one parent that showed anxiety in the flight, freeze or fawn way. When our bodies experience a stressful situation we are designed to recognize it and respond. We either fight, flee, freeze or we fawn. Our bodies are all so different and one way is not better than another. People tend to label the fight response as anger and think it is a lot worse than the flight, freeze or fawn response. However I think it can be better to KNOW what you are working with. For example, someone who is yelling and freaking out can be calmed down eventually, while someone who is just literally gone (as in they get in a car and drive away or run away) or who is totally frozen (so refusing to talk or make eye contact) might not be so straight forward. I don't know if that makes sense but it helps ME deal with the anger anxiety better in my mind.

 Some ways that anxiety manifests itself in this house are:
Say I have been anxious about money. I have bills to pay and don't have enough money to pay them. It hangs over me. I am reactionary, weary and not able to support or nurture my children in the usual way - I am in fight mode.
Or say that my son is getting sick but I don't know that yet. The day before he gets really sick, any little thing can set him off. It can be that the food being offered is not quite the right temperature or that he doesn't want to wash his hands. Any tiny little thing can set him off. It took me so long to learn that the reaction had absolutely nothing to do with what was really going on in that moment. His body just goes into anxiety attack after anxiety attack and for him that means raging. He yells, punches, throws things, slams things and it looks pretty ugly. I used to respond with corresponding anger and sort of matched his levels. That does not work. Not at all! I feel like so many parents do that out of not knowing what else to do! It is almost the easiest way to try and gain control (or so it feels). We scare the child into total shut down. This really doesn't work and it's a negative and damaging way to deal with what is going on their brain and body.

Cortisol is the stress hormone that is released during a fight, flight, freeze or fawn response and when we have constant cortisol dumping into our brain it is likened to a bleach wash. It is toxic and causes damage. It is helpful sometimes to focus on that. We want to be dumping less and less cortisol into our brain and training our bodies to be able to recognize when something is actually a threat rather than just a simple every day occurrence that we can learn to cope with better.

  There is always a reason why someone is responding in anger (anxiety). It takes maturity and the capacity to THINK ~ to stop from responding in kind. Taking a moment to breathe deeply, reflect and then respond helps a lot, and it is pretty hard to do a lot of the time.

  Another way anxiety presents itself in this house is:
Emotional control! When my daughter comes home from school she tries to get everyone really upset. She bugs and hurts and bullies until everyone is losing it. When everyone is at that point she can relax. She feels safer if everyone is at the same level of anxiety as she is because she knows what she is working with. She has been 'managing' at school all day and repressing her anxiety and it explodes when she gets home. Another way her anxiety manifests is needing to know every single thing happening as much as possible in each moment of the day.
There are many more ways anxiety hangs out in this house. Everyone copes or manifests in their own ways around here.

  Maybe you've now realized that you have anxiety. Often anxiety is chronic and we have not realized it because it is our everyday reality. People are in denial or offended at the thought that they may be anxious, but odds are if you have a child that is anxious you are most probably suffering from some form of it yourself. The next challenge is to take some time to recognize the root or roots of your anxiety. Why are you anxious? Does it stem from your childhood or even farther back? Could it be from things that happened in school or a loss you experienced? Maybe a relationship in your life is the root of it? It is painful. When I finally realized I was anxious the process of sifting through the layers and recognizing roots was sometimes brutal. There were a lot of reasons.

The beauty of anxiety is that it is something that can be helped. It is something that can be recognized and with a holistic approach that mentors your body physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally you will start to see and feel a major difference in your life or if you are addressing this in your child's life you will also start seeing positive results. What a relief to realize that it is not a permanent prognosis!

I will continue to write more posts about this over the next few weeks ~ thank you for reading :) xo