At times it seems to me that anxiety may not just be pathological or felt as a response solely to threat, at times I think coming back to life outside of repressive programs we absorbed can also cause us a great deal of anxiety.
Practising a new behavior is never easy if as kids it felt like we had the threat of death or exile hanging over our heads for being real or authentic. As adults we forget how helpless we actually were as children in the face of scary monsters that our parents sometimes became and I am not being extreme in saying this.. I watch those who are obsessed with monsters or demons and often when I hear of what they endured in childhood it all makes perfect sense to me. A few weeks ago I was listening to an African American director being interviewed on The Screen Show here on Australian radio and she was speaking of the monstrous forces of racial oppression that so many African Americans have to deal with… It was an interesting interview and I didn’t get to hear all of it but it got me to thinking.
In his book about coming alive as our true selves, The Search for The Real Self psychotherapist James Masterton writes of this anxiety that we can feel in the face of threat to our True Self or shadow self in childhood and how healing and recovery in later years evokes such feelings.. There is a term coined by therapist Pete Walker called the ‘abandonment melange,’ that can feel almost overpowering in intensity, loaded as it is with deeply submerged experience of overwhelm and emotional abandonment or neglect repressed since childhood. I believe Masterson also calls this the abandonment depression, it is what many of us have to feel and contend with enduring on our path of growing into our authentic sense of self and inner power.
Intense feelings oscillate on the path of healing, we go to places that can feel bereft and hellish, deeply lonely and isolating, we also experience an intense anxiety and scary body symptoms of panic, due to the repression of life energy which is our spirit’s vital life force. Coming alive fully may feel risky if our true self was seen as a threat and we may turn against ourselves. Sometimes psychiatry in not recognising the heavy cost of soul murder in childhood can side against those traumatised with labels such as ‘manic.’ Repressed feeling’s don’t go away but remain encoded and stored as vibrational charge. Intense cruel repression of the true self therefore equals intense anxiety with the emergence of disallowed feeling.
Pathologising (making bad, sick or wrong) what is really part of our struggle to heal stigmatises us when the truth of the horror and repression needs to be embrace in love and seen for what it actually is and for the cost it afforded us. This is the sad truth and facing and containing anxiety may, for many of us, be a huge part of the healing pathway leading may of us through the difficult realisation of how self abandonment (turning the self against the true Self inside) only makes us more anxious. Anxiety shows the charge of what is really powerful and must be embraced as we heal from our unconsciousness of the reality of emotional abandonment, neglect, abuse or trauma.
Emerging From The Dark Night 