Anxiety is Often a Somatic Memory of Our Childhood
When we see the word ‘unsafe’ next to ‘childhood’, our mind goes straight to big trauma.
We look back and think, “my family was normal”, or “I never went through anything traumatic”.
But if our family has been part of this culture, I think it’s unlikely our lineage hasn’t been impacted by trauma – whether obvious or subtle.
The state of our collective mental health shows that.
But a lot of this dysfunctionality seems ‘normal’ because it's part of our ordinary cultural reality.
A common example is mothers having to leave their babies soon after birth to work because there’s no other financial choice – this premature separation is against nature’s design, and it has an impact on the baby’s nervous system.
This is a cultural failure – not personal. There are a myriad of examples like this.
When we experience anxiety as adults, this is a somatic memory of times in our life when our body was sensing a lack of FELT safety.
Whether we remember it or not.
This doesn’t mean we were under an actual threat, although we could have been. But the least we experienced was a fundamental emotional disconnection between us and our caregivers because of their stress and trauma.
If we felt disconnected from our caregivers, our body couldn't relax because it needed attunement and emotional presence for healthy development.
If these were absent, our nervous system started being hypervigilant and looking for danger.
This was the start of living in a ‘flighty’ state & our body looking for escape. It sensed something was off and was getting ready to flee at any moment.
Anxiety isn’t idiopathic.
If you go through anxiety, I invite you to see it through the lens of your family and life history, and consider the cultural context of your development.
Find out what your body is trying to tell you with anxiety, how and why it had to learn that (a lot of compassion can come from that), and work with it somatically to give your body new options of redirecting this emotional energy.