Welcome back to the place we find ourselves podcast. I'm Adam Young and I want to address the subject of anxiety today.

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Thank you for considering it. Okay, anxiety. Let's begin with what is it?

Anxiety is different than fear. Hillary Jacobs' handle is a therapist who draws a very helpful distinction between fear and anxiety. She says fear is an emotional reaction to the presence of genuine or perceived danger in the environment.

So you see a fire in your kitchen, you feel fear. You don't feel anxiety. Anxiety, on the other hand, is what you feel when you are avoiding important emotions.

Anxiety is what you feel when you push down core emotions like sadness, grief, anger. So here's a good diagnostic test.

If you are feeling something that feels like fear, but you are not in any danger in the moment, then you are likely experiencing anxiety.

And Hillary Jacobs' handle goes on to say that our experience of anxiety is often linked to early experiences with emotions. What does that mean?

Well, suppose that when you were sad as an eight-year-old girl, suppose that your mother always withdrew from you whenever you were sad or she got irritated by your sadness.

What do you think that eight-year-old is going to do with her sadness? She'll learn to suppress it, to push it down, to avoid it. And as a result, her sadness will not be able to flow through her body.

She will not be able to digest and process the sadness of any particular heartache from any particular day as an eight-year-old.

In time, this girl will begin to feel anxiety whenever sadness bubbles up. Now why? Why? Two reasons.

Number one, her brain has paired sadness with mom withdraws or mom gets upset with me. That's number one.

Number two, she begins to accumulate a reservoir of unfelt sadness in her body since she was never allowed to feel sadness in her home growing up.

And whereas she would have been able to process through any one incident of sadness, she is as an adult overwhelmed by the cumulative unfelt sadness that is in her heart, that is in her body.

And so now, as a 28-year-old, when she feels sadness, it connects her to all that unfelt sadness inside her heart and that is overwhelming, hence she feels anxious.

So let me say it again, anxiety is what you feel when you are avoiding important emotions. And please note, in the example I'm giving, the avoidance of her sadness, it's not this girl's fault, she's not making a conscious decision to avoid her sadness.

She's not suppressing it as it were consciously. She's an eight-year-old girl with a mom who can't tolerate her sadness. Therefore, avoiding sadness is this girl's only option.

But the price that this eight-year-old girl pays for not being allowed to feel her sadness and digest it and let it flow through her body is that lots of unfelt sadness begins to accumulate inside of her and in time, that leads to anxiety.

Now, there are a lot of reasons that children are forced to push down core emotions like sadness, anger, fear. First off, many children are told or shown that they are bad or weak for feeling sad.

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