Dear Mermaid/ Reader:

Having studied your thread in the last three days I learned more about how indeed damaging it is for a child to grow up with a highly anxious parent, and how important it is for parents to treat and manage their own anxiety best they can, so to minimize its expressions.

A highly anxious person in every relationship needs to take responsibility for his/ her personal anxiety and work on lessening it with professional help when needed, because anxiety in one person increases the anxiety and stress in the other person. But it is especially important to do so when the other person is a child. There is a term for the years of childhood: Formative Years. To put it simply, the Years-long anxiety expressed by a highly anxious parent becomes Formed in the brain-body of the child.

Put in another way:  years of exposure to highly anxious parent => a highly anxious child => a highly anxious adult.

The highly anxious child, now adult can move out of the parents’ home, as you have done, Mermaid, live with a man in another country, live on your own, travel, etc., and yet wherever you go, there’s the high anxiety, that “I’m just not right” feeling, as you put it.

When a person feels I’m-just-not-right, nothing feels right: living with a man feels… not right, living alone feels… not right, living in another country feels… not right, living back with parents feels…  not right, religious life feels… not right, leaving your religion… feels not right.  Nothing feels right.

A child needs to grow up with parents who seem okay, in control of themselves, because the child needs to feel that she is in good hands, so to speak, that the people in charge of her are dependable. When a parent seems all over the place, restless, unsettled, the child feels that she has no one to depend on. Without a calm-strong parent to care for her, the child cannot rest. She becomes restless. Restless within herself, nothing feels right.

Restless adults who have been restless since childhood resist addressing the origin of their restlessness and prefer to address their restlessness within an adult romantic relationship, at work, and/ or elsewhere, but not in childhood. I think that the reason for it is that children of a highly anxious parent (parents who may be abusive or not) do their best to remove their awareness from their painful childhood experience, and this removal aka dissociation becomes a habit that carries on into adulthood.

But the painful reality of one’s childhood continues to be the reality of one’ adulthood regardless of dissociation, nothing felt right then; nothing feels right forever more… unless serious healing takes place for long enough time.

An anxious person shrinks from life, anxiety is about constriction. To grow, to expand, to explore, a person needs to be free from excessive anxiety. Any and all kinds of freedoms start with this one basic individual freedom: the freedom from excessive anxiety.

When a highly anxious person experiences a temporary disappearance of the anxiety, a zero anxiety (when taking a particular psychoactive drug, when a big change takes place, such as getting into a religion, getting out of a religion, falling in love, falling out of love, winning the lottery, reading a particularly inspiring book, etc.), nothing feels better: “awake and able… so happy and alive… euphoric and alive and so much better physically, I felt like a completely new person“, you wrote.

The tendency when that happens is to think that the anxiety is gone for good, and that the euphoria will last. It never does.

You wrote that you had “so many surface reasons to feel happy“, but you had one reason to feel unhappy and that was… years of growing up with a highly anxious mother, her high anxiety Formed within you.

You last posted, in December 2015, four whole years before anyone heard of Covid-19 (December 2019), before the most alarming 2020 & onward escalation of climate change, before the global political radicalization and move toward autocracy, culminating in the current ongoing tragic war in Ukraine, before all these things, while physically healthy, living in a serene countryside, wanting for nothing material, you were highly anxious, and your mother was highly anxious. Why?

My answer to my own question: the world was never right, too much wrong in it, too much abuse and waste, selfishness and ignorance, greed, indifference and short sightedness. As a result, people are highly anxious, and highly anxious make poor choices that lead to more abuse, waste and destruction.

Lessening the current and expected miseries in our world begins with the individual taking responsibility for one own’s anxiety and lessening it. With lesser individual anxiety, each person can think and choose better, have a far-sighted view of the consequences of one own’s and others’ behaviors and misbehaviors, and calmly move toward practical, long-term individual and global solutions.

You asked: “What about being young and free?” – excessive anxiety shrinks and constricts us, it ages us, it imprisons us; it is the opposite of youth and freedom. To become young and free (at any age), take on the process of significantly lessening your own personal anxiety long-term, freeing your mind, heart and body from that “tension in my head like it’s being squeezed in a vice“.

anita