Dear humour,

You’re welcome. I am glad that you don’t mind my prodding 🙂

You’ve said that your go-to emotion is usually anxiety:

Since I have a slightly turmoiled background, I don’t understand the so called “normal” stuff. My go to quality is usually anxiety.

I am anxious in situations that does not require me to be.

So, in situations that would require a different reaction, you still react with anxiety, right?

It occurs to me that those might be situations that would require assertiveness… I am saying this because of what you wrote in 2016 and 2017, which anita kindly put together in a previous post:

I’ve had a challenge with being assertive because I feel that I might ‘hurt’ people. I take the hurt upon myself without speaking out. Once I am assertive, I get all sensitive thinking I hurt the other person (Oct 2016)

I want to be able to take care of myself and be less of a martyr. I am getting frustrated with regrets, things not turning out the way I wanted it to, my efforts not being recognised, me not able to meet my own expectations, people pleasing. I’ve had enough! (January 2017)

You wrote back then that you’ve got a problem with assertiveness, because you believe that if you’re assertive, you will hurt the other person. So you rather don’t speak out…

This might be still happening at your workplace, when your colleagues put you down, and you don’t say anything. Instead of reacting in some way, maybe defending yourself, you rather contract and the only emotion you feel is anxiety?

If so, I think the anxiety – which is your go-to emotion – became a guardian for your anger. It keeps the anger (which would be a natural reaction) in check.

This anger would tell you what is acceptable to you and what is not. It would signal that your boundaries have been crossed. But because you don’t want to feel it, you also don’t know what is acceptable and what is not. And as we’ve discussed earlier, this means you also don’t know what is “normal”, i.e. what is a normal reaction in a given situation.

Does this seem plausible? That anxiety may be blocking your healthy anger, which would otherwise signal you that your boundaries are somehow being violated or that your desires aren’t respected?