 While my work started fourteen years ago focusing on the wedding transition and evolved eight years ago into the motherhood transition, in recent years I’ve realized that the healing of anxiety that informs the crux of my work is intimately connected to the biggest transition of all: crossing the threshold from living one’s life with fear in the driver’s seat to transforming into an empowered life where the Loving Adult is in charge. This is no small change, and it’s not one that occurs within the span of a week, a month, or even a year. No, it’s the work of a lifetime. And while we may experience a free ride during certain stages of the transition between living life from wounded self to being able to respond to the wounded self and live from our essence – times when grace whispers us along like floating downstream on gentle currents – at other times we experience profound resistance to shifting out of the negative voices or false beliefs that dominate our lives.
A few months ago, a member of the Conscious Weddings E-Course sent me an email containing a re-telling of the allegory of Plato’s Cave. She suggested that the parable could be understood as a representation of our challenge to break through the illusions about love and marriage that our culture propagates. She was absolutely right, and I took it a few steps further to include the transition of healing and the resistance that arises when the ego senses that its days are numbered as driver of your life. What strikes me most is that this was written over 2000 years ago, which means that resistance is deeply embedded into our codes of psyches. In other words, it’s natural to hold on to our habitual and comfortable ways of seeing, believing, and behaving. It’s natural to grip for dear life to that which we know and understand. It’s natural for the ego to hold tight to its familiar ways. No one wants to die, even – or especially – the wounded and fear-based parts of ourselves.
When we view our transitions and resistances through this lens, we can bring compassion to this challenging process. Instead of berating ourselves with statements like, “I should make a different choice. I know what I have to do and now I have to do it. What’s wrong with me for being stuck?” we can say, “It’s scary to change. People have struggled with this transition for thousands of years. I’m sure that when I’m ready, I’ll climb out of the cave and commit to a different path for my life. But for now I’m going to practice bringing compassion to myself instead of judgement.”
Note: The first line of italics are from my e-course member and the subsequent lines are mine.
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Fictional dialogue between Socrates (Plato’s teacher) and Glaucon (Plato’s brother)
Plato sets a scene in which there is a group of people deep within a dark cave. The people are bound by their hands, legs, and necks and have been in the cave since childhood, they have seen nothing else their entire lives but what is in the cave. They are unable to stand or move their heads. There is a firelight burning slightly further away from the prisoners and slightly beyond that, there is a path with people carrying all sorts of artifacts- statues of humans, of animals, etc. The prisoners see nothing but the shadows of the artifacts that the people are carrying on the path, and they assume that the shadows are real. Any voices they hear from the people talking they attribute to the shadows. These prisoners know nothing else – the shadows are reality.
This is our childhood notion of romance, love, marriage, and what creates sustaining peace. We assume that the images we’re presented are reality, that if we only achieve the “right” things and find the “right” relationship, we’ll find happiness. We think that the shadow is the truth when in fact it’s a far cry from reality.
Socrates asks what would happen to the people if they were allowed freedom. “Do you not think they would stand? Do you not think he would look towards the firelight?” The problem, of course, is that the people have never actually looked at firelight. Their entire lives they have only looked at the shadows. The firelight would hurt their eyes and they would not understand that the shadows are not reality. “It hurts them to do this (looking at the firelight).” Socrates says, “Suppose someone tells the freed man that what he’s been seeing all this time has no substance, and that he is now closer to reality and is seeing more accurately, because of the greater reality of things in front of his eyes – what do you think his reaction would be?”
This is our first moment of enlightenment, when we are told that our fantasies of romantic love, marriage, and life are not reality, but that reality is so much richer and deeper than what we have been led to believe. Because we’ve never seen the truth – the firelight – it’s difficult to look at. The light of the truth may be painful to see when you’ve only looked at shadows your entire life.
Of course, the freed person is bewildered and still believes that what he has been seeing his entire life is reality and the firelight is a lie. If the freed person were forced to look at the firelight, he would run back to the familiarity of what he has known because he believes that what is more familiar is the truth.
Our first instinct is to run back to what we have known our entire lives: the lies about love and romance (love is an omnipresent feeling), that others are responsible for our happiness, that it’s not safe to live from our essence or true nature.
(Here is my favorite part for anxiety, so I’m going to quote directly):
“And imagine him being dragged (compelled) forcibly away from the cave up a rough, steep slope, without being released until he’s been pulled out into the sunlight. Wouldn’t this treatment cause him pain and distress? And once he’s reached the sunlight, he wouldn’t be able to see a single one of the things which are currently taken to be real, would he, because his eyes would be overwhelmed by the sun’s beams?
“He wouldn’t be able to see things on the surface because he is so used to seeing the shadows in the cave. It would take him time to get used to the situation, first seeing the shadows of people from the sunlight, then eventually being able to see objects in the village. Eventually he would be able to see the heavens during the nighttime and eventually the sun in its proper place.”
For anxiety, it feels like we are being dragged out of the cave, kicking and screaming, and it is extremely painful to be subjected to reality. It causes us pain and distress. It will take time for the freed person to adjust to the new knowledge he is receiving. He would only be able to move forward in small steps, as the new sights and knowledge are overwhelming.
Over time, however, the freed person realizes that life is good outside of the cave and will feel sorry for the prisoners still in the cave and want to help them.
In the story, the point is that the enlightened educated individuals will be dragged out of the cave, kicking and screaming, but once they are enlightened, they feel pity for those in the cave and eventually go back to teach them, despite their resistance. There is a good drawing of the cave on this website: http://faculty.washington.edu/smcohen/320/cave.htm
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We are often dragged out of the ego-cave kicking and screaming. It hurts to change. It’s scary to risk stepping out of the life we’ve always known and learn to ways of seeing, believing, and behaving. I’ve worked with clients who have spent years resisting growth, who have all of the tools at their fingertips but resist taking the committed and daily actions that would transform their suffering into peace. It’s not an easy leap; in fact, for many it’s the most challenging transition of all and can feel like nothing short of a death experience (because it is). But if you’re going to see life as it is instead of watching the shadows of life parade across the cave of your safe and comfortable world, leap you must. It’s the only way to freedom.
 Through working with clients who grew up in fairly healthy environments, it’s become increasingly clear to me that the blueprints of beliefs and experiences we absorb about love are not only connected to how we were directly treated by our parents, but also by how they treated each other and, perhaps even more importantly, how they treated themselves. For example, if we witnessed a mother who suffered from worry and anxiety and never addressed it directly, it’s quite likely that the worry and anxiety would have been passed down to one or more of her children. We often live the unlived lives of our parents, so if there’s shadow work to be done in another generation, you may find yourself the recipient of that work. And while it may not appear to be a gift, when you understand anxiety, worry, panic, or any other debilitating manifestation of fear as a portal into wholeness, the burden is transformed into a blessing.
A secondary and common cause of relationship anxiety is childhood bullying. I used to be surprised by the number of clients who would share stories about the ways in which grade school peers (including siblings) would taunt, tease, and torture them, but now it’s one of the first questions I ask when a client presents with the fear of intimacy. If your own peers, which will one day constitute the age group from which you will choose a marriage partner, tell you repeatedly that you’re ugly, stupid, worthless and any other number of ruthless cruelties, doesn’t it make sense that your self-esteem would plummet and you would develop a belief that says, “I’m not worthy of love”?
And then there are the ways in which we may never understand where the resistance to real love originates. I have clients who say, “I grew up a loving family and have had good relationships in my life. This just doesn’t make any sense,” to which I respond, “It doesn’t really matter where this came from. The fact is that it’s here now and either you move toward the resistance or you run and end up alone. No matter where this came from, it’s an opportunity to grow in your ability to love. Do you want to accept this challenge?”
In the end, fear is fear, and we either accept the task of working with it consciously and diligently or we walk away from loving, solid relationships with the erroneous belief that, “It just didn’t feel right. If it was right, I wouldn’t have to work so hard.” But if you have a love blueprint that says, “Love isn’t safe” or “This will only end in heartbreak and I can’t handle the grief” or “I’m not worthy of love,” massive amounts of compassionate attention are needed to break down these beliefs and replace them with the truth. And one of the most effective ways of creating a new love script is to take the risk, slowly and carefully if needed, of loving the one you’re with.
I’m re-reading a beautiful book called When Love Meets Fear by David Richo. In a section called “Letting Love In” (p. 135) he writes:
Our work on our fear follows a simple path:
admit you are afraid,
allow yourself to feel the fear fully,
act as if fear were not getting in your way.
Allow the one who loves you – and whom you want to love but cannot – to draw an inch closer for a minute longer than you can stand… My desire to be loved is stronger than my fear of it. Love does that; it puts you in a position that makes you no longer so careful about limits – my stony limits that no longer hold love out.
This work involves a willingness to be awkward, to be amateur. To feel the fear and still let yourself be loved is doing the very opposite of what the wall does. The wall protects the fear. Now you leave the fear unprotected, allowing yourself to feel it, thereby acting as if you were not feeling it. The daily moment and the daily inch impacts exponentially as time goes by because you are teaching your body one cell at a time: “You do not have to be so afraid anymore.”
Your partner hugs you. You start shivering and scrunching up. You just cannot stand it, and, to get away, you say: “You know, I have to get to work, I can’t stay right now, I have to leave.” To work on that fear, you let yourself stay in the embrace for one more minute than you can stand. It is awkward and feels painful, but in that one minute your body is finding out: “You can stay and still survive.” A message of safety has gone through every cell. Next time you add another minute. And before you know it you can hug as long as you want. Repeated acts of love diminish the fear response both in ourselves and in others. When each partner risks doing something one more minute than each can stand, they are standing together, i.e., intimate.
Years into my marriage, I still have to work at the art and skill of receiving love. My cellular blueprint says, “Love isn’t safe. People are vampires and want to steal my life-force,” which means that a habitual wall of resistance lives inside of me that can sometimes emerge when my husband comes close. I don’t always have to work at it; I’ve been at it long enough that there are long stretches of time when I experience a “free ride,” when the fluidity of giving and receiving moves freely between us. But during other times – perhaps when I’m tired, overextended, depleted, hormonal, or perhaps having nothing to do with these factors – I feel the resistance and have to consciously work at moving toward instead of away and saying to myself, “This is fear. I’m going to feel the fear and take loving action anyway.”
Somebody less-versed in the architecture of the anxious mind would probably respond to this response to fear with,”It shouldn’t have to be so hard. When the relationship is right you don’t have to work like this,” to which I respond, “I know in the bones of my experience from being in relationships with men who weren’t completely available for emotional intimacy that even when it ‘felt right’ and I didn’t have to work to move toward, it wasn’t a loving relationship. The ease was because there was never any real risk of my heart.” I can corroborate this statement from the thousands of people I’ve worked with over the years who say the same thing: with other partners who weren’t fully available, I never doubted and I always “knew” I loved him or her.
Love is a risk, and somewhere deep in our cells we all know this. But it’s also the reason why we’re here, and each time we find the courage and resolve to break down a brick of our fear walls, we taste the sweetness of the sweetest nectar available to our hearts, the love-nectar that gives meaning, richness, and fullness to our lives.
 With grateful permission, I’m sharing this post from my Conscious Weddings E-Course forum. This will give you just a taste of the brilliant wisdom that often passes through the virtual doors of this very special forum via the words of the compassionate, supportive, wise women and men that are working their tails off to break through their relationship anxiety.
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I had these two MAJOR REVELATIONS running through my mind as I went to bed last night, and I forced myself to remember them! So thought I would share: (sorry to soapbox, it’s just a major mental breakthrough for me!)
1. You know the “doubt means don’t” thing – well I was thinking about what that all these experts and ‘people’ are saying and what Sheryl has just posted about in her blog / Oprah’s response, etc. Well, maybe there are two kinds of people: People who are unaware and people who are fully aware. The first kind are the people for whom doubt SHOULD mean don’t. These people may actually need to be hit on the head by a 2×4 to stop them making a bad decision – people who cannot see what you are on about and are hell-bent on doing something that IS actually bad for them – red flags and all and even make excuses for them.
People who are on the less intuitive side, perhaps less conscientious, immature, less aware. It’s not a criticism, I was that kind of person. When I was 10 years younger, I had absolutely NO clue about what real love was. I knew what it was supposed to feel like, though. I was ‘in love’ with this guy who never thought about coming over to see me (I used to drive an hour to see him all the time). I never questioned his bad moods and it was only in realising he made me feel like crap about myself (why didn’t I doubt? duh!!) and was not committed to us at all that I finally got the idea of wedding bells out of my head. Seven years ago (2 years before I met my now *husband* – love saying that! , I met the man I thought I would marry. He, too, was someone I was totally into, never ever a doubt in my mind. I told everyone, “this is the guy I’m going to marry” – and same thing happened again. Do you think a doubt entered my mind about the relationship? No. Did anyone warn me about these guys – mum/family/friends etc? No. It hit me that no one questions you when you say you are ‘in love’ – they just go along with you, trusting when you are right for each other, no, they are damned HAPPY for you. No one questions your feelings of ‘love’ and yet they are all over you like a rash when you say you are having doubts – and even when you explain there are no red flags, no, still ‘doubt’ seems to mean ‘don’t’ to these people.
Well, I think this confusion is messing with the second type of person – HSP and intelligent / introspective / anxious people’s heads – I think, like Sheryl always says, the whole ‘doubt means don’t’ advice actually excludes people who are looking deeply at their relationship before marriage – ie (us) people who don’t need to be told that doubt means don’t.
So yeah: Say ‘doubt means don’t’ to a conscientious person is like a fricken red flag to a bull, we will go for it – looking (and finding) reasons to assume it applies to us.
Say ‘doubt means don’t’ to a person who isn’t aware and they will make excuses for the person’s behaviour and their own doubts.
Just my two cents here but I’m totally over these blogs about marriage that say these blanket statements to everyone and assuming everyone is the same. Moving on…
2. I also has this thought about the influence of the myth that meeting the One has on our modern culture (ruminating on Sheryl’s books here) but finally ‘getting it’ that people in Western culture really do cling to fairytales to give their lives meaning. As a single person I LOVED travelling alone, just the excitement of having the world open to me was addictive. The fairytale of ‘The One’ was indefinitely suspended when I was single because this intangible hope still existed that my life could suddenly change and become awesome/more fulfilled. I would go out to see romantic movies & buy magazines about people who made it clear that ‘the dream’ existed. When someone wins the lottery it entrenches the thoughts that instant ‘Happiness’ CAN exist and be ‘solved’ by this magical meeting of ‘THE ONE’ or by money. (Few people go beyond the happily ever after story into the aftermath of many lottery winners – there is often a lot of heartache there too that proves money, like another person, does not automatically bring happiness).
So to crush the myth that ‘love’ can ‘happen’ in our popular mythology is like saying to an addict that there is no more drug left, that you have to make your own happiness from your head, that the stimulus, the panacea to your LIFE, isn’t something you GET but something you create yourself. I reckon this fits in very well with our fast food – fast everything culture – the idea that love can suddenly hit you on the head and your life changes. If we didn’t have myths like that, god help us, we may have to find happiness from within, and like cooking vs fast food that takes time and patience.
Combined (and I’m only really just getting my head around it and probably not expressing it very clearly) these are really important revelation for me right now because I have been questioning WHY I have held onto the ‘dream’ in my darker moments of anxiety about past unavailable people and questioned the shit out of the amazing guy I have. I’d bought into the myth – hook, line and sinker – that a man, full of red flags or not, SHOULD just come out of the blue and make my life feel better. The idea that my feelings of ‘love’= real love and that doubt = don’t. It’s all opposite. No one can make me feel happy except for me, due to my own background, my feelings alone are a terrible indicator of what real love should be like and doubt DOESN’T mean don’t!
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Spoken like a true conscious bride, now conscious wife. THANK YOU.
 If you want to illuminate a person’s true colors, especially their relationship to control, put them in a room with kids. Someone can talk a good talk, but when they’re asked to communicate with kids, their true colors emerge and they either turn tight and rigid or they flow with the energy like someone practicing Aikido. Most people I meet fall into the former category, but when I meet someone in the latter I study them with awe and appreciation.
The person who shines most prominently in my mind is my friend, Lisa, who is more like a long-lost sister blessedly found along the shared path of raising kids. When I first met Lisa and I watched her interact with my son, Everest, I was struck by her ability to meet and follow his energy while simultaneously setting appropriate boundaries. I remember saying to her, “You have this amazing ability to say no (set a boundary) in a way that feels like a yes,” like when Everest would insist on telling her something while she was in the middle of a conversation with me and she would say, “Yes, Everest, I would love to hear what you have to say just as soon as I’m finished talking to your mom!” And perhaps it’s not even the words as much as the energy, for she would look him directly in the eyes with a big smile on her face and touch his arm with great love and tenderness. Children respond to this energy, and Everest would inevitably and politely wait his turn.
But she’s a rarity (and gift) in a sea of adults with whom I’ve come into contact since becoming a parent. Most adults I meet talk a good talk but when a child (usually mine) refuses to stay within the lines, the underlying habit of control is unleashed. Since most people were raised by adults who controlled many aspects of their life (as they themselves were raised by controlling adults) and then sent to school where the dominant ideology is one of control, it makes sense that most people treat kids with an attitude of disdain or control. And, by extension, they treat themselves the same way, attempting to control their own feelings, thoughts, and actions so they can squeeze themselves into the image of what they think they “should” be feeling, thinking, and doing.
We’re born naturally meeting life with healthy emotional responses: a baby cries when he’s hungry, tired or separated from his primary caregiver, she smiles or laughs when she’s happy, he expresses frustration when his skill level doesn’t meet his desire, they feel jealous when a sibling arrives on the scene, left out when someone gets to do something that they don’t get to do, they worry if someone doesn’t show up on time, they feel anger, rage, confusion, loneliness. These are all normal and healthy response to life. But somewhere along the way children learn to suppress these natural and healthy responses where they sink underground and emerge later as depression, anxiety, intrusive/obsessive thoughts and/or physical ailments. As adults there are endless ways to control or cover up the uncomfortable feelings of life, and this is why we self-medicate by overspending, overeating, over-drinking, over-sexing, over-thinking, and distracting ourselves with the media.These are all the ways that we deny our natural states and say no instead of yes to life.
When I say yes to life I don’t mean adopting a pollyanna approach where you believe that upholding a positive attitude will allow you to “create your reality”, thereby bypassing the uncomfortable and messy parts of life. In fact, the idea that you can “create your reality” reeks of control and doesn’t allow for the mysterious forces of spirit and soul that are constantly affecting and shaping our lives. A more realistic and simultaneously liberating viewpoint is that, while you can’t control life’s events, you can control how you respond to them, and when you say yes to life you’re saying yes to whatever comes your way.
Saying yes to life means saying yes to change. Saying yes to change means saying yes to the spectrum of feelings activated by change on both the ending side (death) and the beginning side (rebirth): grief, uncertainty, fear, vulnerability, loneliness, doubt, confusion, discomfort, longing, joy, excitement, hope, creativity, laughter. Saying yes to life means accepting with eyes wide open consciousness that death is the only constant in life, and that this awareness engenders fear in nearly everyone. Saying yes to life means saying yes to the stuff that we think we shouldn’t feel, especially if we were move evolved, healed or enlightened.
I used to think that the point of spiritual growth was to eradicate fear, impatience, irritation, jealousy, envy and every other dark and “yucky” feeling. But as I read more from spiritually evolved people, I realized that it’s not the feelings themselves that should or can be evicted; it’s our reaction to the feeling and how much we’re able to contain it, breathe into it, say yes to it, and transform it into its counterpart. It’s as if embedded into each difficult feeling is the potential for growing into the opposite feeling: When we move towards fear, we expand our potential for courage, when we say yes to impatience, we grow our patience, breathing into irritation widens our tolerance, and so on. The difficult feelings are our greatest teachers, the alchemists chunks of coal that, when approached with consciousness, are transformed into gold.
Pema Chodron says it poignantly in her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times:
When we first begin our exploration, we have all kinds of ideals and expectations. We are looking for answers to satisfy a hunger we have felt for a very long time. But the last thing we want is a further introduction to the boogeyman. Of course, people do try to warn us. I remember when I first received meditation instruction, the woman told me the technique and guidelines on how to practice and then said, “But please don’t go away from here thinking that meditation is a vacation from irritation.”
No one ever tells us to stop running away from fear. We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear. I once asked the Zen master Kobun Chino Roshi how he related with fear and he said, “I agree. I agree.” But the advice we usually get is to sweeten it up, smooth it over, take a pill, distract ourselves, but by all means, make it go away.
So the next time you encounter fear, consider yourself lucky. This is where the courage comes in. Usually we think that brave people have no fear. The truth is that they are intimate with fear.”
What would happen if the next time you feel something unwanted, you made a conscious choice to move toward it without judgement? You notice a desire to eat when you’re not hungry and instead of acting on the habitual impulse to reach for food, you ask yourself, “What am I feeling right now? Let me stop and check in to see if I can breathe into this feeling instead of running from it.” That moment is a miracle. That moment that you do something different and turn inside with curiosity instead of reach outside for temporary comfort is the moment you say yes to life and start a transformative process of reversing a lifetime of habit that no longer serves you. It’s the moment you become an alchemist by holding the coal-like feeling close, turning it around inside of you, breathing into it and all around it, touching it, getting to know it until… until… something releases inside and the feeling you’ve been running from your entire life turns to gold.
 I just spoke to a client who needed some reassurance that she wasn’t making a mistake in marrying her loving, caring, passionate, open, honest partner with whom she shares core values and is aligned in terms of life goals. Given that list of qualities about her clearly healthy relationship, how could this be a mistake? It couldn’t, but in a culture that says “doubt means don’t”, any valid questioning and expression of healthy fears about making the biggest commitment of one’s life are immediately interpreted as signs of a mistake.
For the anxious mind, doubt is inevitable. For the mind that examines every decision under the highest resolution microscope possible, that asks important questions like, “How do I know that I love him? What is real love anyway? How do I know that we’re not going too end up like my parents or as part of the 50% divorce statistic?”, doubt is actually another word for fear. And since fear’s entire mission in life is to keep you protected from the possibility of getting hurt, it will naturally make a strong appearance as soon as the concept of marriage becomes a reality. That’s when fear – or doubt – shows up and tries to get you to run for the hills.
Should you listen? In the wise words of my client speaking about every area of her life (not just engagement anxiety), “If I listened to doubt, I would never get out of bed in the morning.” In other words, doubt is a normal part of the terrain of the anxious mind. When you learn to deal with anxiety effectively, you hear fear’s lines but you don’t heed its advice; it will always shoot its darts into your brain but you learn not to take the poison. So to buy into the cultural lie that “doubt means don’t”, whether you’re getting married or starting a new job, is like laying yourself prostrate at fear’s feet and saying, “You win. You rule my life.” And, as my client said, you would never get out bed. You live without risk in the safety of a carefully controlled box. You’re alive, but you’re not really living.
The problem arises when we equate doubt with instinct instead of with fear. If you’re walking in a forest and you have an instinct that a tiger is lurking around the next tree, listen to it! But in this case, instinct is more likely an acute awareness of the here-and-now environment: you’re hearing a far-off, unfamiliar sound, you’re seeing a slight movement in the leaves of the tree, you vaguely smell an unfamiliar smell. Being a highly sensitive person, your senses are more attuned to what’s happening around you than other people’s. But the main point is that you’re attuning to something dangerous that’s present right now. The modern-day anxious mind perseverates on “what if” thoughts, which are based in an imagined negative future and , thus, are unanswerable. My point is that you should listen to your fear/doubt if there’s something right in front of your that’s dangerous or scary – like a partner that has an addiction, abuse, trust, or control issue – but not if it’s hell-bent on convincing you that marrying a loving, caring man is a mistake.
It can be difficult to challenge a dominant message like “doubt means don’t”, especially when the stakes are so high and when many of our highly revered role-models espouse this belief. One of the most poignant moments of my second appearance on Oprah (1/28/03) was when she said, “What I have found is in many cases – and everyone has to judge this for themselves so when I say it it’s not a blanket statement, but this has been very helpful to me: Doubt means don’t.”
I gathered up my courage and then challenged her by saying, “I just want to say that doubt doesn’t always mean don’t. Most people if they’re honest will doubt at some point in their engagement because it’s such a big decision and people will almost always think, ‘Is there someone better out there?’ or “Am I sure I want to commit forever?’”
To which she responded, “Well, that’s why I say it’s not blanket.”
After a bit of a back and forth, it turns out that we were saying the same thing using slightly different language. Oprah wasn’t saying that if you’re feeling doubt that you should call the whole thing off; she was saying that doubt is a sign to slow down and turn inward so that you can ask important questions and dig down to the root of your doubt. Is it stemming from natural fear/terror about getting married and making one of the biggest commitments of your life? Is the doubt a signal that you’re sinking into the underworld of grief, confusion, and vulnerability that defines transitions and projecting these difficult feelings onto your partner and your decision to marry because you don’t know that it’s normal to feel anything less than pure bliss during your engagement? Or is it an indication that you’re marrying for the wrong reasons (because you’re trying to please others) or that there’s a real, glaring, red-flag in the relationship that needs your attention?
Here’s the end of the conversation about doubt. And just when I thought we were going to move on to a new topic, a brave woman from the audience spoke up and shared how her struggle with marriage-doubt resolved itself:
And there you have it, friends: Doubt does not always mean don’t. Doubt means slow down and listen to something important that’s trying to get your attention. Doubt means, “This is a huge decision and you need to examine it from every angle, and once you’ve determined that it’s a solid choice, you need to take the leap because, if you’re prone to anxiety, you’ll never arrive at 100% certainty (about anything).” And as this woman on Oprah shared, doubt can be the doorway into transformation, not just for yourself but for your marriage: “That transformation with God led us to a very intimate, loving relationship.” (Love that).
For everyone who says, “I’m 100% certain that I’m marrying the right person” and ends up with a great marriage, you can find someone who struggled with engagement or newlywed anxiety and ended up with a great marriage as well. Likewise, there are thousands, if not millions, of people who marry each year armored with 100% certainty and end up divorced one or ten years later. And there are people who get married despite the doubt and end up divorced. The bottom line? How you feel about your partner and your decision to marry isn’t an accurate litmus test for whether or not your marriage will work out! Marriage is a risk and a leap of faith and there are simply no guarantees for its success.
So if the decision to marry isn’t based on a feeling or a knowing, how do you know if you’re making a wise and loving choice? You assess your relationship from an objective perspective and ask yourself: Do we basically work as a couple? Are we good friends? When our hearts are open, do we connect? Do we support each other’s dreams and passions? Are there any glaring red-flag issues (addictions, gross misalignment of core values, unresolved control issues)? Do I like my partner’s essence – that place beyond personality quarks and human imperfections? Would a matchmaker pair us together? And then you grab your partner’s hand and leap off the cliffs of your wedding day, trusting that a thousand invisible hands (and some visible ones) will open like a parachute to support you on your lifelong journey of learning about love.
 Many of my clients suffer from the hell-realm of intrusive or unwanted thoughts. Thoughts like, “What if I’m a pedophile?” or “What if I’m a mass murderer?” or “What if I contract a deadly disease?” or “What if I don’t love my partner enough (or at all)?” parade through their brains day and night without reprieve creating a state of perpetual misery. The irony about people who are prone to intrusive thoughts such as these is that they’re among the most gentle, loving, sensitive, kind, creative, and thoughtful people you’ll ever meet. The thought is so far from reality that it’s almost laughable, except that it’s not funny at all because my clients believe the lie which, of course, creates massive amount of anxiety.
Or maybe it’s not ironic at all. Perhaps it’s precisely because of this high level of sensitivity and empathy that their mind has gravitated toward an alarming thought as a way to try to avoid the intensity of feeling with which they respond to life. Highly sensitive people were once highly sensitive children, which means their nervous systems were wired at birth to respond to the sights, sounds, and experiences of life at amplified levels. And because most highly sensitive children were raised by parents who had no idea how to teach their kids to value and feel their difficult feelings in a manageable way, they learned early in life to try to control the external world as a way to attempt to manage their inner one.
Lately I’ve been using a model with my clients that helps them conceptualize the formation of anxiety and the addiction of intrusive thoughts. I call it the A-B-C model and it goes like this:
- A. A difficult or “unwanted” feeling arises: fear, grief, vulnerability, loneliness, helplessness, doubt, uncertainty
- B. You push the feeling away and resist it because you think you shouldn’t be feeling this way, that you’re “too much” or “too emotional”, and/or you can’t handle the feeling.
- C. You attach on to an intrusive thought as a way to cover up or avoid the difficult feeling, thereby creating the illusion of control. Now you can focus on the thought, “What if I have a terminal illness,” instead of attending to the initial feeling.
Not all of my clients are highly sensitive, and not all of them have been lifelong sufferers of anxiety. In fact, many of my engaged clients suffering from engagement anxiety tell me that this is the first time they’ve ever experienced anxiety to this degree. But the same model applies:
- A. A feeling of fear, uncertainty, vulnerability and/or grief hits somewhere near the proposal (when the relationship turns from serious to very serious). Or perhaps it’s been there nearly the entire relationship – or as soon as the initial infatuation stage or free-ride wore off.
- B. The judgement or resistance pushes it away with a thought like, “You shouldn’t be feeling this way. You just got engaged. You should be happy.”
- C. The control-ego-fear mind dangles down a thought-vine like, “You don’t really love him” or “This must mean that you’re making a mistake” that will tempt you to take hold as way to try to have control over an out-of-control experience or avoid the initial pure feeling that you don’t know is normal and manageable.
Once you take hold of the seductive thought-vine, you’re on your way down the black hole of anxiety. The further you go down the hole, the darker it gets and the harder it becomes to find your way back out to the light of day.
I know how difficult it is to re-train your mind so that you can learn to attend to the core feeling as it arises without attempting to control in some way. It seems that some people – if not everyone – are born with a natural inclination to try to avoid what’s hard by controlling something external or latching onto a thought-vine. I see it in my own kids: when they’re tired, hungry, or the situation feels emotionally unmanageable, they’ll try to control someone or something external. In fact, it’s one of my highest goals as a parent to teach my kids that they can handle their difficult feelings, that feelings are just feelings and that they will always pass through, and that trying to control circumstances as a way to avoid the feeling never works: the feeling is still there, but now it’s buried behind a layer of control.
So after 20 or 30 years of this, a deeply ingrained habit is etched into the brain that starts with the false belief of, “I can’t handle difficult feelings.” The work is to learn how to soften into the fear so that it breaks open to reveal the soft underbelly of grief that has lived inside for so long. As Elizabeth Lesser quotes Chogyam Trungpa in her beautiful book, Broken Open: How Difficult Times Help Us Grow:
“Going beyond fear begins when we examine our fear: our anxiety, concern, nervousness, and restlessness. If we look into our fear, if we look beneath the veneer, the first thing we find is sadness, beneath the nervousness. Nervousness is cranking up, vibrating all the time. When we slow down, when we relax with our fear, we find sadness, which is calm and gentle. Sadness hits you in your heart, and your body produces a tear. Before you cry there is a feeling in your chest and then, after that, you produce tears in your eyes. You are about to produce rain or waterfall in your eyes and you feel sad and lonely and perhaps romantic all at the same time. This is the first tip of fearlessness, and the first sign of real warriorship. You might think that, when you experience fearlessness, you will hear the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or see a great explosion in the sky, but it doesn’t happen that way. Discovering fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart.” (p. 37)
If you can understand the alarming thoughts as a flare sent up from the Inner Child to try to get your attention, you will learn to slow down and listen. Your Inner Child doesn’t always know how to say, “I’m hurting. Please pay attention to me,” so he or she sends out a jarring thought because she knows it will get your attention. Once you start to pay attention to your feelings and trust that you can handle your emotional experiences, the intrusive thoughts begin to diminish. Again, the thoughts are a distraction, a first-layer attention-getter designed to force you to turn inside and attend to your inner world. Thus, when you’re perseverating on an anxious thought, the question to ask yourself is, “What am I trying to control, avoid, or fill up?” or “What is this thought trying to protect me from feeling?” and see if you can connect to the softness of the human heart, knowing that what you find when you bring your loving attention to the quiet places is always, always, a pearl.
Posted in Anxiety, Dying/Death, Transitions - General, Wedding/marriage transition
Tags: anxiety, broken open, elizabeth lesser, engagement anxiety, fear and fearlessness, intrusive thoughts, obsessions, OCD thoughts, R-OCD, sheryl paul
 I don’t know why some people experience the pain and loss of transitions and milestones more than others. Perhaps it’s an inborn personality trait; perhaps it’s connected to childbirth or postnatal trauma where babies were separated from their mothers for too long; perhaps it’s associated with early separation experiences with school or friends (being dropped off at kindergarten before a child is ready to leave his mother); or perhaps it’s a mysterious amalgamation of all or none of the above. And in the end it doesn’t really matter. What matters is what happens when we deny our natural need to express and process the pain and loss of any of life’s transitions. Which is what I did this week.
Last Saturday, I sat in the glider that I received as a gift before Asher was born. I rocking and staring out at our land in spring: the apple trees in impossibly magnificent bloom; the grass as green as green can be; the tender young leaves of the Aspen trees fluttering in the slight breeze; the flowing creek in the near distance. I thought about what was happening three years ago this time of year with my belly like a full moon, waiting in anxious anticipation for my water to break and the next adventure to begin. As I remembered, I could feel the tears pushing up against the back of my throat, and then the next moment happened – the kids barreling into the room, the rush of getting ready to leave for dinner – and the tears squashed back down. I didn’t really want to feel them anyway. For some reason, I wanted to ignore the grief this year and just move on to the joy.
But what happens when I ignore my authentic experience is that I turn into an unpleasant version of myself. I turn cold to my husband, become short with my kids, and flat with myself. I plod on through my week, somehow able to show up fully with my clients, but as soon as my work day is over I flatten out and turn into alter-Sheryl. Understandably, my husband starts wondering what’s wrong. My kids look at me with confusion and concern. I keep telling myself that I’m fine, I’m just busy, life is full, not enough space, too much to do, etc etc etc… but it’s just the story I’m telling myself as a way to avoid the rush of feeling that’s stirring underneath.
So today I sat with my friend and talked about our week. I told her that I had shut down last week and she asked why. I said, “I don’t know. I really don’t know,” and then rattled off a few possibilities: April can be challenging because it’s the month that both my grandparents passed away, the holidays, Asher’s birthday… and then the tears. Asher’s birthday.
“My baby’s turning three tomorrow,” I said through tears.
“I’m not a baby,” Asher replied.
And there you have it: he’s not a baby. I think I wrote the same thing in last year’s pre-birthday post, so it’s obviously taking a while for that reality to sink in. Of course I know that he’s not a little baby, and at the same time he’ll always be my baby, but it’s this passage of time thing that just gets to me. It just keeps moving forward. And as much as I love each new stage and the unfolding of each new day, I’m viscerally aware that my boys will only be this little for a brief window of time. As a result, there’s a part of me that wants to package them up and preserve them just as they are right now… and then right now…. and then right now… But I can’t. So the only sane response, for me at least, is to grieve. And in the grieving I arrive back at my core self: my joy, my acceptance, and my gratitude.
As my boys stepped out of the bath tonight, glistening like the angels that they are, and prepared for their nightly ritual of Asher being as silly as possible in an attempt to make his big brother laugh as hard as possible (which he does), I said to Everest, “Can you imagine life without Asher?” To which he responded, “No.” And then ran off to laugh his head off at Asher’s latest antics.
I can’t imagine it, either. Before he arrived, I couldn’t imagine life with Asher. Everything worked so seamlessly with the three of us that it seemed impossible to imagine how a fourth would work into the mix. But of course the subsequent siblings always mesh into the family matrix; it could be no other way. And now when we look at family photos before Asher arrived, we often say, “Where’s Asher?” And someone will answer, “He’s there. We just can’t see him.”
And now he’s here in human form: beautiful, strong, confident, funny, silly, sweet, sensitive, passionate about music, acting, dinosaurs, books, and his big brother. He’s profoundly connected to me but will also take it upon himself to walk down to the creek to fill up his watering can without help. He flows with the current of life until he doesn’t, and then he screams loud enough for my mother to hear him at the other end of the state.
I write so that I can make sense of the feelings and allow them to wash through me, clearing the way to see my angel with clear eyes. I let in the grief so that I can let out the joy tomorrow. I cry because that’s what my soul needs to do as a way to right and align myself with what’s happening in the current of my life. It doesn’t matter that other people may only feel joy around their kids’ birthdays. What matters is that I make time and space to be present for my experience, no matter what it is, without judgement or shame. It’s what I try to teach my kids and, as is so often the case, it’s the lesson I learn again and again and again.
I grieve today so that tomorrow, when I whisper my annual birthday wish into his ear, I can say it with a smile: “Happy Birthday, my little angel. May you walk through life guided by your Daddy, protected by your big brother, taught by your grandmother, and nourished by your Mommy. May you allow the warm waters of life to support you as you pass through the transitions that will grow you into the man you are meant to be. And thank you. Thank you for coming. Thank you for sharing the gift of your life with us.”
 Two of my dearest friends, Carrie Dinow and Jonathan Nadlman (wife and husband), just launched the first segment of their 13-week radio show last week. The show is called, “He Said, She Said” and is, in their words, “an invitation and a dare to dive into the juiciest and most vulnerable parts of our lives. Our intention is to provide a forum where you, our listeners, call in to share your stories, reveal your struggles, and consider alternate perspectives that may offer insight and healing.” It’s a brave and necessary endeavor, and the culmination of a dream that Carrie has held for 17 years to share her insights and counseling work through the medium of radio.
I’ve watched Carrie prepare for the launch over the past several weeks, diving full body and soul into the practical and spiritual work of bringing oneself into the broader world. And true to the way she walks through life, tends to her relationships, parents her daughter, and works with her clients, she approached this new threshold with grace, commitment, and courage.
When I spoke with her the day before the launch to see how she was feeling she said, “I’m not anxious! I know anxiety well and this isn’t anxiety. I’m nervous, yes, as to be expected before doing something new. But I’m also excited. And when I stay connected to my intention for the show and let go of the outcome, I feel grounded.”
“What’s your intention?” I asked.
“To offer our 40 combined years of experience to a broader audience. To create a safe place for people to share their deepest struggles. To have fun!”
“Yes, when you can come from that place of giving instead of what you might get from it, it frees you up to have fun, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, exactly. And since both of our practices are doing well, there’s nothing we need to get from this. We’re seeing it as an offering and a manifestation of a vision that I’ve had for a long time.”
And that’s what they did: they offered themselves with skillful compassion to their radio audience, came from their hearts, and had fun.
These are two of the primary keys to approaching any new endeavor without anxiety: to focus on what you’re giving and to let go of the outcome. Another way of saying this is that, for many people, when they start something new – whether a term paper, a marriage, or a new job – they operate under the belief that they’re not allowed to make a mistake. The inner critic-perfectionist is at the helm, thrashing away with the endless running commentary that says that the job must be done perfectly. This, of course, creates anxiety, for as soon as we’re motivated by an external source – “to do it perfectly” – we lose touch with the intrinsic motivation that initiated the action. And this internal pressure usually creates the opposite of what’s desired: instead of doing the job “perfectly” (because, of course, there’s no such thing as perfect), we seize up inside, shut down, and lose the spark of life and joy that creates meaningful action in the world.
Here’s another example:
I have a young client in Germany who has dreamed of attending acting school for several years. When we first began our work together, she was plodding through her university classes, getting through but not passionate about her studies. She struggles with a powerful and nearly incessant inner perfectionist, but on a whim, she decided to take the risk and audition for drama school. In German-speaking areas there are fourteen drama schools and each year they only accept 8-12 people into each one (with 600-1000 people auditioning), so it often takes people several years and dozens of auditions before they get in. Well-aware of the odds, my client decided just to have fun with the audition and to connect with her joy for acting without any attachment to the outcome. Happily, she made it through the first round. With disbelief, she made it to the second round. Still connecting to her intention, she continued on to the third round. Miraculously, she made it to the end and was accepted into the one of the finest acting schools around. And it was because she had successfully kicked her perfectionist out of the driver’s seat so she could let go of the outcome and stay connected to her joy and authentic expression.
And an example from my own life: When I was in graduate school, someone once asked me how I wrote my papers for school so quickly and effortlessly. Learning for the first time that many people struggled with writer’s block, I started to think about what allowed me to write freely and with great joy. I realized that, when I was in high school, I had inadvertently stumbled upon the key: I would often stare at the blank page, scared to begin, scared it wouldn’t be as good as the last paper I had written, thinking about the grade and my addiction to receiving an A. But then one day I gave myself permission to write the worst paper I had ever written. I said to myself, out loud, “This doesn’t have to be perfect. Just say what you want to say.” I started to say those words before every paper I wrote and to connect with the intrinsic joy I felt when I expressed my thoughts and insights through words. I no longer have to say it out loud, but somewhere in my positive commentary I’m saying these words to myself: Let go of the outcome and connect to authentic expression. It’s okay if it’s not brilliant. You’ll offer something of value and even if you only touch one life, that’s enough.
What happens when you consciously replace your own negative running commentary for something compassionate and forgiving? What happens when, the next time you notice that your engagement anxiety or work anxiety is caused by the voice that says you have to do it perfectly and you’re not allowed to make a mistake, you replace it with these words: So what if I make a mistake? So what if it’s not the best thing I’ve ever done? If I mess up, I’ll learn. What do I have to offer? How can I give?
Or, as Susan Jeffers succinctly states it in her book, “Embracing Uncertainty”:
“If we can transfer the feeling of upset, even panic, about the future into the understanding that we can learn and grow from it all, we will have made great progress.” (p. 17)
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