David Bowie, one of my favourite musicians, who went through many ch-ch-ch-changes
I’ve been thinking a lot about change recently, partly because of the recent change in government in the UK. The Labour party even made “change” their campaign slogan. How much real change we’ll see from them remains to be seen of course. I’m hopeful overall, but I can also relate to the cynicism and disengagement with politics felt by many. Change is also a hugely important theme of my work as a psychotherapist. I know in my bones that change is possible, because I’ve seen it in the people I work with, as well as in myself. More than that, I believe change is inevitable. It’s a bit of a myth that every cell in our body is replaced every 7 years, the evidence on that is more complicated. Some cells are replaced in a matter of months, some years, some never. But even if our entire physical self isn’t different every 7 years, our physical bodies are constantly changing.
I find it hard to talk about the experience of being a living body, somehow language (or my grasp of it at least!) feels limiting. I can talk about ‘my body’ as if it is separate from ‘me’, that ‘I live in my body’. Even saying ‘my embodied experience’ sounds like there are other experiences, as if we could live a non-embodied life. Now, those of a spiritual disposition may argue that we have souls which exist beyond the physical realm, but that is something beyond my understanding – and arguably, beyond all of our abilities to fully comprehend. What I do know though, is my lived ‘embodied’ experience in the world. Thoughts, emotions, and physical sensations all happen as part of my embodied being. Sometimes it can be helpful to separate out ‘thoughts’ from ‘feelings’ from ‘sensations’ to help tune in to them, but they ultimately all form part of our wholeness. Cultivating awareness, as if ‘I’ am an observer of my thoughts/feelings/sensations helps me see that these things are always shifting. While these things form part of my wholeness and my experience, ‘I’ am not any one thought, feeling or sensation.
Changing anxiety
When I feel anxious, I have learnt to tune in to that anxiety, to find it’s location in thoughts, feelings and sensations. A buzzing in my hands, a tightness in my chest, thoughts that sometimes wont let ‘me’ go, or sometimes thoughts that are hard to pin down, feelings of ‘doom’. When I pay attention to these sensations, I am listening for what they have to tell me. My anxiety could be seen as a ‘radar’ for danger, built out of desperation when I was a child. I had limited tools to build it, I didn’t draw up plans first, and it was hastily constructed. And… it’s done a great job, considering all that. While he was alive my Grandpa was very keen on genealogy, so I’m aware that (by some distant of course) I am related to Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a famous civil and mechanical engineer. Which may explain my ‘building’ metaphors, and perhaps even my ability to ‘build’ relationships, if relationships can be seen as bridges. On top of that my Dad used to work with actual radar systems, so it’s possible I had some help from my family… although I may be stretching the metaphor.
To bring us back on track though, if anxiety is my ‘radar’ for spotting danger, I can get more out of listening to it and understanding how and why it was built than I can from ignoring it or trying to push it away. An example may be helpful. I reached out to a friend recently offering my help with an issue they’re dealing with, but I was anxious about how frequently I should follow up with them or push the issue. I know some people prefer you to ‘take the wheel’ so they can relax, whereas others find that too overbearing and prefer to reach out when they are ready. In listening to my anxiety about this, I realised that the message it was passing on was based on assumptions which may be out of date. My ‘radar’ is particularly sensitive to me being perceived as ‘overbearing’ or ‘too much’, because that’s how it was originally ‘programmed’. It was designed to be sensitive to being perceived that way in order to protect me. So with a smile I can thank my anxiety for warning me about being ‘overbearing’, but remind myself that my friend is friends with me for a reason – they enjoy my company, and value me ‘showing up’. The difference in tone between noticing ‘with a smile’ where my anxiety is not needed, and telling myself not to be anxious, that I’m just ‘being stupid’ is huge. My ‘anxiety radar’ is not real of course, just metaphorical, and in reality it is just ‘me’. So the tone ‘I’ approach ‘it’ with makes all the difference, as it’s really how I’m speaking to myself. Really listening to and validating my own experience helps transform and soften my anxiety. The anxiety doesn’t ‘go away’, it is transformed.
A sensitive radar, always looking out for danger, is there because I was ‘wounded’ when I was young. The radar system was built to stop me being wounded again. Each of us will know the experience of being wounded as a child, to some degree. We are all born into relationship before we find our ‘self’. The process of separating into a ‘self’ is disorientating, as we realise that our needs are not always immediately met. We may be hungry, in pain, or uncomfortable but have limited ways of expressing that when we’re young. Our parents or primary caregivers on the other hand, are also only human, and cannot always give us what we need when we need it. So we all experience a separation between needs and fulfilment, with those needs sometimes going unfulfilled, and this can be wounding. This wound is formed relationally. So what better way to ‘heal’ that wound, than in relationship? That’s where psychotherapy can come in, where we can explore the various ‘walls’, ‘radar systems’ or simply ‘ways of being’ which we’ve learnt will keep us safe, as well as the ‘wound’ itself. It’s not about bringing a sledgehammer to the walls, or about saying that the narrative we’ve built up is ‘wrong’. It’s about exploring why they were built, looking at the foundations. With that knowledge we can see where there might be ‘stress cracks’, ‘faulty wiring’ and so on. We can then go through the process of carefully and deliberately planning on making repairs, or even building new support systems around the old ones. Something none of us had the luxury to do as infants.