What is the purpose of anxiety?

What would you say if I asked you what the purpose of anxiety is?

I think it's just to point you towards your younger self. You know, to point you towards your younger, wounded self. I mean, it's the same thing with ocd, same thing with eating disorders. It's the same thing with depression. It just points you to your younger self. All these things express differently. Like, OCD is different than depression. But basically the underlying root cause is young, usually childhood, emotional trauma that's unresolved. I did a lot of work with Gordon Neufeld over at the Neufeld Institute there in Vancouver. And it's really 80% of your brain developments before the age of five. So if you have a healthy, attached, attuned parent or caregiver, your brain structures are going to develop in the best way. Now, if you have parents who are traumatized themselves or not attached to you, and parental mismatch is a huge issue with people. Their parents were okay, but they always just felt like. I didn't really feel like my mother understood me or whatever. And Nicole Lepera talks about that too, like this emotional parental mismatch. And that's traumatic for a child. And sometimes I want to have a seizure talking about trauma, because it's such a common word that's used. But trauma, to me is anything that dysregulates your nervous system permanently. So anything that causes a permanent dysregulation in your nervous system is trauma. And I think we're all traumatized as children. But if you have a connected, attuned, attached parent that helps you process it, you actually become emotionally stronger with the trauma after you've dealt with it because you've had this help rather than just stuffing it down, rather than just not dealing with it, or having a life that's not difficult at all, because we all have trauma. It's just, did we have caregivers? Did we have people that help us metabolize that trauma? And if you do, then your brain learns, hey, we can go through some shitty things, but we can handle it. Whereas if you go through trauma and you don't have that, you learn that the trauma is an endless cycle of pain that you will recreate upon yourself as well. Like, if you feel traumatized in your body, you will traumatize yourself in your mind. You will judge, abandon, blame, and shame yourself. And that inner child part of you constantly does that to you, and you can't heal. It's like having a scab, and you just keep picking the scab over and over and over. Again, you just can't heal. Why you keep judging, abandoning, blaming and shaming yourself.

It's interesting because I think the way you're describing the purpose of anxiety. There's two things. There's two things I want to say. One, I've heard some of my audience, just people in general, the notion, because there's a lot of people that say everybody has trauma, right? Gabor Mates said that and whatnot. And.

I think that's hard for some people to, to.

To really let in, you know, this notion that everybody's had trauma, everybody's had traumatic events. Because I think historically we've looked at trauma as car accident, you know, a this big sort of acute thing, which I think our definition of trauma has expanded, of course. But how do you. How do you talk to people who are like, ah, not everybody has trauma. Like, I don't have trauma, I haven't had trauma. You know what. What would. To those folks who hear that and are just like, man, I can't get on board with that. Like, that just sounds dramatic.

Well, it's sometimes like, if I'm talking to a more sort of, shall we say, philosophical audience, I will use the term inner child. Sometimes I tend to shy away from it. And then I'll often use your younger self, because that's usually when I talk to doctors or I talk to sort of professionals, that's something that they'll understand. But the people I find that object the most to the inner child statement are the ones with the most inner child wounding. So it's funny, it's like that inner child stuff, it's just a bunch of crap. And it's like, okay, what happened to you? Right? Like, it's just the people that had, like, you know, a fairly normal, whatever that is, you know, upbringing with attuned, you know, they weren't perfect parents, but they were attached. They hear the term inner child and they doesn't even phase them. That's what I've noticed. But the people that get the most upset about the inner child stuff are the ones that have the most inner child wounding. So it's just an observ over dealing with hundreds and hundreds of people with anxiety. So I think it's just understanding that the charge behind even, you know, if you have a lot of charge behind that term, there's something there. You know, like you say in your book, like, there's something there and you've got to sort of look into that. Now, often we don't have enough insight in our own selves because we do have blind spots for our own traumas. It's just the way the human neurology is. Is wired. So if you grow up with an alcoholic parent who's abusive, you learn to excuse that behavior. And this is why, like, Freud called it the repetition compulsion. This is why I would have patients in my practice. One particular woman in particular that I talk about a fair amount on podcasts is she was a beautiful girl and had all this attached attention from men, but the only men that she would pick to be partners were abusive alcoholics. Her father was an abusive alcoholic. She had a huge blind spot, and yet she was most attracted to. To these people. So, like Freudian Freud called it the repetition compulsion. The. The compulsion to act out in your childhood when you know in your adulthood what was in your childhood. And it's unconscious, it's automatic. It's. Sometimes, you know, this is when I say, you know, sometimes when some of my friends. This is when I was younger and say, I met the. Oh, this girl. She's amazing. She's like, just perfect. It's like, okay, now this is one of those cases where your soulmate is going to become your cellmate, because what happens is that they. Each of you are lighting up the trauma from your childhood and some of the most intense relationships. And, you know, I've read your book. I'm, you know, I know that you've had a history with a number of females in the past. You know, the most intense relationships are the ones that are often. You're lighting each other up from the past.

So trauma bonds.

Trauma bonds, yeah, absolutely. You know, and.

And it's interesting because my. My mentor, Dewey Freeman, I love him, and he's got a very profound model of attachment. And one of the things that he says is that the foundation of a relationship is being able to go through a hard time and come out the other side. Okay? Plain and simple.

Right?

You're a kid, you fall off your bike, you scrape your knee, you go through a hard time, you come out the other side okay, Right. Your parent comforts you. They're like, you're okay if you go through that hard time and your dad comes out and says, what the fuck is wrong with you? Stop being a little bitch and stop crying. Which is harsh. Some of us hear that, right? Yeah, I heard some stuff.

Your stepdad. Yeah. Right.

And so what happens is that what we. What we learn is it's not okay for me to go through a hard time or I have to go through a hard time and be okay on my own. And that in itself is very, you know, creates isolation, and we psychologically move to a more insular place. But done over time, that is traumatic, right? Whether it's acute in that moment or. Or over time. And so I think, you know, one of the things that I appreciate about what you're saying to just sort of close this loop on this and we'll come back to anxiety is we have to be able to look back at our past. Because I hear a lot of men and some women say, why do I have to talk about my past? Why do I have to talk about my family? Why do I have to talk about my upbringing? And I'm like, well, those are the places where you learn the foundation of can I go through a hard time and come out the other side okay or not? Because if I can't, my body, as you've been talking about so articulately, will send signals constantly of, am I okay? Can I go through this hard time? Is my world okay? Or am I screwed? Should I be terrified? Should I be in fear? And so a lot of us learn to live, unfortunately, in this place of anxiousness simply because we didn't get the foundation or learn the basic principles of I can go through a hard time and be okay because there's other people supporting me. So what did your. What's your thoughts on. On that piece?

Millions. I think what happens when we get that, you know, buck up, don't be a little bitch, is we lose faith in the world. We lose faith. Like when we're children, we're 6, 7, 8 years old, we have kind of this blind faith that the world is going to look after us. And then when we have trauma that's not resolved, we lose that faith. And then what happens is we become like an Alpha. Children and men are typically like this. It's like, okay, everything is up to me now. Everything is up to me. So if everything is up to you and you don't, you can't have faith in anyone else. You're gonna live a pretty tough life, because there are gonna be times where you just can't cope or you just can't deal with what's going on. And regaining a sense of faith in the world is so important in your own healing, because if you don't accept help and you're an Alpha child, and the thing about Alpha children is we do. It does work. It does have the illusion of working if you're intelligent. I was intelligent, so I went and I became a medical doctor. So I sublimated that pain into something that works for me, but it only works for so long, and then that particular program that I'm running is not going to help me. So when I'm in a really tough time, it's like, can I just have faith? And this is something I've had to learn over the last, typically the last five years, just having faith in other people, that I don't have to do it all myself. And it's really important that you can just develop this sort of sense of, okay, and I can wait. That's the other thing about, you know, uncertainty intolerance. Basically, anxiety is uncertainty intolerance. You can't tolerate uncertainty. You can't sit with it and just say, this is uncertain. And not only just sitting with uncertainty. Can I embrace uncertainty? Can I embrace that my relationship is uncertain, that I'm not getting along well with my wife, that we are looking at the potential of divorce? Can I embrace that uncertainty? Because if you can't embrace that uncertainty, it's always going to be your master, right? And not just accept it. People are like, oh, well, you've got to accept this. And it's like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, no, embrace it. Because when you embrace uncertainty, your brain will support you in that. It'll start secreting endogenous opiates from the. From the periaqueductal grain, your brain stem and start secreting dopamine because you feel like, hey, I'm on the right track. And the little analogy that I draw is, you know, say you're at a party or something, you see somebody you're interested in.

So if you start walking over there and leaning on the balls of your feet and you moving forward, your periaqueductal gray will secrete all sorts of opiates. Like, it's protecting you from potential rejection or whatever, but you will still do it. And dopamine is like, I'm on the right track. I'm doing this. And it's the whole thing about, let's do this, that exactly encapsulates the opiates and the dopamine. That's what you need to get over that hill. Otherwise, if you go on your heels and you think, oh, you know, she's way out of my league. You know, she rejected a friend of mine. Like, I'm not. Like, your brain will also support that. So your brain will also support it will start secreting cortisol and epinephrine in there as a stress response. So whatever you decide to do, whatever your brain will support you if you're going to go for it. Your brain will support you. It'll secrete chemicals that support you. If you go back on your heels, literally go back on your heels, your brain will start secreting cortisol and epinephrine, which will reinforce every negative thought that you have, and it will make it seem like those negative thoughts are truly real when they are not. So, you know, getting back to the original thing, the amygdala never forgets. So if you are out there and you hurt yourself and your stepdad comes out and says, you know, don't be a little bitch. That's trauma like that, you. You will have an emotional residue left in your system from that. Now, whether or not you can process that, and it's cumulative. You know, if that happens to you, you know, every week for a few years, like, that's going to create a huge problem. If it happened once, you know, it's still going to be traumatic. It's still going to change your nervous system, you know, so it's. It's one of those things that the amygdala never forgets. But we can overwrite those programs. But to overwrite those programs, we have to go back and visit them. So, as Daniel Siegel says, the brain is an organ that is anticipatory, and it has anticipation. This is his term, anticipation for the past. I can't remember exactly how he said it. So whatever happened in your past, your brain will anticipate that again. If you're 45 years old and you cut yourself on the lawnmower and you come up and your wife's at the. She comes out on the thing and says, are you okay? You're going to go back to that time. It's like you're expecting your wife to say, buck up, you little bitch. Right? There's part of your amygdala that will encode that emotionally. It's not conscious, and it's really these emotional. These deep subcortical structures that house these emotional programs that are very dangerous. And we can't just heal those problems just by talking about them. Like, insight is the popcorn of psychotherapy. It'll help you knowing why these things happen. But unless you go under, unless you actually find those old traumas and go back and find the child that experienced that trauma and show them that they're seen, heard, loved, and protected, you're always going to be at the effect of it.