In this solo podcast episode, host Ryan Light introduces the concept of acknowledgment as a crucial first step in healing anxiety, especially intrusive OCD thoughts. After a brief sponsorship plug for Anchor, Ryan defines acknowledgment and contrasts it with acceptance, emphasizing that merely naming a problem does not equal embracing it. He shares a vivid personal narrative from his early years of fatherhood, describing how a disturbing movie scene triggered a cascade of intrusive, violent thoughts that escalated from "how could someone do that?" to "I might do it" and eventually to fears of harming his newborn son. The anxiety led him to isolate, drink, and avoid his child for months. The turning point came when he finally disclosed these thoughts to his wife, Jessica, whose calm response lifted a massive emotional weight, illustrating the liberating power of honest acknowledgment. Ryan explains how unacknowledged anxiety fuels avoidance and worsens symptoms, while acknowledgment opens the path to deeper self‑exploration and eventual acceptance. He advises listeners to find trusted friends, counselors, or coaches to practice acknowledgment, and invites them to reach out via his social channels (@beatanxiety.me) or website for support. The episode ends with a hopeful call to action for continued healing.
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Hey guys, ever thought about creating your own podcast? I think Anchor is an excellent resource for us to do that. You know, when I was looking to create a podcast, I was looking for a tool in which I could use that would allow me to record and publish to multiple platforms, and I found that by using Anchor. They have some great tools to use. And when you record and publish, it publishes out to all major publications. So it's really a one-stop shop that allows you to create your own podcast and, uh, and then publish it out to all various, um, different platforms, which I just love. Check them out. Make sure you go and download the free app and/or go to anchor.fm to get started. What? What you talking about, acknowledgement? You cray-cray. Hi guys, this is Ryan Light with beatanxiety.me, your host, where we will be going over the struggles of anxiety and learning how to heal the underlying causes. Hey guys, this is Ryan Light with BeatAnxiety.me, and this is podcast episode 3. Looking forward to really getting into this topic today, as it's a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Reason being is because I struggled with this particular topic for just years upon years. And I find that many that struggle with anxiety do struggle with this, this topic. And what is the topic? The topic is acknowledgement. Acknowledgement is one of those things in which is really, really difficult for us to come to grips with. Reason being, at least for me, what I found was acknowledgement was stating and actually admitting to the fact that I had issues and I had deep-seated issues that I really didn't want to get into. I really didn't want to talk about. I hid them from friends and family and my spouse, my wife, just a litany of other people. But they were deep-seated. And, you know, the art of acknowledgment really surfaces these issues in our life. And I find that a lot of us struggle with acknowledging. And acknowledging, it's a power, right? It really gives us a sense of power when we can come to grips with and admit to our struggle. Like for me, I'll lead you down a path here. And I'll tell you a quick story around one of my instances early on in my struggle with anxiety. I just got married. I was in my late 20s, and I remember going to see this movie. And this movie, it wasn't really a bad movie per se. It had Bruce Willis in it and a couple of other people, and it was probably in the late '90s. I don't remember the name of the movie, but there was a scene in there that That was kind of unsettling for me. I kind of got an unsettling feeling about it, and it really sparked an unsettling feeling in me, and it started down a path of really intrusive thoughts, OCD in nature. And what the OCD thoughts were, what the intrusive thoughts were, was it was about a killing or something like that. It had to do something with killing. I think the guy I think one of the characters in the movie was either a serial killer or he murdered somebody or something like that happened. And I remember distinctly just having this unsettling feeling about that. And then all of a sudden, that thought came to me like, you know, it started like this started with, you know, how can someone do that? And I can't believe people do that. And it started with that kind of thought. And then that thought slowly turned into You're gonna do that, right? So it— my thought slowly, my intrusive thought came to, you're gonna do that. And man, I remember when that first happened to me, I just, I crumbled. I absolutely crumbled to the fact that I was capable of doing something like that. What was interesting about that is it went from, you can do something like that, to, you are going to do something like that. So the thoughts, the thought built upon itself, right? I was I had anxiety about the intrusive thought to begin with, like how can someone do that? To you can do that. Then the anxiety built to you're going to do that. And I remember at this time I was we were married for about six months and we just had it. We we got pregnant pretty quick within a couple of months of being married. We got we were we we. We, we had a baby coming, um, and that was a stressful time. I was a contractor in a job, and that was a stressful time. And I just got married, and that was a stressful time. And we were living in this dinky apartment, just flat out broke, and that was a stressful time. And cars didn't run, and bills were piling, and I had this new baby coming at me. And then pile it on was this new intrusive thought of mine. And this new intrusive thought, like I said, went from how could people do it to you can do it to you're gonna do it. Um, and I remember that was probably about 6 months into the pregnancy or 7 months into my wife's pregnancy. And 3 months later we had our son and this went on for a year. So I had— it went from— it built upon that one to, to the fact that I literally thought every single day, every moment of the day that I could do something like that. I could, I could. And it went from killing somebody to killing my family to killing my son. And what I did was I didn't go, I didn't go near my son. So for the first 7, 8 months of his life, I didn't go near him. And what I struggled with was, was acknowledging that I was having these thoughts, right? Those thoughts are embarrassing. We don't know really where they're from. They're scary, so we don't really want to talk about them. We want to hide them and ignore them and run from them. And during this time, what I did is I got, I, I got really, really bad with, uh, coping mechanisms, unhealthy coping mechanisms. I started to drink. I started to drink more. Um, I started to isolate myself from friends. I started isolating myself from my wife. Uh, I started isolating— I just, just started, just really started because I didn't trust myself, right? I didn't trust myself and the fact that I was having these Intrusive thoughts. And so, um, that went on for about a year. And finally what I did was, uh, I told my wife. I just had a breaking point one day. And I told my wife, I said, I sat her down, I said, listen, I'm having this thought around how I can murder somebody and how not, not only how I can murder somebody, but how I'm going to murder you and murder my son. And what was interesting in those in those months is the thought went from like to murdering my kid to to molesting my kid and how I can't know how I can't be so I again I wouldn't get around him I wouldn't touch him I wouldn't hold him I was just so scared of myself that I just wouldn't do that and finally I sat her down and I said you know her name is Jessica I said Jessica you know I'm really I got something to tell you. I'm really, really struggling with this intrusive thought. And I told her what it was, thinking that I would get like, oh, you're crazy. We need to call the ambulance or we need to call the cops because you need to be admitted and you need to go in a psycho ward. And, you know, I was scared of her running off with my kid. And so, or, you know, just the litany of stuff went through my head. And you guys know when you struggle with anxiety, like, All the what-ifs start to come into effect. So, um, anyway, I kind of sat her down and I said, hey, listen, this is what's happening. This is what's going on. This is why I've been acting the way I've been acting. This is what I'm struggling with. And her response to me was something I will never forget. She's like, oh, that's not a big deal. Like, that's— you would never do that. And as soon as I could acknowledge that, acknowledged that I was struggling, acknowledged I was fighting these thoughts, acknowledging— acknowledged that I was having these thoughts, um, the, the weight on my shoulders was just absolutely released. I, I mean, it was, it was a phenomenal feeling, um, that just letting that out and being open about it just relieved myself. I didn't have to hide no more. I didn't have to run no more. I didn't have to ignore it no more. I didn't have to do all those things in which I was doing for the past year with that thought. So acknowledgement is a lot like that. Now granted, this was early in my journey. And well, not really early. This was probably 10 years into my journey. I had kind of general anxiety, but nothing to this point of intrusive thoughts in a pure OCD Uh, bout the way I was having. And so what's interesting about that is I let her know about that, and we kind of walked through it and worked through it. And I saw some counselors and kind of worked through those things. But as I talked about before, my, my earlier podcast, uh, number 2, is around healing the anxiety. I never really healed it. And so I managed it and learned how to overcome the thoughts and allow it and those types of things, which I'm going to get into In my letter podcast. But I had these bouts of anxiety that would keep on coming up. And each time it would come up, I would do the same exact thing. I would struggle with the acknowledgement of it, right? And that acknowledgement was just hindering my healing process, was just stopping me. Each and every time I would not acknowledge it. It hindered me. So again, you know, and it just went on for like, you know, I was good for a little while and then something would pop up and I was good for a while and something would pop up and I was good for a while and something would pop up. And each and every time I would not acknowledge what was going on. Because what is acknowledgement? When you really think about acknowledgement, acknowledgement is about exposing ourselves, right? It's about being real with what's going on. And it's about really being honest and forthright and being open about what we're struggling with, what we're dealing with, no matter how crazy it is, no matter how absurd it might sound, no matter how intrusive the thoughts might be with ourselves. When we let it out and we let it out in an open and honest way, It loses its power. And a lot of times with us, what we believe is we believe that if we just fight through it and ignore it and hide it and just kind of distract ourselves, that it will go away. And that's not how anxiety works. Anxiety does not work like that. Anxiety only gets more power when we do that. It's interesting in society, society teaches us to got to be a fighter. You got to be strong, man up. Woman up. You know, you got kind of like, you, you have to be this strong individual. And so we do that with the anxiety. And as we do that with the anxiety, what, what typically happens, at least for me, is it got worse. It didn't get better, it got worse. Um, and that's one of the things, uh, that we need to understand about struggling with anxiety. The more we fight it, The more we ignore it, the more we try to distract it, the more that we run from it, the worse it gets. And part of the healing process, at least I coach, is really to acknowledge that we're struggling, acknowledge what's going on. And for me, what that started was really acknowledging the deeper-seated issues. You know, it really, it got me, it got me starting to understand that these manifestations that I was struggling with, these intrusive thoughts and some of the control issues that I have and the fears that I have were really deep-seated. There were causes that were manifesting themselves with those outcomes. So if I didn't have control or if I didn't really fear, and fear is a lack of control, and if I didn't have control, well, that was deep-seated and deep-rooted in other causes. And acknowledging allowed me to get real with those things and start really going into the next phase that I'll go into, um, probably in a later podcast. Probably my next podcast is really the acceptance phase, and I'll get into it more as I go through the acceptance phase because that might be a 2 or 3 podcast episodes on that particular topic because a lot of people confuse acknowledgement with acceptance. They believe that since they're talking about it, that they're accepting it. And that's a big chasm that most of us get stuck on. Most of us, I see people get stuck on, is with acknowledging and accepting because they believe that by acknowledging, they are accepting. And that's not true whatsoever. I can say that I can acknowledge that I'm an alcoholic, or I can acknowledge that I'm something, but then go off and drink or go off and do something that's unhealthy. I can acknowledge that I want to stop smoking, but then I continue to smoke. So it's one of those things, right? It's different. It's just different. I'll get into those differences when I get into the Acceptance phase of discovering how we heal that. So, but I wanted to really preface that if we really want to heal the anxiety in our life, we need to really get real with what's going on and really be real and open to what's going on. And that starts with acknowledgement. The faster we can acknowledge. The faster we can go through the process, the faster we can heal. And really, by not acknowledging, like me, I just held myself captive and hostage all those times. All that time I was held captive, and all that time I was held hostage to my own thoughts, to my own feelings, to my own beliefs, to my own habits. And that was just controlling every facet of my life. So if you struggle with acknowledgement and you struggle in that area, I really encourage you to either find a trusted friend, find a counselor, find a coach, find someone that you can, that you can really reach out to and start to, start to understand What it means to acknowledge. And as you learn to understand what it means to acknowledge, you can begin and go through the healing process. As always, if I can help you, please reach out to me. You can find me on my social channels at @beatanxiety.me on Instagram and Twitter. And then obviously you can find me on my website at beatanxiety.me. And Again, I'd love to help you. Message me, uh, send me an email or message me, um, to, uh, if I can help. So anyway, thank you, uh, for listening to this podcast, and I look forward to, uh, another one real soon. Take care, guys. God bless. Bye.
