In this episode of the beatanxiety.me podcast, host Ryan Light returns after a hiatus to explore the next phase of anxiety recovery: acceptance. After a brief promotional plug for the Anchor podcast platform, Ryan explains that many people confuse acknowledging anxiety with truly accepting it. He shares his own 30‑year struggle with anxiety, describing how he spent decades merely acknowledging his panic attacks, OCD, and intrusive thoughts without accepting that anxiety was a part of his identity. Ryan links anxiety to unresolved trauma—physical, sexual, and emotional—and recounts how his therapist helped him see that acceptance of these painful experiences is the gateway to deeper healing. He illustrates the concept with a coaching case of a client dealing with sexual trauma, emphasizing that acceptance does not make the trauma "good" but allows a perspective shift that can reveal strength and growth. Throughout, Ryan challenges listeners to move beyond coping mechanisms (drinking, avoidance, medication) and to consciously accept their traumas as part of their story, thereby unlocking the possibility of healing and empowerment. The episode closes with a motivational call for listeners to practice acceptance and discover the strength that can emerge from their anxiety.
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Hey guys, I really can't wait to get into this subject around acceptance of anxiety. 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, how you doing? This is Ryan Light with beatinganxiety.me, and it's been a little while since I've done a podcast, so I thought I'd get on here. And I know my last podcast was all around the acknowledgement of anxiety, and I promised that I would do a couple of podcasts on the next phase of anxiety, what I believe will take to healing anxiety, and that is around acceptance. And I get, I get asked a lot, what do I mean by acceptance? And, and how do you know if one has accepted the anxiety? And I think a lot of people get confused with acknowledging the anxiety that they're struggling with and accepting the anxiety that they're struggling with. And they're two very distinct things. They're very different. And I believe a lot of people get stuck in accepting the anxiety because they believe that by acknowledging the anxiety, they're accepting it. And let me give you a couple of things or a couple of examples, I believe, to kind of give you a distinction of what I mean by this. So I'll use me as an example. You know, I have struggled with anxiety for— when I really think about it, I'm in my 40s, and I've been really struggling with it probably for about 30 years. And about 20 of those years, what I did was I managed the anxiety, and I just, I was just going through the motions and kind of just kind of dealing with it and struggling through it and not really wanting to accept it in my life and allow it to be part of who I was. I could, I was able to acknowledge it. I was able to talk about it. And bring it up to various therapists and doctors and let them know that, yeah, I have panic attacks or I have OCD or I have intrusive thoughts or I have various other manifestations of anxiety that I was having. So I really had no problems with acknowledging it. I think what I struggled with for a long, long time was accepting the fact that this was part of my life. that this was who I am. That this is a thorn in my side in which I had to work with, deal with, struggle through. And I just had a hard time really coming to grips with accepting the reality in which my thought life and my emotions was happening. And I find a lot of people do that. A lot of people think that, you know, again, since they're seeing a coach like myself or They might be going to therapy or they might be managing it with medication or whatever they might be doing with the anxiety. They really have a hard time accepting it because what happens when we accept it is we can then thereby get deeper with the causes of it. You see, anxiety really has— it's the outward manifestation of an inward issue. There's something that's inside of us that we haven't gone through, or we haven't healed, or we haven't gone through the motions of working through that is manifesting itself with the anxiety. Again, for instance, me, I had trauma in my life that was physical, sexual, and emotional. And I really didn't want to discuss those with people. I hid from them. I ignored them. I tried to drink through them. I tried to fight through them. I tried to argue through them. I tried to do everything I could to resist them. But those were the causes of the anxiety in my life. So I didn't want to come to a place in my life where I was actually accepting that I was— I've gone through emotional trauma and I've gone through sexual trauma and I've gone through physical trauma. I didn't want to accept those things and make them part of who I was. And so Since I could never get to a point where I could accept them, I could acknowledge them in my own mind and my own thoughts, but really never really work through them. And that really hindered my healing process. It really stopped me from healing those areas of my life and the anxiety in my life that was manifesting itself. Now, it's funny because the triggers that would happen to me, I would smell something or see something or hear something and automatically I'd get triggered. I'd get triggered into a full-blown panic attack at times where I felt like I was gonna absolutely die. My heart rate would skyrocket. I would start sweating profusely. I would want to escape and have just no way out. And so I had to kind of go through that panic. Other times it would be just high anxiety where I was just kind of just feeling uneasy about certain things and certain situations. And then sometimes it was just thoughts that came at me that would bring back memories and bring back things that I really wanted to forget, to be honest with you. And so I would go through those things and I would get triggered and then the triggers would go away and, you know, or the anxiety would go down or I'd get over— get through a panic attack or the thoughts would go away and things like that. And then I thought I was good. But it came to a point in my life where I really— back about 10 years ago, I really started to understand and really started looking into, you know, was I Was I acknowledging what was happening or what went on, or was— and was I accepting? And I knew there was a really big difference. I had a really good counselor in my life that finally really helped me to understand the difference between acknowledging and accepting. I remember one time I was in her office and we were going through— she was prying, right? Just like a good counselor would, or a good coach, or a good therapist, prying in such a way that would allow me to be open and honest with the emotions I was feeling and the things I was going through. And so, I remember exclusively we were sitting down and we were kind of going through it and I was acknowledging, yes, I had family trauma that went on and I grew up in an abusive household and those types of things. So, I had these types of responses, so to say. And I remember her saying to me, she said, Ryan, When you are ready to accept these things in your life, that this— accept what went on, it's only through the acceptance that we can start healing. And that was an eye-opening experience for me because the way she related to— I kind of— I remember taking a step back and saying to myself, you know what? You are right. I've wasted years, almost decades, or at least one decade. acknowledging what is going on, right? But not really digging into those situations and digging into those root causes that would allow me to start accepting what went on. Because that stuff hurts, right? Acceptance around our traumas hurt. They, they, for us that know or struggle with traumas in our life. And what I found through my coaching is many of us do, and many of us have traumas in our life that we got that are unresolved, and that's why the anxiety manifests itself. But we think that if we can manage the anxiety, that the traumas in our life will go away, and that's just not the case. The traumas go away by learning to accept that this is part of who we are, um, and part of our story, and part of what makes us strong and our strength. And then what happens is we start to discover discover the other elements to acceptance. The other elements to the acceptance is now we get into a phase of discovery. And we start discovering the outcomes of the traumas and the outcomes of the things that are happening to us and the outcomes that those things that went on in our life. And we start to change those things, start changing our perspective of them as we start discovering. But I really, really want to hone in on accepting and really challenge you to give it some thought Around, or have you been really either going through the motions and acknowledging what's going on, but not really accepting what's going on or what went on? And I really would encourage you to get to a point in your life where you can actually say to yourself, yes, I accept this, right? I'll give you another example. I coached someone that has sexual trauma. And the sexual trauma, that is a— that's, it's worse. It's bad. Um, and it's no good. And it's, and it's ugly and it hurts and it's pain and it's all those different emotions that come up. Um, but what I've been trying to educate her on and help her through is we have to start changing our perspective of it because what's— what she tries to do is she tries to ignore it, escape from it, run it. She doesn't want any part of it. But the problem is, That, that experience has become part of her life. And by not going through and working through that experience and changing our perspective of it and seeing— now get, get this— seeing some good out of it and seeing the beauty out of the trauma, when we can change our perspective of it and we can, we can then start healing from it, we learn that through these different experiences that we can find the beauty in it and find the, find the, the, find the, um, the things that will help us grow and the strength from it, right? That doesn't make the trauma good. It doesn't make the trauma acceptable. It doesn't make the, the trauma less, uh, less, um, uh, less— I forgot the word I'm trying to use, so, uh, excuse me for that. But it doesn't make it less, um—
Painful.
Oh man, you guys caught me in a brain cramp here. But I guess you get the gist, right? The gist is that you don't really need to forget about it, right? You need to embrace it and it becomes part of you. And that's part of the acceptance, is when you actually see these things in light of what happened and you start changing your perspective of them. And as you start changing your perspective of them, you'll start to learn that we can gain strength from them rather than anxiety.
Right?
Because a lot of us now are struggling with these traumas and the lack of acceptance through the anxiety experiences, right? So we've had panic attacks, we have anxiety attacks, we have obsessive thoughts. Then we try to cope with them with drinking and sex and alcohol and food and drugs and whatever else, right? Rather than learning from those experiences, learning from those traumas, accepting that they are part of who we are.
Right.
And then embracing those things and discovering the strength that we get from them rather than the anxiety from them. So what I— like, again, I would really encourage you to start looking at it a bit differently. And I think I'll go into this a little bit more in what I call acceptance in my later podcasts. And I might even flow between the discovery phase as I talk about that and then the acceptance phase because I see a lot of people I work with get caught in that acceptance and discovery. And they think that, again, by acknowledging it, they're accepting it. And then by discovering it, they're accepting it. So it's, it's, it's a, it's, it's way different. And I'll probably get into those areas later on in my later podcast. But like I said, I just want to hop on here and get in and was thinking about this as I was sitting down. I was like, I haven't, I haven't done a podcast in a while. So anyway, if you need help Or you are struggling with anxiety or trauma, please reach out to me. You can find me at beatinganxiety.me is my website. Twitter is beatinganxiety.me or Real Run Ryan. And Instagram is Beating Anxiety as well. So anyway, guys, hopefully this is helpful. Love to hear your responses on this. And if I could help, please reach out. Thank you so much. Take care.
