Why We Cannot Escape Anxiety?
Anxiety is probably the word I hear the most. During a session with a client, it’s very likely that I will hear it at least once. That annoying sense of dread is a ubiquitous part of the human experience, and yet, for all its omnipresence, it is an emotion that we seem to have the most trouble tolerating.
Anger is not pleasant, but it can make us feel powerful, so we don’t always run away from it. Sadness is not easy, but there’s beauty there; there is art and also music to console us. Anxiety, however, is different. It is difficult to wrap our heads around it precisely because it manifests itself in such unpleasant and vague ways that we have a hard time staying with it and not losing our minds. What’s not easy to observe is not easy to understand either.
Even though we feel it daily, we fail to understand it properly because we try to run away from it so quickly. And by consequence, we miss valuable opportunities to get to know ourselves. Avoiding anxiety is like avoiding your own reflection in the mirror.
The infamous French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan devoted a whole year to teaching exclusively about anxiety. If you try to read his Seminar X (1961-1962), you will, I guarantee you, become even more anxious since he was many things, but a clear and concise thinker is not one of them. As an act of compassion, let me digest it for you in extremis: anxiety is the awareness of the desire of the Other in your proximity. Piece of cake, no?
Let’s unpack that.
We are all relational beings. This means that our identity is constituted through relationships. This process is ongoing since the day we were born. We learn who we are through our interactions with other people. We learn what roles we play and what roles they play by anticipating their reactions to our gestures, and vice versa. As we predict and experiment with each other, we adjust to each other, creating our identities in the process.
Imagine that you’re thrown into a play, only no one told you who your character is and what your lines are. You are standing in front of someone and you know that they are placing you in a very specific role, they have definitive and clear expectations, there are lines you’re supposed to say in just a second, but you have no idea what they are. You have no idea what will happen if you get them wrong either.
When you don’t know who you are, what role you’re supposed to play, you can’t anticipate what others expect and what would be the right thing to do. And that moment is what we mean when we say anxiety. To put it in less dramatic terms by paraphrasing George Kelly, anxiety is the failure to anticipate. We simply lack constructs to act in a particular moment because we are not able to give meaning to the situation we’re in.
Fine, you say. I understand the thing about the desire of the Other, but I often become anxious when the Other is not physically present and I cannot necessarily connect it to any specific Other.
That’s a fair point that requires a long explanation, and since I just mentioned Kelly, why not leave Jacques Lacan aside for a second and dive into Kelly’s theory. He may be able to provide a simple answer.
According to Kelly, our experience of living in the world is never completely coherent. Depending on the context we may have several ways to respond to what we perceive as the same situation. You can easily see this if you compare how you talk when you’re at work vs at home with your loved ones. To make sense of our experiences, we fragment them, put them in separate boxes and label them to find them more easily. On a higher level, they are all integrated into who we are, so our sense of self remains intact even though it may be fragmented in different ways. Fragmentation is an adaptive response to the world we live in.
Now I have to take back a part of what I just wrote. Things are never that simple.
Sometimes it happens that not all our boxes are integrated and labeled. For various reasons and mostly because we don’t like their content, we leave a box or two outside and we don’t label them on purpose. We leave them out as trash. After all, we can recognize our own handwriting, so we’ll know it’s our trash if we label it. When experiences from these boxes come alive, we don’t immediately recognize them as our own because we intentionally didn’t label them – we didn’t want them in the first place! These experiences seem like the Other. As you can see, we are sometimes the Other to ourselves.
There you go, you don’t need your boss hovering over you, the Other always already lives inside of you!
Every time we approach something new, anxiety will arise to give us the heads up. It’s your psyche’s alarm system. It’s there to protect you and guide you, telling you: you need practical tools here! If you run away from it, you are giving up on growth because you don’t know where growth is actually needed. If you run away from it, you run away from yourself too.
Running away from it also feeds into it. The more you avoid anxiety, the scarier it becomes. What begins as minor discomfort ultimately becomes intense dread. Instead, we would do better to embrace it and open up to it. By doing so, we are able to identify our shortcomings and work towards acceptance and change.
We live in the times in which our socio-economic circumstances and overall political instability give us ample reasons to be anxious, but I wonder if the well-documented increase in anxiety disorders is also related to certain cultural markers. If you listen to how people talk (which is all I do every day) you notice certain things repeating. One of those things I notice is a tacit assumption that we should not be uncomfortable.
Already on the surface, this seems like a self-defeating assumption. For one, it’s a very vague thing to be uncomfortable. It means nothing in particular, and so it can include any emotions that remotely resembles anxiety. At the same time, as you hopefully picked up here, there is no change without anxiety. If we want to avoid discomfort, our world will only grow smaller and there’s really no way around it, to put it buntly.
