why we worry all the time and how to cope

 

we worry about work , money , being left , illness , disappointing , over  promising , madness  and disgrace , just to start the list . 

we worry in the early hours , we worry on holidays , we worry at parties . we worry all the time while we're trying to smile and seen normal to good people who depend on us . it can  pretty unbearable   , at moments . A standard approach when trying to assuage our blizzard of worries is to look at each in turn and marshal sensible arguments against their probabilities . 

But it can , at points , also be helpful not to look at the specific of every worry and instead to consider the overall position that worry has come to occupy in our lives . 

there is a hugely fascinating sentence on the topic in the essay by the great English psychoanalyst Donald Winnicoat  : " The catastrophe     you fear will happen has in fact already ". 

when we worry we  are  naturally fixated on what will occur next , : It's the future , with its boundless possibilities for horror , that is the natural arena for exploration by our panicked thoughts . But in winnicoat's unexpected thesis , something else is reveled . - The disaster that we fear is going to unfold  is actually behind us .

 there is a paradox here ,  why do we keep expecting something to happen that has already happened .why don't we better distinguish past from present ? 

winnicoat's answer that it's in the nature of traumatic events from childhood not to be properly processed and as a result , like the dead who have not been adequately buried and mourned   , to start to haunt us indiscriminately in adulthood . 

but they do not make themselves felt in straight forward .

 for example , we may panic that we are about to humiliated and shamed . there are no particularly strong grounds for this is in objective reality , but we are utterly convinced nevertheless , because this is precisely what happen to us when we are tiny and at the hands of the parents . or we worry intensely that we about to be abandoned in love  not because our partner is any significant way disloyal . but because someone who once  looked after us at a very vulnerable point  definitely was .

A  benefit of understanding how much our worries owe to childhood is a new sense that it is not so much the future . we should be distressed about as the past . 

we can replace dread and apprehension with something sadder yet ultimately more redemptive  mourning . we can feel profoundly sorry for our younger  selves as an alternative to being  panicked for our future selves . Appreciating the childhood legacy of worries , we also stand to realize that   we adapt and improve on how we respond to what alarm us .

 if we have been well parented , we will have been bequeathed a repertoire of good moves   to latch on to when crises occur . we know how to reach out , seek help , perhaps move away and only take as much responsibility as we are due . we have access to a corridor through our troubles .

But when we have lacked this kind of tutelage , we remain in significant ways , in relation to our troubles , like the frightened children  we once were . we may be tall , drive a car , and sound like grown-up , but face with concerns , resort to our tool kit of childlike solutions . 

we overreact , we go silent , we scream , we have a little sense of other options . we feel extremely limited in our powers of protest and agency , we lose all perspective to which it is appropriate , and in no way patronizing , to remind ourselves of what can in our deeper psychological selves - still be an entirely implausible thought that we are now adults . 

in other words , in response o the kinds of terror we knew so well at the age of four or eight .we don't have to either as afraid or as powerless as we were .we can mount a direct protest , we can make eloquent case for ourselves , we can complain and defend or position .

we can rebuild our lives  in a new way else where .

there are two ways to mitigate risk : to try to remove all risk from the world or to work on one's attitude risk . knowing that many of our fears have childhood antecedents as do our response to them can free us to imagine that history won't have to repeat itself exactly . 

adult life dos not have to be as terrifying as our childhood ones were and our  response  to our fears can have some of the great vigor and confidence that is the natural privilege of our  grown-ups .

we'll still be worried a substantial portion of the time , but perhaps with a little less fragility and fewer burning convictions of  total upcoming catastrophe . 

Thank you for your time .

Happy Monday . 

* photos credit : Google