Several years ago, I had an enlightening conversation with one of my sisters1. We were commiserating over our common experience of living with anxiety.
Amelia: “I don’t know what to call it when that happens. It’s not really a full-blown panic attack, but it’s like an anxiety attack.”
Jessica: “Oh, you mean when a massive wave of anxiety hits you from out of the blue?”
Amelia: “Yeah! It’s an intensely physical experience of anxiety but it doesn’t sound like what I hear panic attacks described as.”
Jessica: “Well I’ve experienced both, for sure.”
Amelia: “It’s crazy that both the racing thoughts of doom and sudden bouts of heart-pounding fight-or-flight can both be anxiety.”
Jessica: “Totally! And that we experience them enough to be able to discern between the flavors of anxiety.”
Amelia: “I’m so glad those really physical ones don’t happen too often. I’m used to dealing with stomach aches and nausea from anxiety, but these anxiety attacks are something else.”
Jessica: “Really? That’s how I most commonly experience anxiety–in that intensely physical way.”
Amelia: “That makes sense, based off of what I’ve heard and observed in you. Mine tends to be more of the racing-thoughts variety.”
Jessica: “Yeah.”
Amelia: “Especially the racing thoughts that keep returning to a few specific things. You know, like all your worries stem from these core worries.”
Jessica: “…”
Amelia: “You know?”
Jessica: “No.”
Amelia: “What?”
Jessica: “No. I don’t experience that.”
Amelia: “You don’t?”
Jessica: “Nope.”
Amelia: “Like, there are patterns to your anxious thoughts.”
Jessica: “No.”
Amelia: “Huh. …2 Really?”
Jessica: “Really.”
Amelia: “So, what are racing thoughts like for you?”
Jessica: “It’s, just, like, free-floating anxiety. Worries about anything and everything.”
Amelia: “Oh, I get that too. Just not nearly as often as the core worries thing.”
As it just so turns out, we were discussing the difference between Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). That’s not the point though.
This was a conversation I was very glad to have had with my sister for several reasons.
First of all, it was an opportunity to be vulnerable and deepen our sisterly connection. Relationships are important and I value opportunities to strengthen my relationships with my loved ones.
Next, this was a very supportive interaction. We weren’t in a competition to see whose anxiety was worse. While yes, we were comparing pain, we weren’t comparing pain™3. We noticed similarities and differences without feeling the need to rank them in order of most to least worthy of sympathy. We both approached this conversation with curiosity and a desire to understand each other better. That is the kind of supportiveness that led us to want to create Emotional Support Sisters.
The final reason I am grateful this conversation occurred is that it has been useful for me to look beyond anxiety as a singular experience. Dr. John Gottman4 lists 5 steps for emotion coaching5. The first step is being aware of your child’s emotion and the fourth step is help your child learn to label their emotions with words. Emotion coaching presupposes that you, the adult/parent, are aware of your own emotions and can label those emotions with words. Recognizing that anxiety comes in different flavors improves my ability to be aware of and label my emotions. It’s like the idea of leaning into discomfort. Everyone’s natural reaction is to recoil from pain. It’s a pretty good response to putting your hand on the stove or stepping on a nail because it reduces the damage done to that body part. Recoiling from a migraine or from fear of public speaking is less helpful. Labeling something as “bad” causes our brains to avoid confronting it. That avoidance turns the “bad” thing into something mysterious, frightening, and dangerous–and generally takes up much more room than it has any right to6.
Since I feel like I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this, I will give a concrete example. There are times when I feel anxious while driving. I could (and have) gone down this path. “I am feeling anxious while I am driving” turns into “I feel anxious when I drive” (a subtle, but significant difference) which turns into avoiding driving whenever I can. Believe it or not, this actually was something that came up in therapy (the avoidance and the anxiety were not so bad that I went to therapy specifically for this, but it turns out to be part of one of those themes I mentioned). The therapist helped me go down a different path. “I feel anxious when I drive” turned into “I sometimes feel anxious when I drive” which eventually turned into “When I am driving with someone else in the car or when I am driving in front of someone I know, I feel anxiety because I worry that they are judging my driving and therefore judging me and I fear that if someone judges me to be wrong/bad/incorrect/incompetent they are probably right about me.”7
Can you see the difference?!?!? To be perfectly honest, I still tend to let other people drive. But because I don’t have this nebulous “driving anxiety” hanging over me, I am able to make a conscious decision rather than a fear-based reflex reaction. If I need to be the driver in a situation, I can accept that with only minimal anxiety.
Bringing it back to the conversation Jessica and I had, I don’t experience all the flavors of anxiety (thank goodness!) and not all the anxiety I feel is strictly of one flavor. I have come to be able to identify my anxiety as either more cerebral or more visceral. The anxiety that leads me to catastrophize, ruminate, or be hyper-vigilant is more cerebral. The anxiety when I find it difficult to breathe and it feels like my cells are about to vibrate apart is a more visceral type of anxiety. While I most certainly wish I were not such a connoisseur of anxiety, ignoring the nuance simply deprives me of options for managing anxiety. Noticing the flavors leads me to use different tools for different types of anxiety. Writing a worry list helps when each strand of thought leads to seven other strands of thought in a terrifying jumble of hydra-headed spaghetti8. Writing a worry list does not help me when I feel like I’m going to explode and implode at the same time.
What helps you when you encounter feelings of anxiety?
Footnotes
- You will not be familiar with this sister through the blog because life circumstances are such that it just isn’t a good time for her to be doing a blog. Starting this blog is something we discussed as a family and we all support each other’s decisions. I include her in this post with her permission. ↩︎
- This ellipse is the sound of Amelia’s brain breaking as it tries to incorporate conflicting information into an established schema. ↩︎
- “Comparison is the thief of joy.” This quote is often attributed to Theodore Roosevelt as a reminder that looking at what other’s have and contrasting it with what we don’t have, or vice versa, and then wishing our lives were different because of that contrast is a really good way to be miserable.
“We don’t compare pain.” This quote is often said by my father as a reminder that one-up-manship is stupid and no one wins in this type of pissing contest.
“Life is pain, highness.” This quote is attributed to the Dread Pirate Roberts, though we know that name is actually a title passed on to Westley, as a reminder that anyone who says differently is selling something. ↩︎ - Dr. John Gottman is my favorite psychologist. Freud is my least favorite, in case you were wondering. ↩︎
- Emotion Coaching is a parenting technique that focuses on parents helping children develop emotional intelligence. I’m a fan. Go to https://www.gottman.com/blog/an-introduction-to-emotion-coaching/ for more information. ↩︎
- I kind of assume people know what I’m talking about here, but I’d be happy to do another post explaining this more clearly if anyone would like that. ↩︎
- You better believe that I’m feeling particularly vulnerable stating this so plainly where other people can read it and judge me. It’s scary for me. I can do things even if it scares me. ↩︎
- I am really proud of this descriptive language. So I’m creating a footnote to draw your attention to it so you can be proud of me too. ↩︎
Emotional Support Sisters 
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