When Your Anxiety Spikes
There’s something I want everyone to understand about soul healing. Soul healing is not about having a perfect life and being in a great mood all the time. We all have survival instincts that make us have knee-jerk reactions to various situations in our lives. You’re going to get angry. You’re going to freak out. Anxiety will make you act in a way that you’re not very proud of sometimes. What soul healing does, instead, is it lessens the time you need to reframe the situation in your mind. It helps you recognize the irrationality in your reactions. Rather than saying “If only that person would do this,” you start asking yourself “What can I do to make this situation better?”
When Anxiety Kicks In
Last week, something happened that really illustrated this difference for me. My son’s high school had two back-to-back incidents that forced the students to “shelter-in-place”. At first, we didn’t have a lot of information available, but as the media coverage increased, I learned that guns were involved in both instances. Now, I challenge any parent not to freak out when the word “gun” is uttered in the same sentence as the name of your child’s school, especially so soon after the recent school shooting in Michigan.
A lot of emotions went through my body. Fear for my son. Anger that the school was so vague in their communications. Sadness that teenagers were so fearful for their lives that they needed to carry a gun around. Anxiety that I wasn’t making the “right” decisions. There was even disgust at myself for not valuing each child in the same way.
Viewing Things With A Little More Clarity
At the same time, there was another part of me that was observing all of this from a slightly wider perspective. A part of me could see that the chances of my son being hurt were very slight, and hadn’t really changed just because of these two incidents. There have always been fights in high schools. They are just more visible thanks to cellphone cameras and YouTube. We are also more aware of them because schools engage in lockdowns when they happen. There have always been a risk to sending your child off to school. The risk is just a little bit more in my face than normally at this time.
There was also recognition that fear was creating more fear, just like when I talked about how being a victim creates more victims. The initial fear harbored within the members of the first incident ended up triggering fear in the rest of the student body and their families. And while the police has not connected the second incident to the first, having them happen so close together more than doubled the tension amongst the families. As I exchanged information with other moms, I also saw that we might be making each other more anxious than we originally were. I could see that I was responsible for managing my own anxiety if I didn’t want fear to spread like wildfire.
What’s The Next Step For Me?
“What can I do to bring more peace into this situation?” In the end, that’s the question that I arrive at every time. I ask this at a personal level, and I ask this for the greater good. In my current situation, the first thing I needed to do was to make sure that my son was prepared to handle the risks the best way he can. But after that, my job is to step back and trust him. Right now, he feels safe enough to attend everyday, and I have no interest in diminishing that sense of safety with my own anxiety.
For the sake of the larger community, I think I’m supposed to continue sharing my thoughts. To help more people recognize how our survival instincts affect our rational thinking. That the world is not as scary as our instincts want us to believe. To help increase more peaceful moments in everyone’s lives. I think it’s also time for me to be more vocal about the issue of gun ownership. As someone who grew up in two countries where attitudes about gun ownership are complete opposites, I think I have an unique perspective to offer.
The conclusions I’ve arrived at for this particular series of events are beside the point, though. What I really wanted to impart is how to deal with very stressful situations. First, recognize the role your survival instinct is playing in your initial reaction. Next, try to reframe the situation from a different perspective. And finally, do what you can to bring more peace into the situation. If you want to change the world, change yourself first. When you follow these steps, you’ll be amazed by how true the words are.