Karla McLaren - Embracing Anxiety: How to Access the Genius of This Vital Emotion

Embracing Anxiety

How to Access the Genius of This Vital Emotion

Karla McLaren, M.Ed.

The Language of Emotions: What Your Feelings are Trying to Tell You

The Art of Empathy: A Complete Guide to Lifes Most Essential Skill

The Dynamic Emotional Integration Workbook

Escaping Utopia: Growing Up in a Cult, Getting Out, and Starting Over (with Janja Lalich)

Sounds True

Boulder, CO 80306

2020 Karla McLaren

Sounds True is a trademark of Sounds True, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author(s) and publisher.

This book is not intended as a substitute for the medical recommendations of physicians, mental health professionals, or other healthcare providers. Rather, it is intended to offer information to help the reader cooperate with physicians, mental health professionals, and health providers in a mutual quest for optimum well-being. We advise readers to carefully review and understand the ideas presented and to seek the advice of a qualified professional before attempting to use them.

Published 2020

Cover design by Lisa Kerans

Book design by Kate Kaminski, Happenstance Type-O-Rama

Printed in the United States

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McLaren, Karla, author.

Title: Embracing anxiety : how to access the genius of this vital

emotion / Karla McLaren, M.Ed.

Description: Boulder, CO : Sounds True, 2020. | Includes bibliographical

references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019036844 (print) | LCCN 2019036845 (ebook) | ISBN

9781683644415 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781683644422 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Anxiety. | Mental health. | Self-reliance.

Classification: LCC BF575.A6 M375 2020 (print) | LCC BF575.A6 (ebook) |

DDC 152.4/6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036844

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036845

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For my dear friend anxiety, who has been misnamed, disrespected, and pathologized but who shows up every day to help us, nonetheless.

And for you who long to live in ease and harmony with your anxiety, I welcome you.

Thank you for bringing your emotional genius to your anxiety, and to our waiting world.

Emotions are at the center of everything you are: every relationship, every dream, every failure, every triumph, every act of violence, and every act of love. Your emotions are not just random sensations or meaningless moods your emotions are vital to your intelligence, your social skills, and your ability to understand yourself and the world around you. Each of your emotions has a specific purpose, and each emotion brings you a unique set of gifts, skills, and genius. Your emotions are your guardians, your support system, and your friends, and you can learn how to work with all of them, brilliantly. Anxiety, the task-completion expert of your psyche, is no exception.

This book is a love letter to my friend anxiety. Anxiety does so much for us, but sadly, its usually treated as a problem or a disease. There are many reasons for this. One is that we havent been taught to treat our emotions as necessary parts of our intelligence. Another is that emotions tend to be looked down on as less valuable than our so-called rationality (or our spirituality). Yet another reason is that many people experience anxiety as a painful and overwhelming emotion that doesnt seem to have any value. Because of these and many other reasons, were usually taught to overlook anxietys gifts and focus only on its flaws, and its hard to love something we see as a flaw. Therefore, the first thing well do in this book is embrace anxiety so that we can approach it in a new way and learn how to love it. Really.

Most of us have been taught to feel ashamed about or afraid of our anxiety, or to treat it as a sign of weakness or trouble. Some people even talk about anxiety as an epidemic, as if its a serious disease thats also contagious. This is a shame because anxiety is an essential emotion with an important job to do: it helps us look ahead, organize ourselves, and gather the energy we need to get things done. As with any other emotion, however, anxiety can become unbalanced, uncomfortable, and even overwhelming, and in this book, youll learn why that happens so that you can work skillfully with your anxiety (even if your anxiety is painful or disruptive right now) and access its many gifts.

This book is a part of my years-long and sincere apology to anxiety. I didnt understand it well enough to include it in my 2010 book, The Language of Emotions, where I gave every other emotion except anxiety its own chapter. That was clueless of me, but now I know why: unlike people who feel anxiety intensely, I feel and respond to anxiety when it is very subtle (you may, too), so I saw it as a problem (that other people had) instead of an emotion.

Note: Your experience of anxiety (and all emotions) may be different from mine, because youre unique. Your neurology, your upbringing, and your socialization about emotions all have a significant effect on how you feel and work with emotions today. Even though Ive been studying emotions for decades, I misunderstood anxiety almost completely, because my anxiety and I have a unique relationship that didnt track with the way most people talk about anxiety.

I learned about anxiety (from a radio show, of all places; Ill tell you more about that in chapter 1) soon after The Language of Emotions was published, and I later created a section on the gifts of anxiety in my 2013 book, The Art of Empathy. Still, anxiety deserves better than that. In fact, it deserves its very own book, and Im glad to be able to write this book for my friend anxiety, and for you.

Ive been studying emotions, empathy, and human behavior throughout my life, and I developed an empathic and emotion-honoring approach to emotions called Dynamic Emotional Integration (also known as DEI). In DEI, we treat all emotions as vital aspects of everything we do: thinking, deciding, relating, behaving, acting, loving, dreaming, and healing. We see emotions as dynamic and lively aspects of our basic cognition and functioning that are present (at varying levels of intensity) in every moment of the day and night. DEI helps us integrate our emotions within ourselves so that they can do their best work.

Because emotions are always present and always working to support us, we learn to work directly with them, and I developed a group of skills that I call the Empathic Mindfulness practices to intentionally access the intelligence inside the emotions. These practices access emotions that help us ground and focus ourselves, set clear and loving boundaries, soothe and replenish ourselves, work directly with intense emotional states, and change or update our behaviors with the help of the very things that create and support our behaviors in the first place: our emotions. Youll learn these emotion-honoring mindfulness practices in chapter 3.