 Recovery from an anxiety disorder is full of paradoxes and backwards upside down statements that don't seem to make a lot of common sense today on episode 259 of the podcast. We're going to talk about one of them. It's that thing where you value yourself highly enough to struggle. Hello everybody. Welcome back to the anxious truth. This is episode 259 of the podcast we are recording in May of 2023 in case you are listening from the future. I am Drew Lyncelotta, creator and host of the anxious truth. If this is your first time here at the podcast or on the YouTube channel, if you've just stumbled in accidentally, welcome. I hope you find the content we produce here helpful in some way. If you're a returning listener or viewer on YouTube, welcome back. As always, I'm glad that you're here. This week, we're going to look at one of those ridiculous backwards paradoxes of recovery, and that is that you must value yourself high enough to struggle. Yeah, that's right. That sounds ridiculous because you would think, well, if I value myself, wouldn't I want to not struggle? Wouldn't I want to protect myself from a struggle? And the answer to that is, well, while that might make common sense in regular life, when you're dealing with recovery from a disorder that has you afraid of yourself. No, you have to value yourself high enough to allow yourself to struggle for a reason. Now, before we get into that, which I know makes no sense, but it is true, just a very quick reminder that the anxious truth is certainly more than just this podcast episode. There's a whole YouTube channel that has all the podcasts. There's 250 something podcasts before this that are all free. There's a mountain of free social media content. There are books that I've written on anxiety and anxiety recovery. There are courses and workshops. There's a ton of goodies. So if you head to my website at the anxious truth dot com, you will find all of them there. I urge you to evaluate yourself of all the resources. And if you're following this work and you feel that it's helping and making a difference in your recovery and you'd like to find a way to support it. All the ways you can do that are also on the website at the anxious truth dot com slash support, financial support and buying things is never ever required, but always appreciate it. And no matter how you support this podcast and the work that I do, whether it's leaving a review of the podcast, a thumbs up on a YouTube video or just stopping by to listen and make a comment. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much. So in this situation, we're going to talk about why the struggle is such an important part of anxiety disorder recovery. Now, at face value, most people will think but isn't recovery about eliminating the struggle. And yes, in the long term, it certainly is. If you're struggling now, then getting better would mean at some point you don't struggle. We can all agree on that. That is true. But if you have followed this content for any length of time, you've heard me say on multiple occasions that that cannot be your primary goal. It never is. The struggle going away or feeling better or not experiencing things like panic anymore. That's the secondary effect. That's the happy secondary side effect of the primary goal and recovery, which is to learn that you've never really needed to avoid these things. You've never really needed to be afraid of your own body and your own thoughts. You've never really had to baby yourself. You've never had to run from these really scary and disturbing but ultimately not dangerous sensations and thoughts in your head. That's really recovery. That's where it happens. And I talk all the time about building a new relationship with anxiety and fear and uncertainty. That's where your recovery is built because that teaches us that we're capable that while it is disturbing and while it is scary and while it is uncomfortable and certainly disruptive when it happens. Being anxious is not an emergency and not a reason to change your entire day or your entire life. And the only way that we can learn that lesson that ultimately leads to the happy secondary side effect where we don't really struggle as much or at all, which is certainly possible, is to go through a struggle. One of the earliest statements I ever made, I believe on Instagram, was that you can only learn, you can only not be afraid by being afraid. If you want to stop being afraid, you have to get better at being afraid. If you want to be less anxious, you actually have to get better at being anxious. And if you are going to learn how to get better at being anxious and you're going to learn to get better at being afraid, well, that's a struggle because that's hard work. And I think in this episode, I really want to bring out that sometimes the resistance to doing that hard work could be based on not seeing yourself as valuable enough to go through that struggle. Maybe not capable enough, but in this situation, I want to talk about not valuable enough, because you really do have to place a high value on yourself to allow yourself to go through a struggle like this in order to learn these valuable lessons. That will propel you forward in your recovery from your anxiety problem, and also that will serve you well for the rest of your life. These are not just recovery lessons. These tend to be life lessons too, and that's amazing. But you do not learn them without intentionally engaging in difficult, challenging, struggle type activities. You are intentionally going to be afraid so you can practice being afraid. You will intentionally trigger yourself so you can practice navigating through that triggered situation and getting through those feelings as opposed to running from them. You will intentionally go into things and places and contexts and conversations and tasks that you are terrified to go into because of how you're going to feel. And you will struggle when you do that, but you will struggle so that you can learn that you're capable of the struggle and moving through as opposed to trying to go around or retreating. And you get your life back in the process, but that's hard work. And you really have to place a high value on yourself and your life as worthwhile if you are going to go through that. Why would anybody go through that? And this becomes almost as much a philosophical conversation as a mechanical conversation about recovery. And I have had people in this community, and I will always say everybody is welcome to choose their own path without judgment. You choose your path and I will stand behind you as one human being to another regardless of what that path looks like. And I have had many people say, what's the point of this? I can have my groceries delivered. My partner takes care of things. My kids are small. They don't really have to leave the house or my kids are grown. I don't have to worry about them anymore. I can work from home. I can do everything within my safe bubble. Why would I do this? And that's fair. You can choose to do it that way if you would like. Nobody should pick on you for doing that. And in the end, sometimes the choice to not struggle is a choice that you make based on what you value in life. I would prefer to live more comfortably at the expense of maybe living in a smaller way. And that's fine. But for others who do not want to live in that small restricted way. And I'm trying to say that very objectively, by the way, not to say that one is better than the other. But for those in the community that don't want to live like that anymore, they have to struggle to stop living that way. And it's ridiculous because, again, you would think that, well, recovery must mean that you take away the struggle, but you do, but first you have to go through a struggle to take away the struggle. And you're only going to do that if you value yourself and want to put some time into yourself and understand that many things in life are an investment in yourself, your time, your energy, the ability to put yourself into uncomfortable places, learn things from that experience, bring those things with you and kind of grow and change and evolve and all of those things. These are all super cliche, like life coaching guru self-help stuff that I never ever talk about. But there's some truth to many of those things. And the analogy that I want to give you is sort of parenting. And sometimes you hear about self-parenting because it's a thing. And if you had told me six, seven years ago that I would be talking about self-parenting on my podcast, I would have told you that you are insane, but clearly you are not because here I am talking about self-parenting. If you are a parent or know anybody who is, you know that part of the job of a parent is not just to protect a child and keep the child's life smooth and struggle free. We are there to help our children learn how to struggle when they need to. A well-rounded parent doesn't just wrap their kid in bubble wrap and hope that nothing bad ever happens to them. A well-rounded parent is going to be there to clean up the scuffed up knee and comfort them when they do fail and have to pick themselves back up and learn lessons from that. We as parents not only protect and soothe and coddle our children when need be and keep them safe, but we also encourage them to explore. And the great personality development theorist of the last 150 years have all kind of agreed on that. The social aspect of personality development, the social aspect of child development, Piaget was one of the first that talked about a child learns to be an adult by exploring and determining what the world is all about and taking risks and finding their competencies and challenging themselves. And as parents we would do well to let them do that and just kind of be there to pick them up when need be and help them learn the lessons that the struggles provide. So we don't wrap our kids in bubble wrap, lock them away and try to keep them from ever feeling bad. I mean we might want to on emotional level. As a parent I would tell you I would love to do that even though my kids now are grown, but I would still like to do that for them. But that would be a bad move. I wouldn't be helping them if I do that. And if you're a parent and again or know anybody who is, you probably understand what I'm talking about. It's a difficult thing to let your kids struggle, but it's also a valuable thing because a role in that situation is to cheer lead for them. Listen I know that was really hard and I know that feels like crap, but I also know that you can get through this and you can learn something from this and maybe you can do better next time. That's a hard thing to say to a kid that's crying or has their feelings hurt or feels like they've done something wrong or that they're not good enough. But that's kind of what they need to hear. And in that situation we are valuing our children at a high enough level where we will let them struggle and help them learn from that. So now this is where self parenting comes in. Can you do that for you? Or can you value yourself at a high enough level that you will in fact let yourself struggle so that you can learn something about you and that you can overcome that self image that says I'm too weak. I'm not capable. I have to run. I don't have a choice. This is too much. Do you value yourself enough to go into the struggle to shatter those beliefs? And I hate to say another stupid cliches health help thing, but those self limiting beliefs. The only way we shatter them is to struggle with them, to confront them, to move through them. Will you place enough value on yourself so that you will allow yourself those experiences? And for some people when we talk about this concept it's kind of a light bulb moment. Like oh my goodness I didn't even realize I was doing that. I thought I was valuing myself so highly that I was trying to protect myself. I was trying to get away from the struggle. I was trying to make myself feel better. I was trying to soothe myself. I was hugging myself. I know all those things are fine. There's nothing wrong inherently with those things. But sometimes we err on the side of that and we make a mistake and think well that's how I show myself that I matter. I take care of myself. Well taking care of yourself isn't just soothing. It isn't just hiding. It isn't just protecting. It isn't just trying to smooth the bumps out in life. Sometimes taking care of yourself is learning that you can handle the bumps. Just let that sink in for just a second. Because for many people in this community that's just not a concept they ever considered and I get that. I totally get that. I really do. Because why would you ever have to think about those things? Now there are entire, entire segments of our economy that are based on that for non-anxious people. You've heard all the cliches. Change doesn't happen in safe places. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. We've heard all of those things. And while I might cringe at those things, when you do drag some of those concepts into our context here, recovery from anxiety disorders, you start to see that they do have some truth there. And honestly for people like us in this community, they have a lot of truth. I might go so far as to say they are a little bit more valid in our community than they are outside. Because okay, I understand somebody might be trying to build a really big business because that's their dream and they have to get comfortable being uncomfortable. But until you've been comfortable being uncomfortable in the context of OCD or panic disorder or agoraphobia, you don't even really know what that means. And I think if we're going to go into those places, it means that you have to place a value on yourself that maybe you already do, but you really didn't think about how to point it in this direction. So all I'm going to ask you to do today, as I sort of wrap up this little short podcast episode for you, is to chew on this a little bit. The podcast episode is going to give you tips and tricks. Not everything is about mechanics. Some things are meant to just make you think a little bit. How do you value yourself? How do you see the value in your life? And have you fallen into the trap of thinking that valuing yourself, caring for yourself, or taking care of yourself always means trying to smooth things out. And are you missing the other part of that? Where sometimes if we place a high enough value on ourselves, like we do with our kids, we will let ourselves struggle so we can learn from that like we have to do sometimes with our kids. Have you been just self soothing? Or are you also self parenting and cheering for yourself and empowering yourself and encouraging yourself? And toward that end, maybe surrounding yourself with people who will help you do that. So the value that you place on yourself doesn't always lie only in making yourself immediately feel better. Sometimes it lies also in letting yourself struggle because you know that when you do that, you're going to learn some lessons that are going to change your situation. And if you're listening to this podcast, I get it. You really do want to change your situation. So think about that today. It's not going to change your life. It's not going to solve your problems instantly. But it might give you a little bit of a reason to maybe turn yourself in a different direction going a different way over the next couple of days and see how that works out. Because always remember when we're talking about these sort of things where we intentionally choose a challenge and we intentionally trigger ourselves and we intentionally feel fear and discomfort and we trigger panic and we go toward intrusive scary thoughts. We're always doing things that are really challenging and will represent a struggle, but we're never doing things that are actually dangerous. So when you think this guy is crazy, what is he telling me to do? Always remember that really is the concept of recovery that we base everything on. Value yourself enough to struggle through really difficult things. Not valuing yourself enough to do dangerous things. Because while they might feel dangerous, they are not. And we base everything we do here on that principle. Anyway, that is episode 259 of The Anxious Truth pretty much in the books. I don't have much more to say about that. I would rather you think a little more than I talk a little more today. So you know the podcast episode is over because it's the music. That as always at the end of a podcast episode is a song called Afterglow, which was written by my friend, Ben Drake, inspired at least in part by this podcast and things he heard several years ago. So if you want to know more about the song that you hear at the end of every podcast episode, go check out Ben's website at BenDrakeMusic.com. And I will ask you as always that if you are listening to this podcast on Apple Podcast or Spotify or some platform that later lets you rate or review the podcast, leave a five star rating and maybe take a second and write a review because it helps other people find the podcast and then more people get help. That's why I do this to begin with. And if you're watching on YouTube or listening on YouTube, like the video, subscribe to my channel, leave a comment, hit the notification icon so you know when I upload new episodes. Thanks for coming by. And I promise I will circle back on YouTube and answer comments there at least twice a week. And that is it. I hope you have found this helpful today. I hope it's given you something to think about. I will be back next week with another podcast episode. I don't know what I'm going to talk about, but I will be here. And remember, take a small step forward today, even if it's scary because even the small steps matter. They move you in the direction you really want to go. I'll see you next week. Get another chance.