 Hey there, I'm Drew and you are listening to or watching The Anxious Truth. The Anxious Truth is the podcast that covers all things anxiety, anxiety disorders, and anxiety recovery. So if you're struggling with things like panic attacks or agoraphobia or health anxiety, then this is the place for you and I'm happy that you're here. This week on the podcast, we're going to address a bit of a serious topic and that is the idea that there may be a bit of a conflict between resolving trauma and recovering from an anxiety disorder. So let's get into that now. Hello everybody, welcome back to The Anxious Truth. This is podcast episode number 252 recorded in early April of 2023. I am Drew Lynn Salada, creator and host of The Anxious Truth. And if this is the first time here at the podcast or the YouTube channel, welcome. I hope you find the content useful or helpful in some way. If you are a returning viewer or listener, welcome back. I'm glad you're here as always. So this week, we're going to talk about the idea that there may actually be a bit of a conflict between some of the principles of trauma recovery and some of the principles of recovery from an anxiety disorder. This is not to say that one precludes the other or that they cannot work together, but these are just observations that I have made over many years of talking with a very large audience of people with a lot of varied experiences. And they kind of crystallized for me over the past couple of months and I wanted to share them with you in this week's podcast episode. Before we do just a quick reminder that there are more episodes than just this one of The Anxious Truth. There's two hundred and fifty something other episodes that came before it, all of which are free. And there are books that I've written about anxiety and anxiety recovery that are helping many, many people around the world. I have courses and workshops and all kinds of good information. All of that stuff is on my website at TheAnxiousTruth.com. So take a few moments, head on over to the website and avail yourself of all the resources, including the podcast episodes, the books, the workshops, the free social media content. It's all there. Take advantage of it. And while you're there, if you are enjoying my work and it's helping you in some way, then you'd like to find a way to support it. You can do that at TheAnxiousTruth.com slash support and financial support is never required, but always appreciated. And anyway, that you do choose to support this podcast and the work that I do, whether it's just listening to an episode or liking YouTube video. Thank you very much. I do appreciate it. It means the world to me. So when I say that there may be a bit of a conflict between trauma recovery and anxiety disorder recovery, what I mean is that especially for people who have been subjected to the kind of abuse or neglect or belittlement or invalidation that involves being silenced and being unseen or pushed to the side or invalidated or told that you don't matter or had your voice taken away. If you've gone through that sort of thing, it matters because your experiences matter. They inform the way you see the world. They provide a lens that you look through in terms of how you see the world and how you see your life and how you interact with the world and how you interact with people around you. So we carry those experiences with us. And that's just a common part of the human condition. Our experiences come with us in life. So if you live that kind of experience, number one, my heart goes out to you and I'm really sorry that you've had to deal with that. And if we were to call that trauma and really why wouldn't we? Then if we talk about healing that sort of trauma and healing those wounds, resolving that pain, then we're often going to work on allowing ourselves to be heard. You're gonna learn to stand up. You're gonna learn to use your voice. You're gonna learn to speak up. You're gonna learn to sort of, we've heard phrases like step into your power and use your voice and just make yourself be known and get your thoughts and your words and your opinions and your feelings validated where they have been belittled or dismissed or made to seem like they didn't matter for so long. And that kind of matters. And I could see where that kind of work is important and it can be really helpful if you're trying to overcome that sort of traumatic past where you have been muscled into a corner or just left in a corner by yourself and sort of been made to believe that you don't matter and you don't have a voice. So learning to cultivate that voice and learning to express the thoughts that you have, the emotions that you have to validate those, to honor those, it's gonna be a big part of that. And we see that in very common social media sort of narratives that revolve around trauma resolution that are based on messages like step into your power, find your voice, be seen, be heard, be validated. Risk being too much. Like sometimes I talk about that in social media circles, sometimes in mental health being too much becomes a personal brand. But I understand why are some of that might come from and you've heard things like if I'm too much for you and go find less and people stand up and cheer for that sort of thing and I get why. I do understand why that is because if you've been invalidated or make to feel invisible or insignificant or unimportant or like you don't matter then the ability to stand up and say, I'm here and I'm gonna get in your face and I'm gonna say what I feel and I'm gonna say what I think and I'm gonna say what's going on in me. I'm gonna make an impact on the world. That could be hugely powerful and that could be a big part of the healing process. So I kind of get that and I understand where that comes from. So if you're going to try to heal if you will or overcome those negative experiences that you have had in your past and part of that is sort of understanding that you do have power, you do have a voice the things you think and feel and your opinions matter and they can be expressed and they can be honored and they can be acted upon. If you're gonna go down that road then you're going to do things like stepping into your power and using your voice and learning that you are in fact enough and that you're amazing and you're beautiful and you are worthy and everything that goes on inside your head and your heart matters and the world needs it. So if you're gonna go down that road because you need to I would completely understand why and I would completely support that but you are kind of learning to pay attention to everything you think or feel and then honor that shine a light on it, right? Put it out in the world. If you were never allowed to talk about what you felt or what you thought or what was going on with you and now you're learning that, oh, I can do that like the world does wanna hear what I have to say then we could create a little bit of a conflict because if you're also dealing with an anxiety disorder and you start to become afraid of your own body or your own mind in certain instances you wind up in a state of disorder anxiety where your body and your mind are doing what they're designed to do but at the wrong time and you've learned to be afraid of that and your mind is creating thoughts that you don't want and they disturb you and your body is creating symptoms and sensations that you don't want and they disturb you and that can create a really hard situation because not only do you have this past experience that you're trying to overcome but now you have this new experience where you've learned to be afraid of yourself and your life becomes very restricted and small and everything is a trigger and everything's scary and you start to believe things like I'm about to go crazy or I'm about to have a heart attack or I'm dying or I can't breathe we all know these things if you listen to the podcast you get it so if you're dealing with that type of problem enter me or somebody that sounds like me with this type of theoretical orientation a sort of a cognitive behavioral approach to anxiety disorders and when you hear me talk about these things you will often hear me talk about thoughts being just thoughts we talk about detaching from thoughts and not treating them as if they're automatically critical and important we talk about not listening to your body and not honoring every thought and feeling that you have and in many instances my job is to dismiss your fear and your worry because it's essentially irrational so when you want to express fear towards somebody like me one of the things that we kind of can do for you is to sort of confidently shrug our shoulders back at you and say it's okay we can dismiss that because you're really okay there's nothing wrong right now so in that situation you see what starts to happen here we start to say your thoughts and your emotions and your body feel incredibly important to you like they are the most important thing all the time and you start to get dragged around by that but somebody like me will start to tell you but just because it feels like they're important doesn't mean that they are and you see what's happening here so on one hand you are trying to get to a place where you can feel things and think things and feel that things are important and you can show them because you were never allowed to do that you can express that you can say what's on your mind you could say what you're thinking you could say what you're feeling you can take a risk to go out and make your voice heard to stand up and be seen and learning to do that is a big deal for you which I understand and I'm cheering for you while you do that and then you get somebody like me who rolls in and says yeah but when that turns into an anxiety disorder and you are terrified of your body and you're terrified of your thoughts not terrified of the consequences of speaking up but the content of the thoughts themselves and you have somebody like me that says hey wait a minute not everything you think is is of the utmost importance not everything matters not everything has to be honored or validated it's okay to like disengage from your thoughts it's okay to disengage from your emotions it can start to sound like I'm invalidating what you think and feel which is exactly the opposite of what you're trying to learn and to overcome those past traumatic neglectful abusive experiences and I could see where things would start to get really confusing for some people so if you are struggling because you have lived those kind of experiences and again my heart goes out to you if you have I can see where you might be drawn to two messages that sort of become diametrically opposed to each other so if you have lived the type of experience the messaging about standing up speaking up being seen expressing yourself not holding it in and not hiding resonates with you because you were punished for doing that or never allowed to do that and you want desperately to do that because you want to be seen and want to be heard and want to be validated and you want to be seen as worthy then on the flip side you're also drawn to a message like mine that says thinking is just thinking thoughts are just thoughts you can throw them away you can walk away from them you don't have to engage with them it could be really confusing and so I'm starting to see a subgroup of people in this community and if this doesn't resonate with you at all well this is a podcast episode that you can kind of eject from I guess and I'll see you next week but if this does sound like you I'm starting to see a fairly large number of people in this community that are struggling with that and when they try to implement the principles of recovery from an anxiety disorder they are now silencing a voice that they are also at the same time trying very hard to cultivate support and strengthen so in some parts of life you are learning to have a bigger voice and say what you feel when you feel it because it's okay to do that and on the other side you're learning to not always say what you feel because that can sometimes steer you wrong and get you sort of dragged around by this disordered state of anxiety that tends to kind of ruin your life so you can see that what we wind up with in that case is a situation where you have two messages that don't match one is validate yourself stand up and be heard your thoughts and feelings matter and on the other side the messages your thoughts and feelings aren't always important you can drop them on the floor you do not have to always listen to your mind and body and that can start to become a really confusing and almost mind-blowing place and when I see people struggle with that sort of conflict from one message to the other I have to admit that it sort of blew my mind for a second and I try to be mindful and I know other people that sound like me we try to be mindful of the idea that we're never invalidating you we're trying to invalidate irrational fear to get you past it but depending on what your past experiences are and what you bring to this process that can create a real confusing mess where you're just not quite sure what you're supposed to do am I supposed to say what I feel am I not supposed to say what I feel when is it okay to do that when is it not okay to do that and you could really wind up a little bit stuck and feeling overwhelmed like how am I supposed to do both of these things I have these particular podcasters or social media celebrities or whatever telling me to stand up and step into my power and be seen and say what's on my mind and then I have this group of people over here that's telling me that I shouldn't always say what I feel so if you're feeling confused by that as one of the people giving you that you don't have to honor your thoughts and emotions message let me tell you I see you and I understand that we might be confusing you I'll just speak for myself I might be confusing you to a certain extent and I don't mean to do that and I don't have any answers for you today I do not have a well here's the method that you use to resolve these two methods and glue them together and knit them together I that exists and I said in the beginning of the episode this doesn't mean that your traumatic experience precludes anxiety recovery nor does it mean that your anxiety recovery precludes trauma resolution they can both be done but it takes a little bit more nuance it takes some more scale it probably takes more guidance like in person real guidance if you can get that and I know not everybody can and I'm sorry about that but I just wanted to take a few minutes today to to at least recognize that for some members of this community I know you want nothing more than to get better and overcome your panic disorder your agoraphobia your health anxiety your OCD whatever it happens to be but in the same vein you may have lived some experiences that to heal from those you have to follow a message that in some ways is opposite of what people like me or I am saying in this podcast or in my books or in my workshops or whatever it is that I'm producing so if you find that they are at odds it's okay to say if you were so inclined in a public forum this is confusing because you're telling me that my thoughts don't always matter but if I stay silent I feel trapped or I feel like I'm repeating or reliving that traumatic past when I was not allowed to speak when I was told to shut up when I was put in a corner when I was muscled away when I was abused it's okay sometimes to express that like when you tell me to do that drew or someone who sounds like drew it makes me feel like I'm going backwards into a place where I was told that I don't matter and what I think and feel is irrelevant and we don't mean it that way I don't mean it that way we're addressing a very specific type of thought that's based on irrational fear and irrational belief when never trying to invalidate you as a person or everything you think or feel is irrelevant that's not true so again I wish I could tell you that I have a solution for this but I don't what I have is at least an understanding that this is a real problem it can be for many of you and it can be really impactful so if you're listening today and you feel like this is you just understand that I kind of get that and if I had some steps for you I would give them to you but what I would say is at least I, speaking for myself can try to be a bit more sensitive to that particular issue and understand when it might be coming across my message might be coming across the wrong way and I will try to clarify that a little bit and I will try to make some space so that if you feel that this applies to you you can speak up so somewhere in my community whether it's in the comments section or you're an Instagram subscriber or the Facebook group or whatever if you need to speak up about that go ahead because I want to hear it and I suspect that anybody that sounds like me that's trying to help the way I do wants to hear it too so that's all I have to say today on that is there a conflict between trauma recovery and recovery from an anxiety disorder maybe in this particular circumstance under this context I see enough people every day to say that I think that might be a thing and I think it just means for the helpers we need to be a little bit more in tune with that maybe we need to coordinate a little better the people helping with that and the people helping with this should probably talk a little more I could try to make that happen and whatever limited influence I have but we certainly can encourage you to speak up about your experience to help us help you a little bit to know that you're in a safe place where if you want to talk about that you can and that's about it again wish I had some better answers I don't but I do have an acknowledgement hopefully some understanding and hopefully a little bit of kindness for you and knowing that this sometimes is harder than it is for other people for people like you it is harder than it is for the rest of the people and I get that so that is it that is episode 252 of The Anxious Truth in the books a little bit more subdued and you know this one is over because there's the music that is as always after glow by my friend Ben Drake who wrote that song at least in part inspired of this podcast a few years ago and he's been nice enough to let me use it so if you want to check out Afterglow or know more about Ben Drake the musician and my friend head on over to BenDrakeMusic.com and of course if you are listening to this podcast on Spotify or Apple someplace that lets you rate or review the podcast leave a five star review and maybe take a minute to rate the podcast if you really dig it because it helps more people find it and we want to help as many people as we possibly can so thank you for that if you're watching on YouTube please subscribe to the my channel and hit the notification bell so you know when new videos come out leave a comment I circle back a couple of times a week and answer those and thank you so much for your support and for coming by this week as always I hope this business has been helpful and we'll explore this topic a little more down the road but until then just do the best you can keep trying to move forward even when it's confusing and you're not sure and if you need to speak up speak up because at least speaking for myself I promise I will listen I will be back next week with another podcast episode I don't know what I'm going to be talking about but I will be here and remember I would tell you that this is the way but that's even more confusing for some of you than it is for others so I'll just say hang in there keep going I'm cheering for you and I will see you next week take care