Hi Darling,
We've created a cycle of negativity and validation. When you feel anxious about something and are looking to be comforted, you share the anxious feelings with me, and then I validate your anxiety by feeding it and comforting you. So without either of us noticing, I've rewarded those anxious feelings with the very validation that we're all seeking from our loved ones. Consequently, I've created a link between anxiety and validation, where you can initialize a spiral of worry and end up being on a sure path to feeling validated.
The cycle is a bad outcome despite my good intentions of always trying to make you feel seen and supported. In response, I've been trying to identify the negative implications of supporting anxious thinking so that we can shift how we make each other feel seen. Because making you feel seen isn't enough when I know it's severely impacting the way we view the world. That's the first negative implication I've noticed-- we so often find what we look for in life. So the more we worry about a negative outcome, the more we're looking for that outcome.
I think a lot of the 'we find what we look for' principle happens at a subconscious level. I feel like it's too complex to explain precisely, but I've conjured a metaphor that seems fairly accurate. Imagine that the thoughts and feelings that shape the way you experience reality are determined by a number of characters [I picture little monsters] in your subconscious. Each character represents an emotion like joy or stress. The sole mission of the characters is to get enough thought tokens so that they can run the feeling machine in the central nervous system. Only one character is allowed to run the machine at a time and it allows them to make the person feel an emotional sequence. Of course, the characters are driven to generate feelings that correspond to their assigned emotion, and they're all very creative. But in spite of sharing creativity as a common thread, some characters are more aggressive than others- often lobbying in the capital of consciousness for thought tokens in unsavory ways. Regardless of fairness across characters, we, as the controller of our consciousness, have discretion on how many thought tokens we give to each character. We just can't forget that the more tokens we give to a character, to more it gets to run the feeling machine and make us feel a certain way about our reality.
When I've validated your anxiety, and in many ways encouraged you to think more anxious thoughts, I've been helping the efforts of the anxiety character. A character who needs no additional help, based on what I've seen of their voracious appetite for thought tokens and incredulous lobbying tactics. And although I'm trying to avoid aiding anxiety and worry, I do sincerely want to always make you feel supported. I'm just struggling to figure out the best way.
Based on your recommendation, I did end up having a quick chat with your friend Faith. Ok, maybe it was a couple chats that, despite intentions to keep them quick, ended up getting progressively longer every time we talked. It pains me to say it, but I actually really like her. I never thought I would because she sees the world almost completely opposite of me. Unsurprisingly, we've always felt like natural enemies. Anyway, she does have some helpful wisdom.
When we talked about how I can improve and best support you, she encouraged me to help you believe in something positive and practical, regardless of the situation. Initially, I was like "um- you're literally just telling me to be more optimistic," but then I realized there was more depth, especially with the practical piece. So- to test it out- let's revisit the example of that creepy new colleague. In this case, I'm suppose to help you believe that there's a positive reason for the new colleague being there. So remember how you were saying you were frustrated that you weren't getting any clear opportunities to show you're ready for more managerial responsibility? Well, forming deeper bonds with other colleagues and showing you're a leader by improving the creepy guy's self awareness is a great way to step into more leadership power. Much more so than looking for violating innuendo between the lines of almost everything he says.
Somehow, I'm supposed to help make you feel like there's a purpose behind everything that stresses you out, beyond just giving us something to have anxiety over. And although that feels nearly impossible, it's made more sense the more I've thought about it. After all, we do get to choose what character our thought tokens go to, so we might as well be persistent about putting them somewhere productive. Still, it just seems so hard to actually believe that bad things could happen for a positive reason.
If we truly believe that there's a positive reason behind everything and we get really good at finding it, then I suppose the very notion of 'negative things' disappears. We then get to live freely as masters of interpreting life as a sequence of positive events, connected by something we don't always understand but always choose to believe in. To me, there's so much beauty in that worldview, and it gives me so much hope that I can help anxiety disappear instead of creating toxic dependency. That way, we can love ourselves, each other, and others much more.
Believing,
Fear