Causes of Anxiety: Trauma, Childhood Neglect and Suppressed Anger
Written by Roland Bal
Unfortunately, you can't surgically dislodge anxiety and treat it as something separate from the rest of who you are. And who you are is a little more complex.
Anxiety in itself is already confusing. It saps your energy away from reason and thinking clearly, stirring up other parts, making you either want to run, confront, or freeze altogether — each depending on their severity and your particular character.
Anxiety also curtails your self-esteem and projects itself onto pretty much everything. How people see you, your performance at work, how you look at yourself in terms of body-image or sense of self.
Anxiety saps your energy away from reason and thinking clearly, stirring up other parts, making you either want to run, confront, or freeze altogether.
In short, anxiety can take over your life.
Three Root Causes of Anxiety
There are different ways through which fear and the causes of anxiety start to manifest themselves:
- Overwhelming or life-threatening events. When your life has been in danger — through an accident, violence, or abuse — and you haven't been able to fully process it, your alarm bells keep firing through projection or flashbacks.
- Prolonged stress that splits your sense of time. When you are continuously working to deadlines, or stuck in a relationship that isn't working but can't leave, part of you lives in the future while your body lives in the here and now. That division creates chronic anxiety.
- Early childhood trauma that hasn't been addressed. This is the most common but least recognizable cause. Most anxiety doesn't just start from one day to the next — there has already been a gradual emotional build-up that has started to compromise your healthy sense of self.
Child Abuse, Neglect and Anxiety
When addressing developmental issues, the initial emotional build-up is often anger and frustration. Expressing one's own meaning, truth, anger, and frustration in an abusive environment is often met by more abuse or neglect — and so you learn to keep it locked inside.
While on the outside you may have had to resort to: avoiding situations, withdrawing into yourself, pretending that all is OK, or pleasing the ones around you for your survival.
When that persists and continues for a longer period of time while growing up, that very suppression of anger results in a lack of boundaries — often driving the need for control and compromises your ability to say your own 'yes' or 'no' authentically.
And that absence of boundaries makes for confusion as to who you are and what you want — and also who the other is or what they want — as you are constantly adapting to others: parents, siblings, teachers.
This is where anxiety slowly starts to take over.
How Suppressed Anger Creates Anxiety
This confusion gives rise to a lack of a 'sense of self' which makes for anxiety and depression. It is this anxiety that starts to project itself onto your life situations. Anxiety covers up the deep hurt and anger which sits deeper but is intimately related to it.
The relationship between anger and anxiety is crucial to understand. Boundaries and anger are of the same energy. If anger is not expressed or healthily contained, it turns inward and becomes anxiety. If healthily expressed, it becomes boundaries and more clarity.
From Anxiety to Healthy Boundaries
It is by addressing, expressing, and owning the deeper held anger that anxiety will drastically diminish. That suppressed energy can be transformed into healthy alertness and excitement.
This needs to be done carefully — preferably with people you feel safe with or in a therapeutic setting — as anxiety will mount first while you start expressing anger and reclaiming your boundaries. Writing can be a good tool to start with as well.
The goal isn't to become aggressive. It's to reclaim your capacity to say yes when you mean yes, and no when you mean no. When that authentic boundary is restored, the anxiety that was filling in for it begins to lose its grip.
38 Comments
Definitely the third one. Through therapy I've been able to largely diminish the first two, and have gotten the tools to deal with the third, but the third is what continues to overwhelm me on a consistent basis, and what takes concentrated mindfulness to deal with.
Thanks for your comment! Some patterns does take more time to lose their force. There is the emotional residue to be worked through and further on there is the addressing of the identity that has been built around that hurt but can keep infusing new energy into old wounds. Both need to be tackled in the end.
Childhood neglect and VERY complex relationship with a domineering mother who herself had survived a childhood where extreme physical abuse and neglect were treated as normal. Add to this a severe breakdown sparked by possible date-rape while a VERY lonely, confused 1st year uni student. And I wonder why I'm still alive? Sheer ANGER and RAGE has kept me going, but at 59 I am totally burnt out. My biggest concern is the date-rape-deleted memories. I am DETERMINED to recall them, cannot let go, will never forgive… Yeah. Dunno why I'm bothering to write this! Cos it feels like I don't matter anymore… as if I ever did!
Thanks for sharing Mary.
Hi Mary, wow that's a big burden to carry through your life. It is never too late for therapy, maybe even hypnosis if you want to process the date rape and heal. Recovery is a recovery of yourself, your true self.
Once the damage is caused during early childhood does anxiety become part of you just as security or happiness becomes part of you with proper care and if so is it simply impossible to ever lose it?
It does indeed seem so. To own one's anger/boundaries will assist in managing or resolving anxiety.
Not respecting own boundaries, truths, sense of self…
I concur, but it doesn't have to be a negative experience. I have had lifelong anxiety, depression, guilt etc. and I finally have almost completely turned it around by changing my perception. Might as well just check out if you think it is all for naught, but I am of the mindset that it is all for my growth into the Divine Being I was always meant to be. I had to go through all of this and come out the other side to truly be myself. Thank you, everyone, who participated in my angst!
Indeed!
After learning so much about the horrid manifestations of many different types of trauma I have had to deal with, the biggest light bulb moment was learning to live without being in victim mode. Victims attract prey and understanding this simple truth has started me on the wonderful path to freedom. Every word or action I make now includes a 3 second thought process….NOT to portray the victim I was and rather empower myself with words and actions of strength. So far so good and I do believe the new me is beginning to bud.
Hi Eve. That's a great point to share here. Thx!
I have started my lengthy treatment and from session 1 to 2 I find me focused on my anger. It's been there a long time but hidden away making me feel ill. It's surfacing along with other emotions and I feel very ill physically and emotionally. I am exhausted but committed to the process. It is interesting how anger has become the first awareness I have in this process. I want to feel it, understand it and be able to let it go. I want to move on but it's going to be a long process…..and that's ok.
Hi Jacqueline. Happy to hear you are working on this and seeing the relationship between anger and anxiety. Often the prep for allowing oneself to feel and having enough resilience to meet what is within oneself takes more of the work than the actual moving through the emotion(s). Both are necessary though.
I could barely finish the article, everything relates. My whole childhood was one huge conglomerate of feelings, thoughts, and anything that had to do with who I was trapped inside myself with no avenue of escape. No one wanted to hear it, I didn't have a voice, even if I did try, I was silenced. Fear was my life. I did not know what anxiety was – but I knew that I was an empty shell of a person. It is very safe to say — Anxiety has ruined my life. It still rules my life – even after 25 years of therapy. So, I concur. Thanks for the information.
Thanks for your comment Gina and sharing part of your story.
The one that resonates mostly is the 3rd about boundaries and always saying yes when I don't want to and always trying to please others to get approval.
The pleasing factor is a tough one! Stepping up one's boundaries is to also meet one's fear.
That's exactly how I am – I don't even feel like I know who I am a lot of the time.
I have been looking at your work and it is frightening how accurate you are. I can relate to everything, my life is "my normal" never considered it was anything else till now.
Hi Karen. Good to have you here and finding my writings resonate with you.
Even having a balanced life and not having deep problems, anxiety may arise if my attention is totally directed toward outside.. news..noise….images..to all kind of forms without any insight of my inner state of consciousness… a space for quietness and self-observation helps me to return in the here and now…and dissolves anxiety.
Yessss, psychological time!
All of them for me, I was abused as a child, bullied at school and work, first tried to kill myself at 12 years old had no help for it just got abused even more. I now have trust and anger problems can't trust a therapist I've had 30 plus over the years, they just drug me up anyway, I struggle with every relationship in my life.
How do you go into the past and bring up the residue and deal with it? Is it a chemical reaction, an emotional release of trauma of past hurts? How does the pain surface and where does it go? I have battled anxiety for so long and it affects my relationships the most especially with my loved ones. This was born from my upbringing. How do we go back and remember then resurface to surrender?
It is a careful process of negotiating allowance to 'sit' with activation and uncomfortable feeling of the past and by doing that slowly process that emotional residue. If it is hard to do on your own I'd suggest to do with someone who knows the territory.
I relate to number three. Since both parents have passed there are a lot of unanswered questions. One right out lied to my sister and I on her death bed.
The third type of anxiety definitely resonates with me, I feel I suffered trauma from early emotional neglect and as I was growing up I was never able to express anger. My self esteem and sense of myself has been affected throughout my life and when my wounds are triggered, I can experience what feels like extreme anxiety and feels extremely debilitating where I go into freeze or flight mode and I feel like I disappear into myself and become a shell.
What do you mean when you say anxiety splits your sense of time?
Have a read further on in the article at point 2.)
Whao Roland – you put into words exactly what I am dealing with right now. I am connecting with all the layers of mixed up emotions and learning – not to survive but to live. It's one step at a time. It might be baby steps but it's my steps.
Hi Louise. Great to hear the article resonated with you. Keep going.
I really enjoyed this article along with others I've read on the subject here. I used to find it harder to have boundaries and say no when asked to do something I didn't want to do but now with 4 kids I am able to say no more but it's still hard and I realise I put more value on everyone else's time. I have definitely gotten in touch with my anger in the last 2 years but it's embedded in fear and anxiety, sometimes I feel my anxiety is being expressed through anger as it feels slightly more safe than making me feel weak like I was as a child.
This was quite helpful as I could relate it to some of my cases and it gives more insight as to how they react in certain ways to situations.
Dear Roland, having problems re-finding the article on which I wished to comment… It was about child abuse/neglect and homed in on "idolizing the neglectful parent" in a situation where the other parent is domineering and physically/verbally abusive. Once again, I find you have hit-the-nail-on-the-head as regards getting to the heart of what went wrong in my childhood. And yes, I did – and to a certain extent still do – idolize my father. He was gentle, affectionate, a talented musician… But sadly unable to cope with a marriage partner who had suffered a traumatic childhood and was so completely unable to give or receive affection.
Hi Mary. Thanks for sharing your story.
The only cure is mindfulness and being present. Anxiety is projecting the past into the now or future. The egoic mind must be terminated – do not subsume to its hectic spiraling insidious entropy! It's the path to insanity not the yellow brick road.
I could totally relate to all of it, the eggshell walking and knowing what topics cannot be spoken of.
Leave a Comment