LEARNED BEHAVIOUR? CREATING ANXIETYThink of your subconscious mind as the “software” that you were born with, it’s highly sophisticated, co-ordinates and manages your body without having to give any thought as to how it is working. We weren’t born with an instruction manual! When you are sleeping, or awake, walking, eating, working, do you give any thought whatsoever to whether your heart is beating sufficiently to pump the blood to all parts of your body? Do you think about your breathing, how often you blink, do you swallow easily – maybe only now you are noticing your breathing, the fact that you are blinking and swallowing.
Now imagine being in the womb and you are feeling what your Mum is feeling, know her thoughts and anxieties. Also you can hear what is going on around your Mum so you hear all your Dad’s anxieties too. No-one has given them a parenting manual, they have learned from their parents, who learned from their parents and we all know about the generation gap!
What if your Mum and Dad weren’t happy? They married but didn’t love each other. When courting, maybe things between them were quite good and they had plenty to talk about but imagine if your Mum, who loved to talk, giving up her job (where she had plenty of opportunities to chat to lots of customers every day and felt needed, appreciated and maybe even loved too – she felt significant), being at home, alone, waiting for her husband to come home for lunch or to return from work in the evening, but he wasn’t interested in talking (often that is a trait of men, not wanting to talk when they first return home – they have a need to re-charge their batteries differently to women) and certainly isn’t interested in the subjects that she wanted to talk about.
How would your Mum feel? Unloved (and yet she’d come from loving parents, a loving home), alone, lonely, scared of what the future holds and maybe even anxious.
Remember what it’s like to be a parent for the first time. You suddenly have total responsibility for someone else, so much so that all your focus is on the baby but what about you? You often take a side seat, your priorities (needs, wants, desires) are no longer important! You want to do what you want to do but you have no choice, you have to look after the baby. You want to have some quality time for yourself, get a good nights sleep but you are on duty 24/7 – unless you have loving, supportive, parents who will babysit for you, or look after the baby whilst you go on holiday, or you can afford an au pair, you are totally responsible for someone else (often that responsibility is down to the Mum rather than the Dad).
What if the baby has poor health, maybe the baby cries a lot and the parents don’t know what to do. They will become anxious and the baby will pick up on that. Maybe the baby is anxious and that’s why he’s unwell and so he makes the parents anxious!
All parents want their children to be born healthy. If they aren’t healthy it causes stress and anxiety and maybe some guilt too – maybe they think it’s their fault!
So imagine that environment for all concerned. The Mum wanted a baby, looked forward and longed for this baby but when it arrives it is anxious and repels the love, the cuddles and affection the Mum wants to shower on it! The Mum not only feels rejected by her husband, she is rejected by her much longed for baby too.
It’s also possible the baby chose the state of mind before it was even conceived, decided the challenge it was going to set for itself as a lesson to learn and overcome!
Whatever the situation, anxiety is a large part of that family. Less than 2 years down the road the Mum is desperate to feel loved, to receive some affection and attention so she finds it in another man. The baby is aware of this and feels insecure, wondering if his Mum is going to leave him, maybe he is worried what will happen if his Dad finds out, what will happen to him then. Then a baby brother arrives and there is more stress and anxiety and the attention and love that was available has to be shared. Another year or so and the Mum is having another affair, this is worse for the first born, knowing that his Mum is seeing two men and the new man visits the house regularly, often daily. More stress and anxiety.
The Dad knows about the second affair but strangely doesn’t do anything about it but of course it causes him stress and anxiety and his mind is distracted when he comes home. Maybe he doesn’t give too much attention to his children, he can only think of himself. However, he has no-one to talk to about it (he would be embarrassed to admit to anyone his wife is being unfaithful), he can't see his own short comings, blames his wife, occasionally gets angry, lashes out and hits his wife. This adds to the wife's believes that she isn't loved, does she blame herself, or her husband? Would she love him more or less?
Then another child is born so now 3 are sharing their parents attention and love, plus the Mum is regularly seeing another man who she is very much in love with, so maybe the children feel neglected and certainly insecure and anxious!
The strange thing with this scenario is that we can possibly see why all those involved would feel anxious but what they aren’t aware of is that they are in control of how they feel! They have chosen to feel anxious. For the children this could be a learned behavior, they learn from their parents and don’t know that it isn’t normal to be able to live without anxiety, so it becomes a habit, something that they believe they have no control over, something that they will have to live with for the rest of their lives.
They learn strategies to avoid feeling anxious but because “feeling anxious” is always in their thoughts, that’s what they feel most of the time and they attract situations where they feel anxious. At times their strategies work, they can break that state and can feel relaxed and comfortable, but if anything changes in their strategies (and they have become a routine, a habit), then they are immediately in that negative state again.
What strategies do you think they might use? Maybe one becomes a bit of a loner, doesn't feel he can rely on anybody for fear of getting hurt, one is a bit of a character, always seeking attention by making people laugh so he seems to those on the outside to be happy and carefree. When another child is born, a girl, who is to the boys seems spoilt and of course gets all the love and attention from their parents because she gives it back, the brothers bully her. She has a troubled teenage life by which time she loses the a lot of the love and attention from her parents because they are so absorbed with their own emotional traumas, so she turns to chocolate, cakes and biscuits to try and recapture the sweetness in her life. Dieting soon becomes the norm and is a constant for the rest of her life!
And so the story develops - I'm sure you can imagine a few more scenarios.
Anxiety is a fear, a fear of the unknown. How many times do we worry about something, get nervous, anxious about a future event (going over it in our minds, constantly picturing all the things that could go wrong, torturing ourselves) but it never happens!
Perhaps if we had kept a record of all the times we’ve been anxious and our negative thoughts didn’t come into fruition, we could learn from that and see that we have caused ourselves a lot of pain. It’s not just emotional pain either, we harm ourselves physically with our anxious thoughts – Blood Pressure increases ……
The future events that we get anxious about, are they life threatening? Would it help to put them into perspective or to realize that the anxiety could be addressed by letting go of our doubts and fears about ourselves, to finally believe in ourselves, recognize all that we have achieved, all that we have overcome, truly know that we have the resources within us if only we’d let them shine through.
Our imagination is very powerful, we can create whatever scenario that we want in our minds, so why not create a positive one instead, one that makes us feel good? Think of a possible future scenario that could make you feel anxious and quickly think beyond it and notice how you feel. Look to the future event, go past it, turn around and look back towards now and notice how you feel.
The above is a real family situation, viewed from an outside perspective, giving an understanding as to why some of the family members suffer from emotional baggage and live a life of misery. Is that what you want? If not then investigate Mind Harmony 4 Life, take the first step to heal, change and transform your life by removing any mind viruses - instead of doing a body detox you'll find it's more valuable and beneficial to detox your mind!
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