Dumping Your Anxiety

In my last post, I shared some very interesting information from Dr Paul Dobransky's ebook called MindOS™ - "The Operating System of the Human Mind". I love the way he explains complex emotional behaviour in a logical, straightforward manner. He showed how avoiding anxiety in our grief is really a passive response to anxiety. While avoidance can be helpful in the first few months after our spouse dies, eventually we need to actively deal with our anxiety if we ever want to heal.

In tonight's post, I'll continue Dr Paul's teaching about responding to our anxiety "signal." As he already explained, anxiety is a signal that we have fears, challenges, change or risk to face, and there are only three ways to respond to anxiety. In my last post, we covered the only passive response, namely avoidance or impulsiveness. This post will look at one of the two active responses to anxiety: worry and complaining.

[pages 188-189]:

When we think destructively with anxiety, Mind OS calls that "Victim-thinking", "martyr-thinking", or masochism, where you take on a "poor me" attitude, erroneously believing that you are truly hopeless, or helpless. You worry about the future and complain without offering solutions. You regret the past, and essentially are WISHING you controlled the uncontrollable, "dumping" your anxiety into someone else's boundary.

Doing all this may seem harmless, but it is NOT. You are dumping your anxiety into someone else to let them worry about FOR you. It is childish, WIN/LOSE behavior, where you WIN relief but someone else LOSES their sense of peace, by absorbing your negative energy.

Is an adult person who walks and talks and can do adult things ever truly hopeless or helpless? NO! Never. Sure, a CHILD can't just go out and get a job, or buy a home to fix their problems, but adults CAN. To think otherwise is an illusion. When we get masochistic, victim-like beliefs about the world, it forces others to participate in the mechanics of OUR illusion. This is where anxiety connects to depression.

[pages 191-192]:

When we decide to take the destructive, immature "quick-fix" of immediate gratification, we find that others can sometimes be convenient "dumping grounds" for our complaints and worries. This happens especially if they have holes in their boundary where we can "push their buttons," shame and manipulate them into accepting our anxiety FOR us. We then "WIN" and they "LOSE."

Note that all the traits that go with playing the victim are also characteristics of nonbiological depression, and they are an illusion. We complain to the boss, we whine and moan about how helpless we are, we allow ourselves to believe there is no hope, and finally find ourselves winding into masochistic depressive thinking.

When we do this attitude long enough, people will get sick of it and turn on us, abandoning us and leaving us with even more loss than before. Complainers, whiners, moaners, and masochists attract the attention of soft-hearted friends in the short run, but tire them out and lose those friends in the long run. So a negative feedback loop occurs where we get negative momentum for our personal growth. We started to make a "mountain out of a molehill" that drives friends and solutions away...

Now you're probably reading this and thinking, "uh, HELLO!!! My spouse is DEAD. This is NOT a molehill. It is a thousand Everests!!!" And I agree. It is probably the most painful, agonizing ordeal we ever have to go through in our whole life.

Keep in mind that this ebook was not written for the bereaved, so it can come across as a bit harsh and uncaring. Yet the phenomenon of dumping our anxiety into someone else's boundary is all too common. Why do you suppose "friends" and acquaintances vanish after the funeral? They cannot deal with our immense sorrow, so they avoid us, adding to our losses.

But to grieve, we absolutely must get our feelings out by talking! We need to talk about our anxiety and fears in order to heal, but if we tell our friends, they can't deal with our hopelessness and they leave! How unfair is that? And how do we resolve this paradox?

Well, you've probably already guessed the answer: bereavement support groups. Try to find a support group like Bereaved Families of Ontario, one run by volunteers who have themselves suffered a similar loss. The primary reason to attend these groups is precisely to express your sense of "poor me," hopelessness and helplessness, worry about the future, complaints without solutions, regret about the past, and wishing you controlled the uncontrollable, all that unflattering stuff in the first quoted paragraph above. The major difference here is that support group attendees can relate to you and support you, unlike your friends and acquaintances.

You are not expecting these strangers to worry about all this stuff for you — you just want (and need) for someone to listen. You need to get your pain and frustrations out. Keeping them bottled up inside is a recipe for lifelong misery. And when you are finished talking, you can be there to listen for someone else who needs you just as much as you need them. Sitting with someone else in pain is one of the most powerful gifts you can ever give another human being. And when you give this gift to someone else, you heal yourself in return.

The Rollercoaster III

In my last post, Dr Paul explained in his book MindOS™ - "The Operating System of the Human Mind" that anger and anxiety are the roots of our poor self-esteem as widow/ers, and that the remedy is to be assertive, face our fears, and work to get our needs met. There are several ways to respond to both anger and anxiety, and in this last post of the series, I'll explain the results of each.

Anger is neither good nor bad — it is a signal that something is wrong — our needs are not being met. Dr Paul explains that there are only three possible responses for anger [pg 161]:



One response is to make no decision and sink into depression; in other words, do nothing to get our needs met. A second response is to act aggressively to get our needs met at someone else's expense in a win/lose scenario. Acting aggressively will cause ourselves more hurt, which will cause more anger, resulting in more aggression in a vicious cycle. The last response is to be assertive and work out win/win solutions to meeting our needs. This is the path to maturity and adds to our well-being.

Likewise for anxiety, there are only three possible responses [pg 183]:



Again, anxiety is a signal that something is wrong — we are harbouring fear. One way to respond to this signal is to be impulsive or avoidant and is the passive way to respond. This includes actions like:

• over-eating


• over-spending


• addictions


• drug abuse


• workaholism


• being busy just to be busy

Another response is to act like a victim and think that the world is out to get you (win/lose). This includes regret about the past and wishing that you controlled the uncontrollable (like wanting to have life return to the way it was when our spouse was alive). Essentially, this means trying to dump your anxiety into someone else's boundary instead of working to resolve it yourself. In widowhood, this commonly manifests by thinking "if only I had done something different, my spouse wouldn't have died and everything would be better now." When we verbalize this to others, we're trying to unload our anxiety onto them, and we lose their support. This causes further loss when they pull away from us, resulting in another vicious cycle.

The way out of anxiety is through courage by facing our fears. When we do what is right even when we are afraid to do so, this restores our confidence and builds our trust in ourselves and others. It is the other half of building positive energy back into our lives.

Does this make sense? Ever since I read this book, my thinking has totally changed. I can now catch myself getting angry or anxious, and I know now to work in positive ways to face my fears and work towards getting my needs met. So, I go to work on that guy in the mirror. Each time I succeed, even if just a little, I build my self-confidence and improve my quality of life.

I believe this perspective on the grief roller coaster is the major reason why I no longer feel the pain of grief. It is up to me to ensure my needs are being met, and it is also up to me to overcome my fears about the future and learn to trust others (and life!) again.

I hope you find this map as helpful as I do. It is one of the major power-tools in my grief recovery toolbox.

The Rollercoaster II

In my last post titled The Rollercoaster, I described the full spectrum of emotional experience we go through as grievers. Tonight I'll complete the picture by explaining how to go from the low energy states to higher ones. It makes perfect sense when you think about it.

What causes the low energy states of anger and anxiety? In a word: stress. The stress can come from outside ourselves or from inside our mind. Let's look at another chart [pg 150]:



According to Dr Paul in his book MindOS™ - "The Operating System of the Human Mind", when the stress is external, anger comes from hurt, and anxiety comes from loss. Both impact our self-esteem. Is it any wonder, then, that as widow/ers, we suffer such a tremendous hit to our self-esteem? A double-whammy of hurt and loss, right between our eyes. Under normal circumstances, if we have a high-enough personal boundary, it can ward off external hurt and loss and can minimize the damage to our self-esteem. However, I believe that everyone is deeply affected by the loss of their spouse, regardless of how well-defined their personal boundary is. The stress is simply too overwhelming.

So, you might be thinking, it is all well and good to know this stuff, but how can I use it to feel better? How do I transform anger into well-being and anxiety into confidence?

First, it helps to understand that once stress is inside our boundary, it manifests in one of two ways: anger stems from our needs not being met, and anxiety arises from a loss of confidence and/or trust [pg 153]:



So, we see that the remedy for anger is to get our needs met, and the remedy for anxiety is to face our fears. I'm going to suggest that in the first year or so of grief, this is easier said than done!

Now that our spouse is dead, we face a huge laundry list of unmet needs. For example:

• Love


• Friends


• Income


• Freedom


• Creativity


• Leisure

And our confidence in ourselves, as well as our trust in God and the very foundations of the world, is shattered. Still, it is helpful to know what steps we need to take to feel better. The journey of the bereaved is one of slowly facing our fears and working towards getting our needs met. Like eating an elephant, we do this one little bite at a time.

For my next post, I'll conclude by showing the only possible reactions to both anger and anxiety, and that should complete our map of the roller coaster. When the next big downswing comes, you'll know exactly where you are. Where you go from there is up to you.

The Rollercoaster

If you've been grieving for any length of time, you probably relate to the title of this post. One minute, you feel yourself plunging down into the depths of despair, wondering how low you can go. The next day, you can feel pretty good, them something goes well and you feel ecstatic for a bit, then something else happens and you're plunging down again. Another analogy is feeling like being bounced around in a big emotional clothes dryer. Sound familiar?

Would it be helpful if you had a map to this rollercoaster? It might be helpful to know when the next big drop is coming, as well as the loop-de-loop around the corner...

I'm about half-way through a very interesting book by Dr Paul Dobransky called MindOS™ - "The Operating System of the Human Mind". He's got lots of very interesting diagrams in there, and several stood out very clearly to me as I recognized what I was looking at — the Grief Rollercoaster!

Dr Paul talks at length about the Spectrum of Negative Emotional Energy. Here's his chart [pg 142]:


He explains that anger and anxiety are opposite emotions, and that other negative emotions are a combination of the two. The benefit to knowing this is that we can learn how to master all negative emotions — we just need to know how to master the two ends of the spectrum, anger and anxiety.

We can learn how to transform these two negative extremes into positive emotional energy, the two ends of which are well-being and confidence [pg 145]:


Now when I saw that chart, I saw instantly the sides of that emotional clothes dryer I had been tumbling around inside of for many months. It made sense to me as I looked at it and thought back over my many trips on the roller coaster. One minute I was feeling anger at my situation, then I did something and had a bit more well-being, then I plunged down into anxiety, then I did something else and felt a wonderful sense of confidence. Wash, rinse, and repeat.

In my next post, I'll explain the causes of both anger and anxiety, as well as what we need to do to transform our negative emotional energies into positive ones.