“Connection Is More Powerful Than Anxiety”
UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session.
Sheryl Lisa Finn: Anxiety is an appropriate response to a lot of what’s happening. And at the same time, we all need tools for how to navigate, for how to come back into our most centered self, to sit at the head of that table primarily so that we can fight whatever fight and bring whatever light into the world that we are called to bring
Tami Simon: In this episode of Insights at the Edge, my guest is Sheryl Lisa Finn. Sheryl is an author, educator, and counselor informed by Jungian depth psychology. She’s guided thousands of people worldwide through the tricky terrain of anxiety through her courses, blog, books, and private sessions. She herself became intimately familiar with anxiety when she had her first panic attack at the age of 21. And since then, she’s devoted herself to her own inner growth and development and also helping people navigate conscious transitions and other challenging situations of all kinds that bring forth anxiety. With Sounds True, she’s the author of the book, The Wisdom of Anxiety and also a new workbook. It’s called The Healing Anxiety Workbook: A Guide to Calm Worry and Intrusive Thoughts at the Root. Sheryl, welcome.
SLF: Thank you so much, Tami.
TS: We call these Inner Workbooks, doing the inner work, something that I think is a very good fit for you. And when I opened your new inner workbook, The Healing Anxiety Workbook, to be honest with you, I kind of almost fell off my chair during the introductory chapter. I was so surprised, because at this point I’ve interviewed north of a dozen people on the topic of anxiety, and yet you have a framing that I found tremendously helpful and simple at the same time, and I was like, oh my God, that’s brilliant, really, to be so helpful and simple. Simple doesn’t mean easy, but just easy to understand. So I want to start with this framing you offer at the beginning of the workbook. A nutshell definition anxiety in a nutshell is a lack of safety. Tell me how you got to that working definition.
SLF: So we can think of anxiety in a lot of different ways, and I think it’s one of those terms that we throw around a lot, but we don’t often know exactly what it means. We know what it feels like when we’re anxious. Everybody has had the experience of feeling anxious, but not necessarily why and what’s at the core. So to pare it down in that way to say anxiety is at the core, a lack of safety gives the reader, gives whoever’s in this conversation a very direct inroad so we can feel safe in the outer world, unsafe in the outer world in terms of our physical environment or outer threats that might be coming in. But this book and my work is about ways that we feel unsafe internally. And as I say in the introduction, if we understand what the root is, then we can reverse engineer and say, okay, so if that’s where we feel the result of feeling unsafe is to feel anxious, then we want to learn how to feel safe and what are the steps, actions, principles that help us feel deeply safe inside and then taking the actions that help us to grow that sense of safety so that we feel less anxious.
TS: And this was the real sort of fall off my chair moment. You write, connection is the remedy, and I want to start right here to start with the headline. Don’t underestimate the power of connection to dissolve anxiety. And this is what I want to hear more about and how you’ve seen this with the people you work in your own life experience really dissolve anxiety in the moment.
SLF: Yes, it doesn’t mean it won’t come back, but connection is everything. We are knowing this more and more culturally that when we are disconnected from ourselves from each other, when we forget that we are all in this together, when we forget that we are embedded into the natural world, into the unseen world, into worlds that we can’t even really begin to understand with our conscious minds, when we forget that inherent sense of connection, we feel anxious. So connection is everything. We will feel disconnected in this life. It’s part of being human. It’s part of our existential plight on this earth. Unfortunately, from the moment we are born, from the moment we are expelled from our mother’s womb, we are experiencing separation, right? We’ve gone from oneness to separateness and we’re kind of spending our whole lives trying to figure out how to scramble back into some sense of connectedness, togetherness.
So connection is everything. And when we are connected, and the diagram I lay out in the book is connected to ourselves, connected to others in a variety of ways and connected to the unseen realm, we have a deep sense of safety. So we’re back at the root place of safety. We feel attached because attachment is connection. So there’s a lot of work now in the realm of attachment, healthy attachment, attachment, parenting, attachment in relationships. When we feel attached, we are connected, we feel safe, it edges anxiety out, we are then in that deep centered place of I am safe. I am okay, I am being taken care of in this moment. It doesn’t mean bad things don’t happen, but even in between and underneath the bad things, we can arrive back into that core place of I am held, I connected to myself, others in the unseen realm, therefore I feel safe, therefore I feel less anxious.
TS: Now I want to ask you a lot more about this. You offer this opening metaphor that I think people have heard. If you put salt in a cup, you can’t drink it, but if you put it into a lake, you don’t even know the salt’s there. And I can relate to that with anxiety in terms of if I’m, let’s say connecting. Recently a small child went to sleep on my lap and it was just such a, no, I couldn’t feel anxious in that moment, but then the small child is returned to their parents and it’s me again, and how am I getting to anxiety at the root? I’m just pausing it during those moments of connection.
SLF: Great question. So as I say in the introduction, when there are deep causes of anxiety related to trauma, then we need to be working on that level. We need to be working with a trauma-informed therapist, EMDR, somatic. There’s all kinds of wonderful, beautiful ways of working with trauma at the root. So if we’re just trying to stave off that deep seated place of anxiety that is rooted in trauma, it’s not going to do much to try to connect, connect, connect, connect. But as I also talk about in the introduction, intention is everything. So if we’re approaching our lives with the intention of trying to stave off and run from anxiety, I’m just going to connect to my friend and I’m going to write a poem and I’m going to work out so that I can run from the anxiety demon back there. We will never outrun it, but if we have the intention of connection, right, I’m going and moving towards the next action in my life to open to that place of connectivity, then we’re spending more and more of our lives.
We are widening that lake of connection by the actions that we take. It’s a workbook, it’s an action-based book, and all the work that I teach is action-based because there’s only so much that we can learn theoretically in our heads before we realize that we need to take action and we need to kind of be filling our days with connectivity so that we are feeling that deep place inside of the lake, widening and widening and widening. So we’re not just going from one connective action to the next. We’re actually feeling it in the core of our beings. Now we are also, human anxiety is going to seep back in, it seeps back in for me, it seeps back in for everybody that I know and then we return. And so the way I understand it is that we are constantly in this process of forgetting and remembering of leaving and returning, and hopefully as we move along the path of life and we do more and more of these practices, that we spend longer amounts of time in the place of remembering, in the place of trusting that we are okay, that we are being held, that we are connected, but it doesn’t mean we’re not going to get knocked off.
And especially when there are bigger circumstances going on in our lives, if we are in the midst of a big transition, for example, or there’s something going on with one of our kids or we’re in a health crisis, it’s not easy to stay in that nice lake of connectivity. The anxiety’s going to come back in, but the more we can return to any of these practices that help us to connect and remember the deeper place of okayness, the less we get kind of knocked off, the easier it is to return.
TS: Well, I want to ask you another question about the anxiety that comes from traumatic experience because I think a lot of people would say, well, I think the fact that I didn’t have the kind of bonding in my family that’s a trauma or even just the inherited trauma from my family stories, that’s a trauma. Where do you draw the line of like, oh, this is anxiety from trauma that just going around connecting with other people and animals isn’t going to touch. How do you make that go see a trauma therapist, this workbook’s not going to be enough for you, or this approach of focusing on connection as the remedy won’t be strong enough for your situation?
SLF: And it might be right. I can’t say that it won’t because when we have an experience of being deeply connected, it is the remedy. It is the medicine for those kinds of attachment ruptures that many people experience early in life, even abusive situations that people experience early in life, that working with a trauma-informed therapist is really fundamentally about coming back into our bodies and connecting and connecting often with, well, sometimes the therapist themselves is a source of healing, but in our own work, separate from therapy sessions, connecting with our source of goodness are something bigger than ourselves. The tree that lives in our backyard and developing a relationship with the tree, which I have, all of those exercises are in the workbook. So it’s on one level we can say, well, it’s just a workbook. It’s not going to touch those deeper layers, but it can, when we work with them and we develop those regular practices that I suggest in the book, it can be an additional source of healing in addition to working with somebody else.
It’s not a replacement for therapy. I don’t think any book is a replacement for therapy. It’s just not going to give what happens in that one-on-one intensive environment in that relational environment. But it’s certainly a good addendum to any other work that you’re doing in your life now. Sure. I would say most of us have some kind of attachment rupture, and if you are committing to these kinds of actions, it can heal at the root. It can create more of that connectivity that is the medicine for the rupture of connection. But there is also the basic existential premise of being human, which is regardless of the trauma that you may or may not have suffered as a child or anytime in your life, we are walking around on this earth knowing that change death loss exists at any moment and that we could lose somebody we love or be diagnosed with something at any moment something could happen to our child. At any moment,
TS: I’m getting more and more anxious as you’re describing all of the possibilities here.
SLF: But that’s the reality, right?
TS: Yeah, of course.
SLF: That is the reality that we all know, even if we push it aside, we all know we live on this incredibly uncertain planet because change in death exists. It’s a real bummer. Often I will say, what is it with this planet? Maybe there’s a better planet somewhere where you don’t have to die. And we have our beloved member of our family cat at the moment, who was diagnosed with very aggressive cancer. And we are heartbroken, right? We are just heartbroken. She’s still here, but not for long. And it’s just heartbreaking when somebody you love human or non-human is going through the dying process and you know are going to lose them. And I’ve had to deeply rely on all of the practices that I teach in the book and beyond and other practices as well that aren’t in the book to remain steady in the midst of profound heartbreak and loss.
And of course, one of the sections in the book is on the emotional realm, and it’s such a key part of the work that I teach is having a deep relationship with grief and the willingness to feel grief and to feel groundless and to feel uncertainty and to feel fear, to let all of that in and joy and excitement and all the positive feelings as well. But we’re only going to get so far if we’re pushing away the grief of daily life and the grief of loss that every single human on this planet has and will experience loss. So on one level it’s like, well, these are just going from connection to connection practices, but it’s really not. It’s a way of life, it’s a way, it’s a mindset. It’s a way of being with ourselves. It’s a way of moving through a day, moving through a morning, an afternoon and a night attending to all of these spheres. And I talk about 10 spheres that together form a quilt, a foundation of connectivity that we can then source into in times that are more challenging.
TS: I’ve mentioned that I’ve interviewed different people on the topic of anxiety, and I’m just going to bring this one person forward because it wasn’t that long ago, and I was very impressed. Martha Beck wrote a book on Beyond Anxiety and talked about how when we’re engaged in a creative act, we’re not anxious while we’re creating. And I thought, huh, that’s interesting that being engaged in a creative act is a form of connectivity. We’re connecting with something moving through us. And you also write about how when we’re working with our hands in some way that we’re not anxious when we’re creating with our hands. And I wonder if you can share a bit more about that, specifically the part about working with our hands.
SLF: Yes, I love that and I love the science around it that actually when our hands are in the earth or with yarn or any way that we work with our hands, that there is this connection to our brains that we’re sending the good hormones through our systems and really calming the mind. So it’s busy hands, calm mind is that practice in the book where I talk about, and I give a lot of suggestions for ways to work with our hands in case people need them, but it’s really a reminder that for most of human history we have worked with our hands and as we have become. And by working with our hands, I don’t mean scrolling on a phone, it has to be something more tactile than that, and more connected to, I think just more ancient and primal ways that we have worked with our hands, kneading dough, right?
It’s such a sensual experience where it brings us right into our bodies. So working with our hands also brings us into our bodies, and anxiety is so much a head state where we get into ruminating and processing and on that spin cycle of what if and if only, and oh my gosh, and catastrophe and all of that is a head space, even though we do feel anxiety in the body. So anything that brings us into our bodies like working with our hands, but even things like raking or shoveling snow or dancing, there’s so many ways to be in our bodies, kind of interrupts those patterns and brings us back into that place of connectivity.
TS: You mentioned having this willingness to be with the emotions, whatever they might be, the everyday griefs of our life. I’m sorry, also about your beloved cat family member. You offer in the beginning of the Inner Workbook, what you call a foundational exercise for having at the seat of an imaginary table, a figure that you refer to as our wise self or if it works for people in inner parent. And I wonder if you can share more about that and why we’re at a table, who are all these other people at the table and what’s our wives self doing here?
SLF: Yes. To me, I start with that practice because it’s critical to any inner work that we do that we’re able to locate the part of each and every one of us that does exist that is wise, compassionate, centered, like a loving parent would be. And we do all have that part. Some people think, well, I never saw that. How could I possibly have that? I didn’t have loving parents, but we all have it and I give ways to access it in the book and also in the wisdom of anxiety. So I include that because it’s a great visual. I’ve shared it with many, many clients and course members, and it always lands really well as a visual to imagine there is a table, and the illustrator of the book did a great job of showing the table, drawing the table so that we can imagine that there is a seat at the head of the table.
And if your critic, for example, or your rebellious teenager for example, is sitting at the head of a table, you’re not going to want to do any inner work. You’re either going to be bombarded with judgment and shame because that’s the critic voice or the perfectionist. Well, what’s the point? It’s not going to be perfect. I’m never going to, or the resistor. So then the other seats we name with the different characters that we all have, and IFS has done a great job of bringing all of this into the mainstream in terms of different characters. But Jung in psychology, which is what I was trained in, has been talking about this for a long time as well, that we all have these archetypes, these characters, and when we can visualize it and name it and actually write it down and put it on a piece of paper, it helps us to then identify who is in charge in this moment.
So if I wake up in the morning and I have an intention to do an exercise from the workbook, there’s a section on dream work, which is such a powerful way to stay connected to ourselves, connected to our psyche, our unconscious, very much comes from my work in the Jungian world. Great. I’m going to wake up in the morning and I’m going to write down my dream, or I’m going to work with this dream mandala that Sheryl has in the book. How cool. And I’m going to have my markers ready and my pastels, and that seems like so much fun and it’s creative and it’s connective, but I wake up and like, oh, there’s my phone and oh, I see there’s some notification. Oh, I’m just going to grab my phone real quick and check out what’s, get a little dopamine hit. That person texted me back, and then suddenly we’re going down that rabbit hole of the phone.
The why self, the parent is not in charge in that moment. That’s a different part of us. That’s like the kid or the teen that’s like, Ooh, I just want my jelly beans there. They’re, I’m going to grab ’em real quick instead of having my eggs for breakfast or whatever. So we are getting hijacked a lot by these different characters inside of us that we hand over the reins, we let them sit at the head of the table, but when we have the consciousness and the awareness to say, oh, wait a minute, right? There’s that part, I’m going to wrangle back the reins and make a different choice that I know is going to serve me, I know is going to lead to connection instead of disconnection. And to me, it starts first thing in the morning, really from the moment we wake up, we’re setting off on a path either of connection or disconnection.
Now we can course correct at any moment of the day. So it’s not to let the shame of the critic come in and say, oh, rats, I blew it for the whole day. Forget it. I started the day on my phone and totally disconnected. There’s no point in doing anything else. It’s not that. It’s recognizing as soon as we can, when we’ve made a choice that disconnects and making a different choice. That’s the why self that will make that different choice and settle back into that seat at the head of the table and say, okay, I’m going to put my phone outside the door and I’m going to come back and return. So now we’re returning to a different field, a different stream, a different river inside of us, and I’m going to actually do that exercise with the dream mandala.
TS: Now, let’s say someone is in a place where they’re feeling quite anxious about something or other, how would this inner figure of the wive self be able to help them in that moment?
SLF: Yes. So the wise self would first and foremost be compassionate, right? You think about the most loving parent, you want the compassion, and you also want sort of firm discipline to be curious about what is needed. So it’s recognizing, okay, I am in the wise self. Here’s my anxious, here’s my anxiety. Sitting at one of the seats right close to the head of the table, it’s pretty loud, but as long as there’s some separation between me and the anxiety, I can then work with it and I can be curious and I can start to locate where is the anxiety living in my body? What might it need in this moment and actually ask it. I’m very big on dialoguing either out loud or journaling, becoming curious, anxiety, oh, I’m feeling the anxiety in my chest. I feel this tightness in my chest, in my throat. But when I slow down, and there are some exercises in the book around pausing and the importance of the pause, how we are moving so quickly these days that we don’t stop to reflect, to be curious, to pause and to ask. Here it is in my throat, what might it be needing? Oh, there’s some grief there. We often feel grief in our throat comes out as anxiety first, anxiety is the messenger. That’s what the wisdom of anxiety was about. Anxiety is the messenger letting us know something needs attention.
Something needs attention. Somewhere we are feeling unsafe. We are feeling unattended to, if we are not attending to our emotional realm, we will feel unsafe. Just like if you have a child and you’re ignoring them and they’re crying, they’re going to feel unsafe and they’re going to find all kinds of other ways to try to let you know, I’m sad and I need to be held and I need attention.
So it’s not a formula. I can’t say for each, every person who’s feeling anxious what those steps will be. But it starts with self-compassion. It starts with genuine curiosity. It starts with inquiry. It starts with saying, you what? I’m going to actually pick up this workbook and do something that might help me connect inward and identify what might be needed in this moment. And honestly, just flipping through and picking a random page and saying, huh, okay, let me try that. Let me take an action. We get very stuck when we’re in an anxious place. We do get stuck on that hamster wheel of ruminating. So any pattern, interrupter, anything we can do to interrupt that is probably going to be beneficial, probably going to set us on a different trajectory of at least inquiry of what is going underneath. If we’re stuck in our heads and we continue to feed that plant, it’s just going to grow and grow and grow. But if we do something different, then we have a chance of getting underneath into the root of what might be needed.
TS: One other question about this wise self figure. You mentioned that for many people that you work with, when you describe this as a parent figure of any kind, even a wise and loving parent, it’s triggering. And I think, yeah, it’s hard for me to imagine, but yet you want this figure to be both loving and firm. So let’s say somebody doesn’t connect to the parenting. How could they do a really good job of fully animating inside of themselves? A wise self figure?
SLF: Yes. So first off, disregard the whole language around inner parent. It does not work for a lot of people because of their relationships to their own parent. That’s not something that brings joy or good feeling, but the why self, how can it be animated? I encourage people to consider how they are with their friends. People often show up with their highest selves. We hear this often these days, but there are things that you would never say to your friends that you say to yourself all the time. So it’s being your kindest friend, your most compassionate friend is another word for their wise self, right? What is it to be my own friend? How you show up with your pets, with your animals, that tends to bring out our most loving, tender sweet self. And sometimes we do have to be firm, right? If we have a dog, cats don’t require that same firmness.
So it’s embodying and recognizing the places where you do show up in the way that you would like to show up more, and that we all do that. We do that with friends, we do it with pets, we do it with our children, not always with our children because those can be difficult, but certainly in our highest moments, right? We are showing up in that way or at least striving to. I work a lot with imagery, with the imagination and encouraging people to call on perhaps a beloved ancestor, somebody who has passed on a loving relationship with a special teacher that you had growing up and bringing all of those beings in this realm or any other realm into the incarnation, the embodiment, the imagination of how you are seeing yourself as a wise self that they’re all informing this part of you that already exists. Again, I can’t emphasize enough because people do say, I don’t have a wise self, but everybody does. And so it might be a literary figure, might be a figure from your favorite work of fiction. It might be your best friend. It might be your partner borrowing those qualities from people that you love and love you and see you and interjecting those until they become much more familiar, until it’s a place inside of you that you can access daily, hourly.
TS: I am going to ask you, Sheryl, the question of our time, which is anxiety is in a nutshell, a lack of safety, and I think a lot of people just do not feel safe at this time as a human being in the world. They don’t feel safe in their communities. They don’t feel safe in the political situation that they’re living in. They don’t feel safe because of their gender, sexual orientation race. They don’t feel safe in their workplace. They don’t feel safe with the environment. I could go on and on. We don’t feel safe. So yes, we need to work on creating communities that foster a sense of belonging and inclusion and acceptance and where there’s a social security net, et cetera. But we’re living where we’re living and we’re so anxious. How can, I mean, all of this inner work we’re doing doesn’t solve the issue that, no, I don’t feel safe. I don’t feel safe.
SLF: It does not, and I’m not going to pretend that it does. And right off the bat in the book, I differentiate between true factors of external safety, systemic brokenness that creates a true sense of unsafety in people that no amount of inner work is going to solve, that we have big problems, we have real brokenness in pretty much all of our systems, from education to healthcare to workplace neighborhoods, communities is broken. Now, I’m an eternal optimist, and I do believe that things break on this scale because they need to break in order to be reborn in a whole different way. And I do believe in a much grander conversation in the global transition that we are in that will land us eventually in a much better place for many more people and all beings creatures on this planet. But we are in the throes of it.
We are in the thick of it. We are living through really tumultuous times. As a parent, I really feel for my kids and everyone else’s children who have been raised in these times where it has been one catastrophe after another, whether it’s politics, COVID, climate change, all the natural disasters, not to mention the phone and the access to every single problem going on everywhere on the planet at all times. It is an onslaught. So we have seen rates of anxiety and depression skyrocket, especially among young people, but really among everybody. So that is all fact. And at the same time, we work where we can work, we identify where we do have agency and where we do have choice. And we do have choice in terms of how we work with our minds of how we, and again, I do not want to diminish or underplay the effective systemic issues at all.
And I bow down to people for whom that is their life’s work is being activists in that way. I am a different type of activist, right? I am a mental, emotional, soulful, spiritual activist, so I can’t speak too much to that realm except too validate that it is all real. And it bothers me when there is some kind of implication or conversation that we should just be able to rise above all of that if we do all of our inner work that we won’t feel anxious about it. No anxiety is an appropriate response to a lot of what’s happening. And at the same time, we all need tools for how to navigate, for how to come back into our most centered self, to sit at the head of that table primarily so that we can fight whatever fight and bring whatever light into the world that we are called to bring.
So to be mired in anxiety is not helpful to anybody. So to do whatever we can to shift, to move, to get back into the flow of life, the river of life, to learn the tools and the skills that we can learn regardless of our circumstances, and especially if we are in a relatively safe environment and we are privileged enough to be in a relatively safe environment, we can still feel anxious, right? And we still then can learn ways to work with it so that it doesn’t define our lives so that we don’t drown in it, become paralyzed by it. A lot of the news sourcing right now, we are on a 24 7 fear, doom and gloom news cycle designed to activate the amygdala partially so that we stay paralyzed. We, I believe, have an obligation to fight against that. And one of the ways we fight, and I use that word fight in a more spiritual sense, is to, first of all, on a very practical level, I am a big proponent of limiting how much we intake in terms of news.
If it helps us to take action, great. If we need to check in every few days so that we don’t feel like we have our heads in the sand, great. But to be on the 24 7 cycle, I don’t see that benefiting anybody. I really don’t. All I see is that it creates paralysis and terror and more anxiety. So of course with our children, there’s only so much we can control. They are absorbing a lot of that, but we can certainly educate in terms of better ways to use one’s time. But when we limit that and we come back into the core of who we are and we reconnect with our gifts, our strengths, our joy, dare I say, right? I think the obligation right now to connect with joy is immense. I think it is one of our tasks because I think it is one of our most powerful ways to shine back against this onslaught, and that’s what these tools help us do. They help us where we can given the limitations of our broken systems, reconnect to our wellbeing so that we can give in the ways that we’re called to give.
TS: One of the quotes that I pulled from the workbook is connection is more powerful than anxiety. And I wonder as we’re in a time where for all of the reasons you mentioned anxiety is increasing so much, there’s so much a pervasive sense of I’m not safe, I’m not safe, I’m not safe. That this, to use your metaphor of the large body of water, the lake of interconnected wellbeing, it has to get huge. It just has to in order for us to be able to navigate right now. So I wonder how you see that maybe that this thesis that I’m asking you to comment on, that the tremendous anxiety is actually driving our evolutionary appreciation of connection and interconnectedness and that it’s helping us recognize this because we have to,
SLF: I 100% believe that, that there is this hidden agenda of anxiety that at this stage of our evolution in the past anxiety’s message was Watch out for the tiger that’s coming down. It’s about to eat you. Anxiety served a very important role for all of our evolution, but we’re at a different stage where for many of us, it’s not so much our physical safety. It is these other realms of safety that are at stake. But if we see anxiety as in some way, a friend in disguise, even though it feels awful, I never mean to glorify anxiety. It’s so awful when we’re stuck in an anxious spell. But that there is this opportunity and this invitation and this almost like you’re saying, an injunction, a requirement that we reach for connection. We are not going to get through this without connection to each other, to ourselves, and I believe to the unseen realms, which I include, creativity is one of them in dream work, and I’m not talking about angels and fairies. I’m talking about these ways that we open to something nature, we open to something that we don’t quite have words for that reminds us and returns us to the bigger place to that place of interconnectivity where we know in our being, not in our heads, in our being, that we are all connected like the trees, like the root systems, that we are all connected. And yes, we must do this right now. It is imperative for all of our survival that we learn how to reconnect in this age of mass disconnection.
TS: One of the interesting sections of The Healing Anxiety Workbook had to do with how we can release stories that run inside our heads that make us feel anxious. So maybe this is some story that we inherited from our family line about a certain kind of scarcity or a certain kind of body shame, or could be anything. And I thought this was very interesting. You offer people a practice they can do to release these anxiety producing stories that seem really hard to disconnect so that they’re not running us on the inside. Can you share this practice and how you came up with it and how it works?
SLF: I think I can, but I share a lot of different practices about stories.
TS: This had to do with your writing down the story you want to release and you’re going out and you’re offering it at the base of a tree.
SLF: Yes, yes. That’s what I thought you were referring to. So I think the visual, the diagram in that, I think there’s a bunch of different spheres, circles. So the act of writing down is also a powerful one to get it out of our heads, to actually see the words, what is the story that I’m carrying? Whose story is it? Because most of our stories didn’t start with us, so did I inherit this from my mother who inherited it from her mother? Let’s assume this went way back through the matrilineal line. Let’s say if we’re talking about shame, about our body to write it down. And then like I said, I rely a lot on imagery, visualization and action and developing these relationships with the natural world that we might not think of as a relationship, but I very much have relationships with the trees on our land.
I don’t want to say they speak to me in words, but we know each other. We are in relationship with each other. And so the power of ritual, the power of taking a story that we’ve written down and placing it at the base of a tree, or it can be anywhere. It can be in a basin of water, it can be we do a fire ritual, but to call on the elements as we have always done throughout human history, and it’s another area where we are bereft, is we have lost our connection to ritual and the power of ritual in terms of transforming going from one state to another state. So calling on any of the elements, earth, water, air, fire, to take this from me and transform it. It’s a way that my work is embodied and also spiritual. It’s both. It’s both in the body and it’s in another realm. It’s not typically what you do in a therapy session, which is why what I do is not really therapy. It’s something else that I don’t think we quite have a word for yet, but it’s more like soul midwifing and spiritual tending.
But these kinds of ritual actions that we take have tremendous power that our rational minds can PPO and say, well, that’s not going to do anything. But when you do it and you try it, it actually does. And I have had countless clients and course members come back to me after doing various kinds of rituals, whether it’s this one with the stories or any other one to say, I could feel something inside of me loosen. It was an embodied loosening. We’re only going to go so far telling our stories, which is what happens in traditional talk therapy. We tell our stories, it’s an important stage of healing. We get heard and validated and witnessed, but then what happens next? There needs to be some process of alchem, of metabolization where the story is metabolized. It is alchemized, and that’s what that exercise really that ritual offers.
TS: You also offer one of the practices, as you said, the workbook contains dozens and dozens that you can ask an ancestor to take your worry from you. And I wonder if you’ve ever done this and if so, how it worked for you a hundred times.
SLF: I ask my ancestors, primarily my beloved grandmother, Charlotte who died when I was just before I gave birth to my first son. So I was 31 when she died, and she was a very, very loving figure in my life, the most loving mother figure that I’ve had. And she was also a chronic expert worrier. She had really perfected that art of worrying, I’m Jewish. I think as Jews we worry, we worry a lot. And she was really good at it. So that got passed down. And from what I understand about ancestral work is it’s good to call on an ancestor who actually struggled with the thing that you are struggling with. And so she knew a lot about worry, and when I imagine her now, again, I am not one who has visions. I don’t see my grandma, Charlotte. I imagine her and in the imaginal realm, which I believe is deeply powerful, is our imagination.
I feel a transformation happening. And so I have many times dialogued with her in my journal, called on Her. Please take this worry. My older son now is in the Navy. He’s ROTC. And so he’s in college, but he’s on a navy track and he is also a pilot. He’s in dangerous situations. He flies a plane and I worry every single time he flies. And those are times when I call on my practices because turning towards a loving ancestor and arriving back in a place of trust, not trust that nothing bad will ever happen to him. I would love to believe that that would be the case, but trust that in this moment I am okay and I’m not alone and trusting in the most likely scenario, which is he’s an excellent pilot and he’s cautious and bringing all of that in that it’s a much better place to be than hanging out in worry mind to hang out with my grandmother who I envision in certain times of year.
We have this huge pink, gorgeous Rose Bush in the corner of my garden and she loved roses, and I always imagine that she’s kind of embedded into those roses. And I’ll sometimes go and sit in front of the Rose Bush and just kind of hand over, please take my worry. Please take my worry grandma and feel, imagine sense that she’s smiling and she’s just loving me. And I can remember how she lit up when I would come to their house and through that act of connection and reconnection and remembering the connection, I’m brought into a different vibration, a different place. Worry is such a low vibration and it’s really so pointless, right? There’s nothing good comes from worry. Anxiety has a different quality for anxious, let’s say about a test, and it spurs us to study, okay? Then there’s something good that came from that. But sitting there mired and worry, while my son is flying a plane does absolutely nothing, and he’s actually been a great teacher for me because he has said to both my husband and I over and over again, I don’t want your worry. He is breaking the intergenerational relay. He is saying, I will not take that baton. I do not want your worry. So I’ve also had to train myself to say before he goes, if I have fun, well inside him, but then I bring it and I can feel it again, alchemizing, it shifts in some way and I can come back to myself, my center, my day, what needs to be done next.
TS: You said that you’ve taken on this view that if one of your ancestors actually suffered with this issue when they were alive, that they would be a good person to help you. Why is that? You’d think, well, they never really knew how to do it in life. Why are they going to know how to deal with it now?
SLF: Yeah, I learned that from Purita Finn in her book Take Back The Magic, which is a really beautiful book about the ancestral realm. She’s much more steeped in that than I am, and I don’t remember exactly how she explains the why of that, but I think it has something to do with that once, who knows what happens when we die? I do not know. I like to imagine that something goes on, something lives on. And so I like to imagine that in some other realm that whatever the source of pain was somehow gets healed, gets elevated, and that they can bring that elevation back to us.
TS: One thing I wanted to ask you about specifically, Sheryl, is that I know you do a lot of work with people who have relationship anxiety of different forms, and it’s interesting here, connection is the remedy, connection, connection, connection. But let’s say I have this anxiety about am I in the right relationship? I have anxiety because I’m jealous that my partner seems X, Y, Z or I’m insecure and in some way, how is connection if it is a remedy for relationship anxiety?
SLF: Yeah, well, relationship anxiety in the way that I work with it is specifically the first example that you gave. Am I in the right relationship? What if there’s somebody better? Is my partner this or that? Enough? At the root of relationship, anxiety is the fear of loss. If we ourselves that our partner is not this or that enough, then we leave. If we believe those thoughts, then we leave and we have managed to protect ourselves from the risk of loving, loving and being loved. To me is the riskiest thing we do emotionally, not necessarily physically, but emotionally, deeply letting somebody in to our hearts, being that vulnerable, knowing that again, there is the possibility that we will at the extreme lose the person on the smaller scale hurt and be hurt. We will hurt each other in a long-term relationship. It’s an inevitability. So when we return, and I talk a lot about relationship anxiety and the specific ways that it shows up, is my partner attractive enough?
Am I, are they intellectual enough as projections? So those thoughts are projections of inner places that need our own attention. So is my partner intellectual enough? If we flip it, if we understand that it’s a projection of something inside of us that needs attention, we might then become curious about the value that our family of origin placed on a certain type of academic intellect, our own insecurity about our own intellect. So it becomes a process of deep inquiry, self-reflection, which is connection, which is connecting to our own selves and the places inside that are wounded that are being projected onto the screen of our partner. Of course, relationships themselves are all about connection, and so if somebody comes with the, I talk about it in different spikes, attraction spike or sexuality, spike or social spikes. So if someone is struggling with an attraction, spike, is my partner attractive enough?
And we break that down, and I understand attraction largely as a function of connection when we are connected to ourselves, when we are connected to our partner, open heart to open heart, when our partners connected to themselves, we are seeing through clear eyes instead of fear, eyes and attraction is not a problem. Attraction the lack of attraction, if there is, I’m talking always when I talk about relationship anxiety with the assumption that it’s a healthy, well-matched relationship, shared values, that there is a foundation of friendship, you like each other. That’s always my all predicated on that assumption. I’m not talking about where there are true red flags that need attention, that is a good, healthy, well-matched relationship, but we get scared in relationship and we see through fear eyes and we disconnect and our hearts close when we disconnect, our hearts close, so we see through different eyes when we reconnect to ourselves to each other, our hearts open back up.
We see again through clear eyes and we are attracted in the definition of drawn to the person. It’s not like we have to love every single feature about our partner’s face. I’m not talking about the Hollywood definition of attraction. I’m talking about true connection. So of course, if we’re in a primary relationship, if we’re in a romantic relationship, it is one of our sources of connection can also be a source of disconnection. And that’s sometimes when anxiety shows up and especially around attachment wounds, because relationships can be very challenging and a long-term relationship, again, inevitably will at some point be very challenging. That’s just how it goes.
TS: Now there’s just two final questions I have for you, Sheryl. When I introduced you, I said that part of what spurred your own journey on is when you had a panic attack at the age of 21. And I’m curious for people who have, whether it’s panic or it’s extreme anxiety in the moment, if you have an in the moment, go-to suggestion in the moment, here’s what you need to do in those kinds of intense situations.
SLF: Yeah, panic is a whole other conversation. It is a wild energy that comes through us. Panic attacks I think are the most terrifying thing we experience without actually being in danger, which is the wild thing about panic attacks is that we are actually safe, but we feel like we are either going to die or go crazy. So I do have a little cheat sheet for those moments of panic. It’s very specific things like first of all, naming, this is panic and I’m safe and it will pass. There’s a lot of work around cross lateral touch, touching your collarbone, even elbow to wrists that can immediately calm the nervous system. All the work that’s being done around nervous system regulation can be used in the moment of a panic attack, but you have to first have enough distance from it to know this is panic and it will pass, and I am safe. I am safe, I am safe.
So those are just a couple of things. Of course, trying to regulate your breath, coming into your breath, coming into your body. I also, again, I turn to spiritual sources. I turn to mantras or poetry to integrate, to regulate, to refocus on something bigger than this moment that helps me to come into the deeper place of I am actually deeply safe in this moment. And when I can turn to those mantras or poems or prayers that I also have in the workbook invitations to write those down as a go-to so that they’re handy and you have them good use of phones is to have it in your notes tab that if you’re in a situation of high anxiety that you have your own personal cheat sheet. This is what I do because we tend to leave the building in those moments. It’s such intense amygdala activation that it’s hard to get back online and in that seat, but if we have something that we can turn to or even I have a playlist on my phone for those moments, that music can bring me back and also expand me. The biggest piece about panic that makes it worse is when we fight it. That’s what escalates, just like with anxiety, just like with any emotion is when we fight it, it gets a lot louder and it lasts a lot longer, but when we kind of smelt and surrender into it, which is so hard to do in those moments, right? It does pass through.
TS: You named anxiety as a you ready for this friend in disguise, in our conversation, how when it comes up for you, are you able to recognize, oh, this is actually a friend in disguise?
SLF: Well, I’ve been doing this work for so long, both in my own self and with other people that I recognize anxiety very quickly for what it is, and I’m able to name it very quickly and turned to something bigger pretty immediately. So I had anxiety come in the other night. Our son was on his way to a very far location and traveling alone in the middle of the night, and it was the night before Mother’s Day, so it was 1:00 AM on Sunday, and I could just feel my anxiety about him going so far away and other feelings and grief coming in and different painful relationships in my life. But the anxiety was first, and I looked out the window and the window was a warm night and the window was open. I looked out the window and the yard was flooded with moonlight. I think it was a full moon, and the trees were just radiating.
And because I have this relationship with this gorgeous apple tree right outside our window, it’s one of my mothers and I could feel it sort of leaning in. It does lean towards the window, and so to me, that’s mother tree. There’s mother Moon, and my whole system calmed in that moment. I was able to take in the beauty, the goodness, the connection of I’m not alone in this, right? It’s okay to have worry, we’re going to worry about our loved ones. That’s just part of being in relationship, but to the point where I can’t sleep where I really did want to go to sleep and my nervous system calmed the deeper, bigger relationships came in and I was able to sleep and I woke up in Joy.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Sheryl Lisa Finn. With Sounds True, she’s created The Healing Anxiety Workbook: A Guide to Calm Worry and Intrusive Thoughts at the Root. And my final comment here, I think it’s so interesting, this workbook series that we’ve created at Sounds True, and how, particularly with something like anxiety, it’s so useful, because you have to take all of these actions and use your hands and pick up your pen and do things and do rituals, and how the act itself of engaging with the workbook helps you with your anxiety. I wonder if you have a comment about that.
SLF: Yes. As I say in the introduction, and again, my work is action-based, but also I would love people to have a sense of play with the workbook and to let it be creative and to really get out markers and crayons and glue and a photo of yourself as a young person. There’s an exercise and a spot in there to put photos or photos of ancestors or meaningful people and to let it be fun and that the work itself can be play, can be connective, going through the exercises and creating your own kind of personal scrapbook at the end of it, if you really do it and you fill it in, it will be a document that you can return back to again and again and again, different stages of your life. And that just picking it up itself hopefully will have this sense memory of, oh, right, that’s the book I turn to when I’m feeling anxious, but it helps me reconnect. And so I see it and I remember all of ways that I come back and I return to connection.
TS: Sheryl Lisa Finn, thank you so much for being our guest on Insights at the Edge. Thank you.
SLF: Thank you so much, Tami.
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