Anxiety Rx: A New Prescription for Anxiety Relief from the Doctor Who Created It

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He decided that he was going to move out to Victoria, British Columbia one day. He got on the road, hitchhiked out here, and then sent for us, my mother and my brother. My life as a child was chaotic. My father was loving, caring, and present when he was present, but the problem was when he would go into a deep depression or a manic stage or lose touch with reality, as a child, you look at your dad like, “This is the be-all and end-all. This is the guy that’s going to pave the way for me.” I might go in and out. For those of you reading, I am going to be completely transparent, this is the second time I’m doing this interview. We had a technical glitch, unfortunately. Dr. Kennedy and I are not in the same place so our technology blew out. I’m excited to do this again. bctt tweet=”Look at your patterns as a child and ask yourself, “What pattern did I have as a child that I am replicating in my adult life now?””] ALARMS is really what our inner child is feeling. (Abandonment, Loss, Abuse, Rejection, Maturing too early, Shame. Dr. Russ loves his acronyms. I have every one of these letters from my childhood, and had to skip parts of the ALARMS section because it was too overwhelming.) The inner child needs to feel safe and protected. Alarm is triggered in the present by experiences that recall the initial wound. (For me it's also triggered by high morning cortisol.) I still think when people go to medical school and they become neuroscientists, they should be called Dr. All that schooling, you deserve it.

The short version of that is LSD showed me that my anxiety wasn’t in my head at all. It was this old trauma of alarm that was stored in my body and I didn’t pay much attention to that alarm. It was the generator of negative thoughts. That’s my little journey so far. I dealt with anxiety for many years and was frustrated with psychiatry, psychology, and all that kind of stuff. They couldn’t help me, so I had to go out and help myself. For Russell, healing starts by finding out where anxiety lives inside your body and during our conversation, Russell walks you through how exactly you can start doing that. As that shows up in your body, for me, it’s in my solar plexus, that solar plexus alarm is my younger self, my 12, 13-year-old who started to see his dad fail. I put my hand over it. If you get a chance, if you find it, it might be in your throat, it might be in the middle of your chest or your belly, put your hand over it and feel the warmth of your hand over it and feel the sensation of your own connected touch. If you don’t find the alarm, it’s not a big deal. As you say, Gabby, it is a separation from yourself. One of the best explanations I heard in meditation was, “Your thoughts are like a parade. You can let the float go by. You don’t have to grab onto it.” That’s what meditation does. It makes us more thought-resilient. It’s like that quote by Michael Singer that says, “You are not your thoughts. You are the one that observes your thoughts.” This is from The Untethered Soul. It’s an inversion of it. It’s not completely verbatim. If you can observe your thoughts and curiosity, you have a degree of separation from it and it doesn’t charge you up so much.I can still relate to so much of that. I appreciate those reminders because we’re growing up. We can be 40 and still be growing up. We’re learning and changing. I want to finish this by talking about the ego. You also say the solution in the book and it’s like, “Heal thyself.” You do get into the ego and how either we’re in protection or we’re in growth. It’s one or the other. We’re either in this protection mode or we’re in a growth mode. You talk about where the ego dragon shows up and such. You said, “It’s not reflective, it’s reflexive.” Talk about the ego’s dynamic in all of this. A lot of us are projecting or past-futuring what we think is going to happen. Even if you don’t have full-blown anxiety, which is different from feeling stressed out or being in a stressful time, these are still important ideas that can shed light on ways like, “I can do this differently and make this a little bit easier.” Russell is a compassionate, intelligent person. I hope you enjoy the conversation. Having done all that, the "alarm" still would find its way through to terrorize me, and I believed the cruel, negative thought loops to such a point that I wanted to die.

That’s important because people feel that although we failed at this or we’re disappointed maybe we weren’t equipped yet. To give ourselves to be compassionate with ourselves and say, “Maybe I have more tools. I can get in there and try again or allow myself,” that’s another thing we do. We’re like, “I’m not good at this. I’m not good at that,” and we wrap it up. Laird always jokes with me, “Parenting is for us to grow up. That’s what they call parenting.” There’s some other extra opportunity for learning because that is part of it. You’re always feeling like you’re not good at it. Parenting is the only thing for sure besides like, “We’re going to get old and die,” that you won’t get right. You can’t hit the bullseye. Reassure that child from a touch sensation from say, essential oils, some breathing, or anything that starts to calm that autonomic nervous system with the intention that you’re connecting to yourself. You’re connecting to that younger wounded part of yourself because that’s constructive, that you can learn from, that you can do something. If every time I heard suicide, I freak out and had to wait for two hours until my body calmed down, I wouldn’t be in a good state. Freud had a lot of amazing theories. He got a little wonky with the sex thing, but he had tremendous theories. One of them was called the repetition compulsion, which is to reproduce your childhood in your adulthood unconsciously. We all do it. For some people, it’s a revelation when they go, “This is exactly a repetition. I was always trying to make my mother feel better. I was always trying to do things. I was always trying to be perfect for her. I do the same thing for my husband,” or, “I do the same thing for my friends.” My little time in India gave me a sense that everyone has their path. Some people get cancer, some people get ALS, and some people live a life that’s comfortable and calm. I saw a lot of people because as a doctor, I talk to them at the end of their lives. It’s like, “Everything went well for me.” “I wish that I got divorced.” “I wish that something bad happened.” I say, “That was your path. Your path was to have a comfortable life.”

Nach dem Kontakt mit Psychiatern/Therapeuten habe ich mich nicht wirklich verstanden gefühlt. Es wurden extrem schnell Medikamente verschrieben und probiert, bevor überhaupt noch die Ursache verstanden, geschweige denn besprochen wurde.

Knowing that you can go into that space, and then teaching yourself that you can come out of that space too. We often talk about finding a safe place in your body. For me, that’s my sinuses. I’d go into the alarm in my solar plexus and I’ll sit there for fifteen seconds. I have this little mantra I call sensation without explanation, which is such a great mantra for me. There’s a great story behind it, but I won’t get into it. When you feel anxious, sensation without explanation, if you repeat that phrase over and over, you’ll acclimatize to that feeling and then know that your brain is going to compulsively try to worry because, in a way, it was a coping mechanism when you were younger.

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The reason why it’s struggling is that you’ve never given yourself the chance to sit there and feel that negative emotion and become acclimatized to it. Bessel van der Kolk talks about this in The Body Keeps the Score. We’re not getting people to get rid of their anxiety. What we’re doing is they’re acclimatizing to this feeling of alarm so it doesn’t fire us out in our head and tell our head, “What’s the reason for this?” On top of saying what’s the reason for this because your body’s alarmed, your brain preferentially looks for threats so it will find a threatful reason. JABS = judge, alienate/abandon, blame, shame. JABS are the negative thought loops that lead to depression, paralysis, despair. The big thing about parenting when we all lose at a point is, “What’s my intention here? My intention is to provide the safest and I’m their best bet. Even if I’m not having my best day, I’m still their best bet.” I have three dogs, so it’s like that, too. I walk them at the same time. They have three leashes and they all go different ways. They wrap me up, trip me, and tie me. They’ve all got their path. If I find it, I fall down but if I let them go their own way, things are a lot easier.