Anxiety - Bees in the Brain
Anxiety is a lot of things, but today I’m going to look at just one of the ways it can show up:
As bees. In your brain. Let me explain.
When we are little, inevitably we get negative feedback about who/how we are, and we must learn to navigate this. We become polite, patient, quiet or loud, whatever our caregivers want. The way we achieve control over our experience is by monitoring our behavior, anticipating and interpreting feedback, and managing our inner experience by shutting it down, devaluing it, ignoring it, pretending it is different, or any number of other strategies (what’s yours?).
It’s quite a complex job to navigate human social interactions, and there are many functions needed, so I like to think of this process as being undertaken by a hive of worker bees in our head. The bees check if we’re okay and if we are not, they tell us how to get back.
Each bee has a slightly different focus. One might ask: “Did I do it right?” while another wonders, “Do they like me?” and the next focuses on, “Am I acceptable?” These are necessary and helpful questions — especially when young we rely on the answers to these questions to find our place in the social scheme. And because, in childhood, the consequences for not being okay are especially dire, the bees’ questions come with a buzzing, urgent energy. Their purpose is to identify where/when/what we are doing wrong and to handle it ASAP.
We all have a LOT of bees; the more punishing our early environment was, the more bees we have, and the more intense their concerns (usually) are.
When we sense a threat to our wellbeing, the bees become active. They start buzzing, asking, telling, working! They review the past, anticipate the future, plan for every possibility and try to protect us from showing our authentic experience to the wrong person.
Many therapy modalities work directly with the bees - assuaging their concerns and talking them out of any over-activity. This is helpful and succeeds to some degree, but in my experience deeper work is needed to address this in a more permanent way. In Healing Work, we don’t engage so much with the bees aside from noticing their concerns and intensity. Our work is more in the alert that sent those bees buzzing in the first place. The, “I’m not okay!” message.
I ask: where did you get the message that you’re not okay? When? What does it feel like (then or now) to believe that your naturally arising experience needs to be changed or managed?
The truth is, every social “lesson” is cemented in place with pain: the pain of not being allowed to be who we really are or to say what’s really true for us. As we recognize this and allow the grief of it, something wonderful happens — we start to support ourself from the inside. We start to say, “Hey, it’s okay to feel this way. My experience is not a problem to fix. The bees don’t need to get moving because everything is okay here.”
Slowly we learn that we don’t need to monitor our past as much or plan every possibility of the future. We learn that whatever happens will be okay, because inside we are okay.
Want to learn more about your little hive of helpers? Reach out.
