For a really, really long time, I thought anxiety meant something was wrong with me. I thought I was broken, that I had generalized anxiety disorder, and that I was too sensitive, emotional, or tightly wound. But looking back now through a nervous system lens, I see something very differently. I see adaptation, overwhelm, and protective layers. To understand this, I want to share a story about a very specific day, January 14, 1984. I had just turned 12 years old, and the next morning, my mom was getting remarried. In isolation, that moment doesn’t seem especially significant. However, that night was the accumulation of months of dysregulation. Why Anxiety Starts Before We Have the Words For a really, really long time, I thought anxiety meant something was wrong with me. I thought I was broken, that I had generalized anxiety disorder, and that I was too sensitive, emotional, or tightly wound. But looking back now through a nervous system lens, I see something very differently. I see adaptation, overwhelm, and protective layers. To understand this, I want to share a story about a very specific day, January 14, 1984. I had just turned 12 years old, and the next morning, my mom was getting remarried. In isolation, that moment doesn’t seem especially significant. However, that night was the accumulation of months of dysregulation. In the five months prior, my parents both divorced, my father remarried, we put my childhood dog to sleep, we moved to a completely different town, and I started a new school. I lost my friends, my routines, and my sense of groundedness and predictability. A holiday came and went, my great-grandmother passed away, and now suddenly, my mom was getting remarried too. The Body Learns First Laying in my bedroom that night, everything felt unfamiliar and deeply unsettling. It wasn’t dramatic or hysterical, but rather an internal, unsteady feeling, as if the ground underneath me emotionally had shifted. At 12 years old, I did not have language for any of this. Nobody was talking about nervous systems, emotional overwhelm, or panic in 1984. What appeared was a constancy of rumbling in my entire body, a constant vibration that went from my gut to my throat. Children do not need intentional harm in order for overwhelm to occur. A child can become overwhelmed simply because there is too much change, unpredictability, or emotional movement without enough support and safety. Anxiety rarely comes out of nowhere. More often, a nervous system quietly crosses a threshold where too much has happened too quickly. The body learns long before the mind has language for it. Because children are meaning-making machines, they internalize these events and form conclusions like “I’m on my own,” “I need to stay alert,” or “I’m not safe to fully relax”. The Limits of Insight For years, this dysregulation became a constant hum underneath my life. I was in and out of therapy starting around 15 years old, and was eventually diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder in my 30s. Therapy worked and helped me in many ways, but insight alone did not rest my nervous system. I understood the lack of safety intellectually, but my body did not feel safe. I learned a vital lesson: cognition and physiology are not the same thing. You can understand your patterns and still live inside of them. It wasn’t until my 40s, when I began exploring trauma-informed healing, inner child work, reparenting, and nervous system education, that things finally began to click. I stopped asking what was wrong with me, and I started asking what happened inside of me. I began understanding anxiety not as something to be pathologized, but as a level of protection and an adaptation that once served a purpose. The Invisible Backpack This realization led me to a concept I teach called the “invisible backpack”. This backpack is what we all carry unconsciously through life, filled with our experiences, the beliefs we formed, and the strategies we learned to cope and survive. We even inherit fears and emotional wounds from the people who raised us. Because that backpack is invisible, we often mistake what we carry for simply who we are. Many adults minimize experiences that profoundly shaped them because they don’t believe those experiences were “bad enough” by cultural standards. But the nervous system doesn’t measure trauma the way culture does; it measures safety, connection, predictability, and overwhelm. Today, when I look back at 12-year-old me, I don’t see weakness or someone who is broken. I see a young nervous system trying to organize enormous amounts of change without the proper tools to process it. I see adaptation, and I see someone worthy of deep compassion. If you have absorbed compounding moments of instability or unspoken loneliness while life kept moving around you, please hear this clearly. You are not weak because your nervous system adapted to what it lived through. You are not broken because your body learned survival. Healing begins not when we finally defeat anxiety, but when we actually begin to understand it. * Take the Assessment: Are hidden patterns holding you back? Gain clarity on your emotional well-being by taking my free H.U.R.R.T. self-assessment at https://www.flipyourmindset.com/hurrt See you on the flip side! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit flipyourmindset.substack.com/subscribe
