The short answer is that no one outside of you knows for sure.
And you may not be clear how it started.
But that may not matter.
It’s my observation that anxiety likely comes out of a person’s experience, and is generated out of a sense of being unsafe.
That may seem like a statement of the obvious, but depending when in our lives we have that experience it can be challenging to manage.
Lots of things can happen that make us feel unsafe, and the younger we are the easier it is to feel unsafe in response to an experience. Those experiences can be severe and terrible in some cases, but they can also be something that looks, in hindsight, to be pretty ordinary or benign. That sense can cause us to question what we could possibly be upset about.
But we have to be careful about judging what we ‘should’ feel: just because an experience looks like it shouldn’t have had an impact on us when we look back on it doesn’t mean our experience at the time was ordinary. Something can happen that makes us feel unsafe — and thus fearful and anxious if something happens in the future that, for some reason, triggers that sense of being unsafe.
The experience doesn’t have to be the same.
Faced with the thought of an experience that triggers that sense of being unsafe, anxiety is an understandable — and maybe even important — response. Anxiety isn’t just an emotion: it’s also a kind of ‘chemical state’ our body goes into when its sense of security is threatened. It’s an old part of our nervous system — the sympathetic portion, responsible for the ‘fight or flight’ phenomenon we have all experienced in some way. That heightened sense of awareness is an important function of our body: we need to be aware of things that threaten us. Where anxiety is concerned, in my experience it’s often childhood experiences that trigger an anxiety response. We experience the response as we grow older, but it originally occurred when we were younger…even if we can’t remember it, or what we remember seems normal or innocuous.
Here’s an example of how I think about it.
If a small child needs to cross a busy parking lot, it won’t understand much about the threats it faces. Cars can be zooming back and forth, but the child will not know what it needs to do to be safe. Things just look scary. And if it tries to cross that parking lot, it’s not going to know how to do it safely. Whether or not it tries, the experience of seeing a threat it can’t understand or manage has a profound impact on that little body, one that is normally linked to fear. And until the child has the experience of crossing a busy parking lot safely — usually with an adult holding its hand and reassuring it — it won’t have a reason for the fear to subside. The child has to have the experience of crossing safely, and until it has that experience, the fear will keep recurring.
In my experience, it’s much the same with anxiety. For whatever reason, the thought of something, a person or an experience triggers a sense of anxiety — a sense of insecurity, of not being safe. And, from what I’ve observed, one of the more effective ways to address it is to have the experience of safety — to discover that the thing we are afraid of actually does not create the result we feared.
It’s often true that anxiety comes from a traumatic experience or set of experiences. Trauma can be unique and horrific, but it can also be kind of ordinary.
How do we give ourselves the experience of safety when we’re anxious or afraid of something?
I think it has to start with looking to that part of ourselves that is feeling anxious — and simply start by reassuring it. In my simple example, the child won’t easily cross the parking lot without some assurances that it’s being protected; that it is, in fact, safe. With assurances and a sense of being protected, it may cross the parking lot But along with those assurances it has to have the experience of being protected.
So it is, I believe, for the places inside ourselves where we feel anxious and unsafe. Those places need first to be accepted, and even if not understood, protected and sheltered. If the child crossing the parking lot doesn’t feel that it’s been accepted — that it’s okay to have those fears — reassurances won’t feel truthful. But if it feels accepted and then feels protected, its sense of safety will increase, because it has had the experience of being safe.
Enough of those experiences, and from what I’ve often seen, the anxiety may then subside.