Anxiety is not an emotion

“What are you feeling right now as you tell me this?”

“Anxious.”

“Hmm, I wonder what you might be feeling underneath the anxiety.”

This conversation usually occurs at some point between myself and my clients. We’re taught that anxiety is an emotion. But it’s actually something that covers up our emotions. 

Anxiety occurs in response to a deeper, core emotion being activated, usually one we fear feeling due in part to our early socialization around expressing emotion. If we stay at the surface with feeling the anxiety, it often deepens our distress because the core emotions underneath remain trapped. It’s like shaking up a soda bottle but not letting out the carbonation. 

Hilary Jacobs Hendel, a psychodynamic therapist, developed a helpful tool called The Change Triangle that outlines how we avoid feeling our core emotions. When a core emotion (such as fear, anger, sadness, and joy) arises, we sometimes cover it with “secondary” or “inhibitory” emotions like anxiety, shame, and guilt. 

Many of us were never taught how to know what we were feeling; maybe we were rarely asked, or maybe acknowledging and expressing our feelings came with relational consequences. You might have been criticized for showing vulnerability (“Stop crying, what’s wrong with you?”), or your feelings might have been minimized (“It wasn’t that bad!”) by your caregivers. 

When these patterns occur over and over again, we learn to “cut off” or “disown” those parts of ourselves that were not embraced by our caregivers. When emotions arise, we respond to them as our caregivers responded to us, resulting in us feeling guilt (like we’re doing something wrong or shouldn’t feel these things) or shame (that we are inherently bad). 

Secondary/inhibitory emotions (anxiety, guilt, shame) are particularly painful to sit with, so we distract ourselves from feeling them through various defenses. For clients with anxiety, a common defense is escaping into the mind via rumination or intellectualizing, and a general focus on thoughts rather than feelings. Instead of feeling core feelings, you might instead find yourself stuck in your mind, looping over and over on the same intrusive thoughts. Replaying these thoughts becomes a way of avoiding our true feelings, and the anxiety that comes along with acknowledging them. 

In therapy, we’ll work together on noticing how you avoid feeling your core emotions, and help you connect to them. For example, I might point out if you change topics when I ask about something painful, or if you focus on others’ feelings instead of your own. For others, defenses might take the form of speaking quickly and going on tangents, or developing theories to help rationalize why someone did something. While these defenses were effective for managing distress in the context they developed, they now often keep you disconnected from yourself.

In the process of pointing out these defenses and connecting with the core feelings hidden beneath them, we might unlock past experiences that have made it difficult to stay in tune with your authentic self. Giving voice to these memories tends to free ourselves from their weight, and release us to move forward with living a purposeful life.