The Faces of Anxiety

When I work with anxiety, depression, grief, or any heavy emotion, I don’t treat it like it’s the core of who you are. You are not “an anxious person” or “a depressed person.” Those labels collapse you into the problem.

Instead, I treat these experiences as characters in your story. Separate voices. Roles that show up and try to take the microphone. You can listen to them, talk back to them, even laugh at them but you don’t have to hand them the script.

This comes out of a mix of approaches. In Narrative Therapy, we call it externalization: separating the person from the problem. In ACT, it’s defusion: stepping back from thoughts instead of fusing with them as absolute truth. In Gestalt, you might go so far as to put the character in an empty chair and talk to it directly. Different names, same point: when you create distance, you reclaim choice.

Anxiety in particular is slippery. It doesn’t wear one face it shifts. I often describe it to clients as four different characters you might meet.

The Scared Child

This face of anxiety wants nothing more than to hide under a blanket. The world feels too big, too loud, too unsafe. If you try to argue with the child, you’ll only make them cry harder. The job here is comfort. Wrap them in reassurance: You’re safe. I’ve got you. We’ll get through this together.

The Schoolyard Bully

This one is loud, mean, and convinced you don’t belong. It pushes, taunts, and sneers: You’re not enough. You’ll never make it. The right move isn’t to run away. It’s to stand your ground. Talk back. Argue. Defend yourself. The bully loses power when you refuse to cower.

The Overprotective Parent

This face of anxiety comes wrapped in love but coated with control. It’s the voice that won’t stop asking: Do you have your coat? Do you know the number to call? Did you pack extra toilet paper? (because for some unknown reason during Covid the world decided toilet paper was the ultimate survival tool). The parent means well, but they smother. Your job is to reassure them: I’ve got this. I’ll handle what comes. Staying behind won’t protect me, it’ll only hold me back.

The Babbling Kid Who Can’t Finish a Sentence

And then there’s this one: the face that never lands on a point. It spins out in endless loops of What if? What if? What if? like a kid who keeps restarting the same sentence and never gets past the third word. You can picture it: frustrating, a little funny, impossible to take seriously.

Here’s the trick: don’t fight it. Let the babbling kid speak out loud if you need to. When you actually hear it, three things happen:

You notice how incoherent and silly the thought process is.
You separate yourself from it. (You are not the babbling kid.)
You laugh. And laughter cracks anxiety’s grip.

Different Responses, Same Core

Each face of anxiety calls for something different:

Scared child → comfort. (Compassion, Grounding, Self-soothing)
Bully → push back. (Respond with strength and assertiveness, reframe the argument)
Overprotective parent → reassure. (Needs boundaries, self-trust, reality checking the argument)
Babbling kid → laugh. (Defuse from the argument, never feed the loop, don’t go down the rabbit whole of “what if”)

But the core doesn’t change: you’re meeting a character, not your identity. You don’t erase anxiety, but you take away its control.

That’s the work. Don’t collapse into anxiety. Step back. See which face is talking. And choose how you want to respond.

A quiet Rebllion

A Quiet Rebellion

Most people don’t rebel.

They reflect someone else’s life back at the world and call it their own. They smile when they’re supposed to, nod when it’s expected, and shrink when something real starts to rise up in their chest. They tell themselves it’s fine. This is just what life is. It’s Grown-up stuff. I’m being responsible.

But deep down, they know it’s not enough.

Not really.

Rebellion doesn’t always look like fire. Sometimes it looks like silence. Like putting down your phone and sitting with the ache. Like saying no when your voice is shaking. Like asking a question no one taught you to ask:

Who am I when no one’s watching?

There’s nothing wrong with you for wanting more.
It isn’t selfish to refuse to live someone else’s script.
But the hardest part? Choosing to live truthfully in a world that rewards performance.

That is what we are doing here. We aren’t blowing everything up. We’re not starting a war.
It is something quieter, stronger. It is a rebellion that begins the moment you stop nodding.

A knock at the door

A Knock at the Door

What if there’s nothing wrong with you?

Not in the way you’ve been told, anyway.
What if the heaviness you’ve been carrying isn’t because you’re broken, but because you’ve been lied to about who you’re supposed to be?

It wasn’t one lie. It was a thousand small lies. It was rules about how to live, what to want, what’s “acceptable.” It was in the roles handed to you without asking, and in the masks you’ve worn so long, they feel like skin. Maybe you played along because it felt safer, or easier, or because everyone else seemed fine pretending, so why not you?

And then, in the quiet, there’s that knock.

It’s not loud. It’s the flicker of unease when the screen goes dark.
It’s the 3am stare at the ceiling, wondering if this life even feels like yours.
It’s the part of you that’s tired of performing, that doesn’t care about “acceptable” anymore. It just wants real, even if real is messy.

You can drown it out. Most people do. They fill every gap with work, noise, and endless scrolling, surviving their days while that knock keeps tapping, asking: Is this really it? Is this really you?

So here’s the question only you can answer:

What would your life look like if you stopped numbing and started noticing?
If you noticed what actually matters, not the script, not the expectations, not the distractions.
If you noticed who you are under the masks.
If you noticed the knock and finally opened the door.

It doesn’t start with fixing yourself.
It doesn’t start with becoming someone new.
It starts with the courage to be real especially when it scares you.

You don’t have to be ready, you just need to answer.

When the song knew First

It started with a doctor, not a priest, not a therapist. Just a VA doc telling me I was too sedentary.

I didn’t argue. I walked.

At one point, I was living in Florida with an old friend. He was working on his VA rating and talked me into applying. I did, and the rating was good enough to get medical care. I scheduled an appointment, ran some tests. Overweight yeah, I’d been stationed at Fort Couch too long. I used to stay in decent shape after the military, but a knee injury during the 2014 Tough Mudder in Seattle gave me the excuse I needed to stop.

High cholesterol? Sure. Garbage diet.

My partner calls me mapache , Spanish for “raccoon”, partly because I never sleep, so I’ve got the dark circles around my eyes. But I say it’s because my diet belongs in a trash can.

Pre-diabetic. Sedentary. Working from a chair.

So the doc told me: walk.

And I did. Every night, after work, for a year. Sometimes at 9 p.m., sometimes closer to midnight. I’d go out and walk for about 45 minutes. Oklahoma nights are quiet in that in-between hour, when the day’s noise is gone but the world hasn’t quite gone to sleep.

My usual route curved past a Roman Catholic church with a Marian shrine. At first, it was just a halfway mark. A point to turn around. A visual checkpoint that made the loop feel complete.

It wasn’t symbolic. Not then.

But somewhere along the way, a client conversation flipped everything upside down. We were talking about avoidance. About how avoiding the things that remind us of our pain doesn’t protect us, it preserves the power of the person who caused it.

That hit like a wave.

I hadn’t turned away from faith in a sudden storm. It had been a long tide, starting in a childhood where obedience was about avoiding pain. I spent four decades on that drift. Not out of rebellion but because I didn’t know that love without fear could exist. It had been fear, fear shaped by the memory of a man who used scripture like a weapon. When I was a child, my mother dated a deacon in a Southern Baptist church. He was horribly abusive. By avoiding faith, I wasn’t healing. I was handing over the reins to someone who should never have held them. And every night I walked past the shrine but wouldn’t face it, I was letting him stand between me and something I hadn’t even had the chance to define for myself.

At first, it was just a glance. Then a pause. Then one night, I sat quietly still not praying, just remembering.

I never meant to pray. Not in any way I’d admit to, anyway. I wasn’t looking for faith. Not even peace.

I just wanted to feel something.

After everything I’d experienced what I grew up with, what was stolen in the name of God, what the uniform hardened in me I’d gone cold somewhere inside. I didn’t need a miracle. I just wanted one ember to flicker.

That night I asked for nothing specific. I said quietly, “I don’t need a miracle. I don’t need a grand sign that clears away my doubt. I just want to feel something again.”

On the walk home, I put in my earbuds, shuffling YouTube. And “Arms” by Christina Perri started playing. A song I’d probably heard a thousand times without hearing it at all. By the first chorus, I was crying. Full, unguarded tears. Not sadness. Not even release. More like recognition like the song knew something before I did. That I was ready. I sat on a bench outside the church and let it happen. No visions. No revelations. Just the feeling of being… seen. And the strange sense that something call it God, grace, presence had answered, not with words, but with music.

“I tried my best to never let you in to see the truth
And I’ve never opened up, I’ve never truly loved
‘Til you put your arms around me
And I believe that it’s easier for you to let me go”

Christina Perri

I’ve always been skeptical of pop. Too polished. Too packaged. But Christina Perri had always felt like an exception. Not flashy, not forced just honest. And in that honesty, beautiful. I’d heard Arms before, but I hadn’t listened. Not until that night, cracked open by silence and longing.

Perri once said the song is about the fight between the heart and the mind, the heart that wants love, and the head that says you can’t. It’s a love song, but it hits something deeper. How many times has your heart yearned for acceptance, only for the voice of pain to whisper: you don’t deserve this? It was like she gave language to something I hadn’t been able to name. It wasn’t just a song it was someone standing beside me in the dark, saying: I see you.

If the words hadn’t been so raw, so brave, they wouldn’t have reached me.

But they were.

And they did.

And maybe that’s why, in that moment, I didn’t need a hymn. I just needed her.

But the bigger shift came later, in reflection. That night didn’t just reopen faith. It reframed my entire life. I started to see that the pieces of my story, the ones I wanted to cut out, were actually chapters that led me exactly where I needed to be. In the days that followed, the signs weren’t grand. A video that named an old question I’d never voiced. A comment thread that mirrored my thoughts. Little moments that felt more like winks than messages. And somehow, that was enough.

I didn’t rejoin a church. I didn’t proclaim a faith. But something shifted. I stopped walking away and started walking with.

If I hadn’t been hurt, would I have understood the true depths of despair? If I hadn’t been so broken I was just existing, would I have woken up needing to do something more? Without the Navy, I wouldn’t have become someone I could respect. I wouldn’t have found discipline, purpose, or even school. I started in computer science. Hated it. Graveyard shift, late-night commercial: “Become a medical assistant.” That led to addiction medicine. That led to nursing. That led to organic chemistry, which nearly broke me, but also led to psychology. I loved the psych classes. so I kept going.

Addiction counseling came next, but I disagreed with core philosophies there. A supervisor told me, “You need to learn to crawl before you try to run.” That unsatisfying answer? It pushed me forward toward counseling psychology, toward therapy, toward exactly where I needed to be. Every detour school, mistakes, burned-out jobs, even that knee injury led right here. And if I hadn’t walked every step of that strange, painful road… I wouldn’t be able to help others find footing in the fog.

Even my relationship long-distance, unconventional, cross-cultural became part of that path. I used to ask, “Why does she have to be so far away?” The answer came, unexpectedly, through a video:

“I didn’t know how to love them the way they needed to be loved.”

That was it. I had to learn. And I wanted to. Another video said:

“Love is a choice, not a feeling. You wake up and choose it. Choose them. Every day.”

I wasn’t just learning to believe again. I was learning to love again. To stay. To be present. To be a partner, not just a person.

Even my teasing about testing God circled back. A verse I hadn’t searched for popped up in a video:

“You shall not put the Lord your God to the test.”

My only reply:

“Okay. Message received.”

I used to think stories needed a clear message. But most of mine didn’t look like lessons until I was already living the next chapter. If there is a message in this one, it might be this:

Sometimes, life draws your path in reverse.

I didn’t become a therapist to fix anyone. I followed a spark. Got curious. Took a class, and somewhere between psychology and philosophy, I realized this wasn’t a job, it was a calling. Not to lead, but to walk beside. Not to have answers, but To ask better questions.

Even the nearly forty-year exile from faith had its place. I was a Christian once out of fear, trained to obey with clenched fists. I had to leave it behind to come back with open arms. Not because I was afraid not to love God, but because I wanted to. In my own language. At my own pace.

The shrine never was meant to convert me, and this chapter isn’t here to convert you. What I hope it offers is something quieter:

Avoidance may protect you in the short term.

But it gives the wound permanent lodging.

Facing it takes courage, but it’s the only way I’ve ever seen someone truly heal. Including myself.

That pop song? I still joke that pop can be soulless. But this one… This one cut through everything. I still tear up when she sings, “I hope that you see right through my walls…”

She did.

And I did.

And maybe if you’re still reading this you do too.

None of this was planned, but here I am, writing it. Somehow, every broken road feels like it was pointing here all along. Not to a finish line. But to a bench outside a shrine… Where one man sat down long enough to feel what he’d been missing.

And maybe that is the invitation here.

Not to believe what I believe. Not even to feel what I felt. Just to stop long enough… To notice what is already waiting for you.

The song knew first. The rest was just catching up.