Imagine knowing all about anxiety at the tender age of three, of being triggered by certain things that other children would laugh off?.
My sister and I used to walk home from school with two older girls because we were only four and five at the time, too young to walk by ourselves. The two older girls used to get great fun and a kind of buzz out of teasing me and telling me things that frightened me, things like they were going to take me away somewhere and leave me leave me by myself where no one could find me.
This really triggered the biggest feeling of panic and anxiety in me because .. well … I believed them. I believed it could happen , that they had the power to do as they said. The interesting thing in all this was that my sister was not bothered in the least, she used to laugh at my reaction, amused by my crying and worry. She knew it was just teasing so I think the older girls let her in on the secret that it was just a game they were playing. That’s the only way I can make sense of it .
I grew up in a home where there was always an undercurrent of uncertainty and anxiety, my Mam suffered terribly with depression. The depression hung around like a bad smell permeating he walls and rooms of our home. You might say I was more sensitive than most to how my Mam was feeling mainly because I think I bore the brunt of her frustrations. She criticised me a fair bit and always compared me with her first born, my older sister. I remember she threatened a few times to send me away to an industrial school and that sounded ominous to me although I did’nt understand completely where that was or what it was.
I became a people pleaser at a very early age, spent a lot of time trying to please my Mam and keep her sweet so to speak. Its a bit like learning a foreign language the way I learned how to navigate my Mams moods and side step things becoming overwhelming for me. The lack of a secure attachment with my Mam I believe firmly was the catalyst for my tendancy towards anxiety. Its a well known fact that a child’s personality is developed between the ages of 0-7 years and whatever has happened between those years will imprint itself on the child.
Anxiety was the main reason I became a Hypnotherapist. I wanted to find out why things were the way they were with me, why I felt unsafe and insecure around people. I learnt and found out a lot about why some people go on to be anxious adults on account of their unattached and insecure relationships in their early childhood. There is a saying I have heard a couple of times and it’s this. “Show me the child and I will tell you about the kind of Man or Woman he/ she will become.
