The Role of Anxiety

Q. I have a good life. A loving husband, healthy kids, a nice house and a good job. Sure, we have money problems and family issues, but overall we’re blessed. I even get along with my parents and my brothers and sisters. But I know I don’t enjoy my life enough. I’ve struggled with depression at times, and am often critical and irritable with my husband and kids. Medication helps a little, but doesn’t solve my problem. I don’t like taking it anyway. I often feel like I’m faking it and just going through the motions. What I really want to do is stay in bed and pull the covers over my head. I must be really messed up, right? Maybe my mother was right and I’m just spoiled because I’m the youngest.

A. It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on without knowing your specific family history and other details of your life, which we will gather if you come in for therapy, but there are some principles that apply to all of us:

Individuality and Togetherness

All people struggle with a tension between the emotional forces for Individuality and Togetherness. The togetherness force is a biologically rooted life force that pushes individuals to be part of the group. The togetherness force encourages dependence, agreement, following, and harmony. The togetherness force is always operating in dynamic tension with the force for individuality, “a biologically rooted life force that propels an organism to follow its own directives to be an independent and distinct entity” (Kerr and Bowen, 1988, p. 64).

More pressure for togetherness often exists than room for individuality. When the forces get out of balance, this contributes to Chronic Anxiety. In your case, it may be that the pressures of being a wife, mother, homemaker, daughter and employee are making it difficult for you to honor your need to be an individual among your loved ones. This might explain your desire to separate yourself and “pull the covers” over your head.

Chronic and Acute Anxiety

The level of chronic anxiety you inherited and carry may be contributing to your symptoms of mild to moderate depression: Anxiety is an organism’s response to a real or imagined threat. Anxiety triggers physical reactions including heart rate and blood pressure changes, gaze aversion, fight or flight responses, and heightened alertness or fear sensations. Though a certain level of anxiety mobilizes physical and mental resources necessary for human adaptation and survival, some reactions to threat in modern life may not be adaptive.

Chronic anxiety differs from acute anxiety. Acute anxiety is usually a response to a real threat and of short duration. Chronic anxiety arises within our relationships, is related to the tension between the togetherness and individuality forces, and has a more enduring quality. Chronic anxiety often exceeds a person’s ability to cope with it and can lead to the development of physical or emotional symptoms in vulnerable individuals.

Differentiation of Self

Differentiation of self is defined as your ability to distinguish between your thoughts and feelings in your emotional relationship systems. Ultimately, the goal of therapy is to increase your level of differentiation of self. DOS determines your level of sensitivity in the following four arenas:

Approval from and toward others
Attention from others
Distress within self and others
Expectations of self and others

A high level of relationship sensitivity will prompt you to either adjust what you think, say, and do to please others or, conversely, decide what others should be like and pressure them to conform. Can you relate to the idea that you are too sensitive to the people around you? That their behavior can have too big of an effect on you, sometimes driving you “under the covers”? Working on raising your level of DOS means getting more objective about the motives and behavior of the people around you, and learning how think things through even when the emotional intensity around you gets high.

According to Ed Friedman (Friedman, 1999, p. 183):

Differentiation refers to a direction in life rather than a state of being:

Differentiation is the capacity to take a stand in an intense emotional system.
Differentiation is saying “I” when others are demanding “we”.
Differentiation is containing one’s reactivity to the reactivity of others, which includes the ability to avoid being polarized.
Differentiation is maintaining a non-anxious presence in the face of anxious others.
Differentiation is knowing where one ends and another begins.
Differentiation is being able to cease automatically being one of the system’s emotional dominoes.
Differentiation is being clear about one’s own personal values and goals.
Differentiation is taking maximum responsibility for one’s own emotional being and destiny rather than blaming others or the context.

Individuals

The Role of Anxiety

Individuality and Togetherness

Chronic and Acute Anxiety

Differentiation of Self

According to Ed Friedman (Friedman, 1999, p. 183):

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