The Survival Skill My Mother’s Anxiety Taught Me

As WordPress continues to recycle old prompts, I pulled another prompt from The Coffee Monsterz Co to respond to today

Think of one of your character strengths. Why do you think it became one of your strengths

The Mellow Myth: A Childhood of Anxiety

People tell me that I have a very easy-going, go-with-the-flow personality. They say that I’m mellow; that I don’t let things rattle me: that I don’t blow up.

I feel like I have to be like this. Even when I was younger, Mother was the most over-anxious, high-strung person I ever knew, it has gotten worse as she’s gotten older. Back in the day, they just called people like her “worry warts”. We were late for everything. Whether that was the price of having three children under the age of five or just an utter lack of punctuality, I will never know. Maybe the worst thing about growing up with somebody who is perpetually anxious or is that we were never discouraged from giving up very easily. If something didn’t go your way, quit. I wrote yesterday about an experience I had in high school where I really had to power through some adversity for the first time in my life. Needless to say, that was not a lesson I learned from Mother. Growing up around that you learn not to sweat the small stuff – as a survival mechanism.

Today, were she ever to be formally diagnosed, I’m sure that people would say she has an anxiety disorder. And don’t get me wrong. She certainly has reasons too. There was a trauma that she experienced as a teenager that still haunts her to this day. The problem is, she grew up in a generation where people weren’t encouraged to do much about their mental health. Because of that, this trauma that she endured, and the anxiety that resulted from it ended up defining her as a person.

Controlling the Two Things That Matter

But growing up with someone who was always anxious, always afraid of everything made me decide to pick and choose what I was going to let anger me. I don’t have a lot of male friends right now in my life, so most of the people I really talk to have been the women that I’ve dated. And almost all of them will tell you that I’m a very easy-going kind of guy. I’ve been told on numerous occasions that I don’t really let things get to me. Nothing could be further from the truth. I just happened to pick and choose the things that I’m going to get really worked up over.

A while back I learned that there are only two things you’re in control of in life: the way you treat other people, and the way you react to the way other people treat you. Everything else is totally out of our hands. I try to go out of my way to treat people the way that I would want to be treated. Yes there are points where the limits of my patience are exceeded and I snap.

Proof by Crisis: Divorce and the Wedding Day

if I had to think of one example of a time that I acted or reacted in a certain way that surprised other people, it would probably be my divorce.

The failure of the marriage itself was partly due to anxieties I hadn’t yet mastered, but when the end came, my core strength—that ability to detach and move forward—took over. I could sleep well knowing I did my best, and what I couldn’t control, I had to let go.

But as for my relationship with X2, I know that I did everything in my power to make that work. And I know that there were some instances were I simply wasn’t enough for her. And that’s OK. Again, I could sleep well, knowing that I did everything I could to make the relationship work.

Some people tend to look at my “go with the flow” attitude and things that I’m not disciplined or spontaneous. It’s not that I do not plan or prepare for anything, but I do prepare myself for the fact that things are going to change on the fly. I do think that people who try to micromanage too much, end up running the risk of things completely unravel and not knowing how to adapt

Furthermore, I do believe that at moments of catastrophe or moments of crisis, someone has to be the level head of reason. I think more often than that, that is me; or at least I try to be that person.

In fact, I remember back to the day of my wedding. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I was getting cold feet, but I was getting really nervous. The sentimental sap in me got all caught up in the moment of “this is my wedding day!“. And I started pacing in my father‘s basement. I’m assuming that my best man went upstairs to say something to my dad because he came down a few minutes later and had a short conversation with me where he basically explained :

“Rob, what you do today really isn’t going to change your day-to-day life. You and next one I’ve already been living together for sometime. You’re going to go through a church service say a couple vows and sign a paper. But your everyday of life is not going to change at all because of what happens today.” Even though I still got caught up in the emotion of the moment, I wasn’t scared or nervous about actually getting married after that conversation.

The Skill Learned from My Father’s Focus

It’s strange for someone who grew up in an anxiety-ridden household to be the calm center of a storm. But while my mother taught me what to avoid, I think my father showed me what to be. He was practical almost to a fault. He had this innate ability to just look at the ultimate objective of the situation and ignore any of the extraneous happenings on his peripheral vision and just see the objective.

I like to think that I picked that up from The Old Man. Ultimately, my go-with-the-flow nature isn’t a sign of being lazy or undisciplined; it’s a learned survival skill, honed by my mother’s fear and tempered by my father’s focus. True strength isn’t trying to micromanage life’s storms; it’s preparing to adapt when the plan inevitably changes.

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