It’s Not That Deep

If you’re an anxious person, you may feel like your brain is a hamster on a hamster wheel, going around and around in circles and never stopping.

You may find yourself overanalyzing situations, looking at things from every angle, trying to parse out your motivations and feelings, the other person’s motivations and feelings, trying to explain why you feel the way you feel, why something happened the way it happened.

Maybe you even find yourself overtherapizing. This idea that you’ve been in therapy, you have insight, so how you feel about a particular situation must mean that something bigger is going on internally.

Anxious brains are our internal warning system always being on high alert, always scanning for a threat, and when something comes up that makes us feel an uncomfortable emotion, we want to find an explanation, we want to understand it, because if we can do that, then that means we won’t experience it again in the future.

Now, the problem is that that isn’t how emotions or life works.

Our emotions are our brain’s way to communicate that something is happening in our environment and we need to decide how to address it.

Sometimes, that requires thinking about where we’re at, and if there are things coming up in that situation, but sometimes, we’re just reacting because that’s what humans do.

One of the things that comes up a lot in my therapy sessions with clients is the reminder that sometimes, things aren’t that deep.  

Sometimes we’re just having a normal human reaction to something and that reaction doesn’t have anything to do with what is coming up for you in therapy. We don’t need to dig deep about it, it just is exactly as it is on the surface.

For many of my anxious clients, and myself included as an anxious person, we find ourselves going over every little detail of an interaction or an experience, trying to dissect it, placing pressure on ourselves to understand why we responded that way, and try to not do that again in the future.

This spiral can then cause more anxiety, especially if we aren’t coming up with “reasonable” explanations for the experience.

Sometimes we’re just feeling something.

Many times, the search for a deeper explanation is an attempt to “fix” something within ourselves, to try and ease future anxiety or stress, when in reality, we can’t fix it.

Sometimes there are things that are just out of our control.

Many perfectionists and high achievers take on more responsibility for things, believing that if they “just did more” or “understood this better” they could eliminate a future issue when the reality may be that it’s something that person has no control over.

Sometimes people just suck.

Sometimes (many times) the systems in place aren’t fair and no one individual can make it better or be responsible for it.

Sometimes there is just no deeper explanation for something and it just is what it is.

It’s okay to feel it. You don’t have to explain it away or qualify it. You can just feel it and we can work together on understanding when things just aren’t that deep.

If you want to learn more, reach out here for a free consultation.