What Mothers Have Known All Along
Photo: Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash
“Joan Baez said in an interview that she’d had terrible, terrible stage fright. So bad that she’d be doing a concert and she’d have to go backstage for five minutes to pull herself together and go back out to finish singing.
The interviewer asked what happened to the stage fright. She said, ‘Oh, it’s [still there, but] it’s not a problem anymore.’
I’ve seen it, too.
Anxiety may take years to diminish, but it does.
It’s a tough thing to say to somebody who’s really suffering from their anxiety in the here and now and it’s very painful, but the truth is it may be that the best solution is really to keep on working at mindfulness — at distancing from the anxiety.
We think about mindfulness these days as something that comes from Buddhism, but I think of mindfulness as something that comes from the first years of your life.
Think about what happens when a child is one or two and in a lot of distress. They cry and then a parent comes and says, ‘Oh, I’m so sorry. Let me hold you. You’re feeling so terrible.’
So mom [or dad], in understanding, reflects back a point of view about the distress that is an outside perspective. "‘I see you hurting. I understand you’re hurting and it’s going to be okay.’
That’s exactly what mindfulness is about: stepping outside yourself, looking at yourself, and knowing that it’s going to be okay.
So it may be Buddhism, but maybe Buddhists just discovered something that mothers have known all along. Either way, it’s when you’re feeling something like anxiety — you’re inside it, you’re inside yourself.
You’re focused on that bad feeling and what helps is to be able to step outside yourself and to see it as kind of a wave of feeling — like surfing a wave. It’s going to come. It’s going to pass along. It’ll break on the shore and it’ll be done.”
See also:
Smith, J. (2017). Psychotherapy: A practical guide. Ann Arbor, Michigan: Cham Springer International Publishing. (author, library)