Intergenerational Anxiety

Understanding which part is ours.

I’m hosting a Tarot + Kabbalah workshop with Mark Horn on Zoom for paid subscribers on Sunday, April 14th at 10amPT. The link to register is at the very bottom of the email, after the paywall. You can read more about Mark here or listen to our podcast episode here (he jokes that he’s the only person to teach at both the Jewish Theological Seminary and the Readers Studio International Tarot Conference). It would be good to have a Rider-Waite Tarot deck.

Workshop News: I’m co-leading a weekend workshop—“Choosing Wholeness Over Goodness”—at The Art of Living Center in Boone, North Carolina with Courtney Smith (our podcast episode here), from May 17-19. You can find all the details here.

I’ve been riding a wave of anxiety for many weeks, right on the edge of tipping over into a period of chronic hyperventilation, where I enter a pattern that can last for months. This is when I yawn and sigh to take full breaths, even though my lungs are over-saturated with oxygen. It’s exhausting. It fills me with dread. Yet, despite doing this for two decades, I can’t tell you its triggers, except that sleep deprivation (and a concordance of too much caffeine) don’t help. Vacations don’t cure me; and a period of acute stress doesn’t result in an attack. It’s in moments of overwhelm that I find myself calm, centered. My anxiety reconstitutes itself into excitement, becomes energy that I can process and use.

Katsushika Hokusai, “Under the Wave off Kanagawa,” or “The Great Wave,” 1830-1832, Metropolitan Museum Print Store

I did a book event with my friend Matt Gutman last month. Matt is the chief national correspondent for ABC News, which means he is frequently reporting from the middle of terrible trauma: school shootings, forest fires, wars. He was in Israel on 10/8 and Gaza in the weeks and months after. He is often with people on the worst days of their lives, documenting their grief, pain, and fear.

Like me, Matt suffers from debilitating anxiety—he has a panic disorder, which he writes about in No Time to Panic. (You can listen to our podcast convo here.) And like me, he contends with it as a random constellation of triggers. For people with panic, its unpredictability is what makes it particularly painful: If you only knew what brings it on, you could control its onset, but alas, it often descends precisely when it should not. Matt refers to himself as a “Courageous Coward,” because he overfunctions in situations where 99% of us would run for cover, yet finds himself sweating through his shirt when he’s going live to tell the world about, I don’t know, a puppy parade.

As we sat in the bookstore together, Matt talked about how fear and panic are highly adaptive qualities: No fear, no survival. And this comes right down through our ancestral lines: We transmit our emotional codes intergenerationally, particularly when trauma is involved. As Matt noted that day, he likely owed his life to the heightened anxiety of his grandparents, who decided to pay attention to the rise of antisemitism and get out of Germany in the ‘30s.

My family history is the same, though I had never thought about it in this context. My Jewish great-grandfather sold his jewelry store in Warsaw and moved with my grandmother to South Africa in the ‘30s, where she eventually met my grandfather. My grandfather had fled Germany simultaneously—as a Jewish actor, he was not allowed to work, and didn’t wait around to see what would come next. He changed his name (my real last name is Lowenstein) and took refuge in Johannesburg. There’s a large population of South African Jews because the apartheid government was actively encouraging white people to immigrate, and Jews, in this instance, were adequately white. My great uncle went to Israel instead. When I let myself dwell on it, this is an emotional mixed bag for me: survivor’s guilt, masking and concealing, white supremacy. All justifiable, reasonable, life-saving, but complicated. Like Matt, I owe my life to my father’s family’s hypervigilance—anxiety is my birthright. It makes sense that when things are going a-ok, my spidey sense comes online, waiting for the threat: What was once an essential trait is now mal-adaptive.

Many, many years ago, an intuitive healer told me something I think about all the time. It was pretty basic: “You know this anxiety isn’t yours, right? It doesn’t belong to you.” I know this to be true, that the anxiety my system is trying to process is hanging out in the air—it’s collective anxiety that I keep trying to locate in my body and immediate environment, to root down to its cause and effect. This will never resolve. I know I’m not alone: We’re all swimming in anxiety and I’m sure many others can’t immediately identify why because it’s disconnected from events of the present. It’s located in the past, or in another cubicle, state, or country.

I’m working on a special series for the podcast about trauma—I’ve done a lot of interviews about trauma in the past decade, specifically as part of a very wide communal effort to mainstream both the word* and concept. We—I’m using the royal “we” loosely—were trying to create a trauma-informed society so we could find common language and frameworks to begin to see, address, and break old patterns that have us by the throat.

(*I think this has been achieved, to the point that the word is likely over-used and at risk of becoming meaningless.)

I just read Peter Levine’s An Autobiography of Trauma (coming April 2, he’s part of this series), where he explores our instinct to repeat experiences until they resolve. He writes, “Carl Jung, in his book Psychological Types, wrote: ‘all experiences are represented which have happened on this planet since primeval times. The more frequent and the more intense they were, the more clearly focused they become in the archetype.’ This might be one reason why wars are never truly over, and why there are no ‘wars to end all wars.’”

We are stuck in inescapable loops. We keep trying to trace humanity’s horrible grievances back to the beginning, or run them forward to equally horrible conclusions. You know what I wish for? A 23andMe filter where we could each attend to our own ancestral lineage, to see how our own becoming unfolded over time.

I think each and every one of us would face a similar reckoning: That we are here, on this bright and beautiful day, because our ancestors ensured our survival by any means necessary. That at various points in time, we were sometimes the oppressor and sometimes the oppressed, sometimes the victimizer and sometimes the victimized. Some of this played out in the wild, some of this played out in local feuds and skirmishes, some of this played out on a global scale. This is the story of our wholeness, its grim and stark and stunning reality. We know this, it’s epigenetically coded into our DNA, and yet it feels unbearable to address this because we don’t know how to reconcile this reality with who we believe ourselves to be.

Here’s Richard Rohr, in The Wisdom Pattern:

“In the last forty or fifty years, we’ve had better scholarship, more honest history, and more access to historical records. We now can cite chapter and verse as to how and when other people have oppressed us and done us wrong. We have better knowledge than ever before as to why we have a right to our anger and our wounds. This type of progress will not create any kind of future.

“I am surely happy for the honest scholarship and the access, but it is actually a two-edged sword—like all things—cutting good and cutting bad. Only wise people know how to take the information in helpful directions so we can stop victimizing in the future and not be trapped inside the resentful perspective that allows us to justify new victimizations.”

This is where wisdom comes in and a path beyond a binary or dualistic way of thinking that traps us in a cycle—doing this requires the ability to be honest and hold both truths together, our complicity in the evil and the good. Because a complex history is a universal reality, and until we’re willing to face this, accept it, integrate it, and metabolize it, we’ll never be able to choose different stories for our future. We’ll keep re-enacting the same patterns, again and again, “righting old wrongs” by creating new tears in the fabric that is supposed to hold us tightly woven together. As Rohr writes, “We think we can dominate the shadow self rather than forgive it, transform it, and embrace it into a larger wholeness.”

Just as Matt and I, and others with anxiety disorders will never get a master control sheet to our systems, there’s no balance sheet coming for all of us either, no way to “square up” our history and make it tidy, neat, and resolved. We have to start where we are. In The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin writes, “To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it’s learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.” We need to find our durability. We have to tend to this collective shadow and take our share to process. It’s our only shot, to take the bad as well as the good, to do our part.

This is from a newsletter I wrote on October 12—“What’s the Work for Us?”—it still holds. Maybe small actions like this are where we begin.

I know we can all feel the collective, even thousands of miles away from terror.

Hearts are racing and pulses are sky high. People are angry. While anger is a primary emotion, it’s also secondary to fear, shame, and grief. The fear is the trickiest: This is first/root chakra, safety and security. Absent an assurance of that, it’s impossible to stay centered or grounded, to speak from the higher self. This is where those of us who are not directly affected by the conflict come in.

We must stay present and connected with whatever capacity we can muster: We each need to process as much collective shadow as we can, and not add to it. It’s time to take back all of our own projections—our anger, irritation, impatience—and move it through our bodies so that we can hold more, including emotions that are not our own. Think of yourself as a turbo, energy efficient washing machine: If you pray, pray. If you meditate, meditate. If you walk, walk. If you sit, sit. Do all of this with presence. Move your own fear through your body so you can process the shadow that’s hanging in the collective. Move your own fear through your body so you can sit with friends who are scared and unable to process this themselves. Be kind in the world: Kind comes from kin. We are in this together. Hold the vibration as high as you can. Rest. Find ways to be with other people, to make each other laugh. Take long breaks from social media and the news. Shake your body.

Take care of yourselves. The special series on trauma is coming in May on Pulling the Thread—it’s been moving to make it. I thought I knew a lot, but find there’s always so much more to learn.

In the interim, some related podcast episodes from Pulling the Thread:

Collective shadow is the focus of Thomas Hübl’s work (Episode 1, Episode 2), Galit Atlas writes and talks about ancestral trauma (Episode), as does Gabor Maté (Episode). Here’s a list of books on trauma of all types.

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2/29: Five things I’ve been thinking about (Solo Episode)
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2/22: The basics of Spiral Dynamics with Nicole Churchill
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My New York Times bestselling book—On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to be Good—is out now.