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I believe that most, almost all, mental health disorders originates in childhood experience – and it originates as a coping mechanism. If you look at anxiety, if I were to pull a gun on you, you would not be anxious, you’d be afraid, as you should be. When are we afraid? When we’re threatened with something.
Either something bad happened to us or something that we need is threatened to be taken away from us.
In the young child’s early life, anxiety is an attachment alarm. What is the child’s biggest need? Attachment with the parent, and connection with the parent. When the parent’s not around the child should feel some fear. That serves a positive purpose. When the child feels fear, he cries. And that brings the parent. Look at the mother cat responding to the kittens’ cries – it’s immediate.
It’s the same with human beings who are still connected to the parenting instinct – they will respond to the child’s cry for help. That fear is adaptive. It’s a coping mechanism.
But what happens to a person whose parents are taught by medical experts not to pick up their kids when they’re crying? Now that natural fear which causes the crying, which brings the parent and ends the anxiety is embedded in the child. So what begins as a coping mechanism, now becomes generalised.
Under certain circumstances, there should be fear and anxiety. But when I have this anxiety when there is no immediate threat – what is that about? It’s not a response to anything external, it’s the embedded anxiety that I developed as a child.
In a society that makes people more isolated all the time, where human social contact is replaced by the rather cold and impersonal world of the internet. And where young people have less opportunity for meaningful employment and belonging than their parents used to – there is a more general threat.
When that general threat hits people who are in childhood over-immersed in anxiety that’s not relieved by the parent coming to help them, now you’ve got an anxiety situation.
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