There is a particular kind of anxiety that comes from nothing happening. No one has said anything. Nothing has gone wrong. There is no bad news. There is no evidence that anything has changed. And yet, something within is waiting.
Waiting for the message. Waiting for the tone to shift. Waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting to find out if you’ve done something wrong.
This phantom anxiety is the anxiety of something that hasn’t happened yet. It happens most often when “power is disguised as love” (Marion Woodman).
We need love. We need belonging. We need attachment. We need to know that we have a place somewhere. And because we need connection, we also become exquisitely aware of the possibility of losing it. When we are reminded of our need for love & belonging, we are reminded of the threats of rejection & abandonment.
We feel loved by the possibility of connection and afraid of losing the connection we so desperately need.
So we start looking for signs. We read faces. We listen for changes in tone. We notice the pause before someone answers. We notice when someone seems quieter than usual. We notice when someone doesn’t respond right away. And when there is nothing to notice, we notice that there is nothing to notice.
This is where the phantom comes in. There is no rejection. But there could be. There is no abandonment. But it could happen. There is no disconnection. But what if there is? And so the body prepares, not for what is happening but for what might happen.
This is where we become choice-less in the most subtle ways. When connection is at stake, our choices don’t always feel like choices.
I can say no.
But what if you’re disappointed?
I can tell you what I actually think.
But what if you don’t like it?
I can do what I want.
But what if it makes you angry?
I can leave.
But what if you don’t come after me?
Technically, I have a choice. But the threat attached to the choice changes the choice itself. So I start making decisions based on other people’s possible responses. I don’t ask myself what I want. I ask what will keep everyone happy. I don’t ask how I feel. I ask how everyone else feels about me. I don’t ask whether I want to go. I ask whether someone will be upset if I don’t. And eventually, desire becomes something I look for outside of myself.
I become very good at knowing what everyone else wants and very bad at knowing what I want. This is not because I don’t have desires but because I learned to outsource them.
If I know what you want, I know how to belong.
If I know what you need, I know how to stay connected.
If I know what might disappoint you, I know what to avoid.
And if I can anticipate rejection, maybe I can prevent it. This is the strange bargain we make with belonging. I’ll give up some of myself in exchange for the certainty that you’ll stay. Except there is no certainty. There is never certainty.
So we keep giving.
A little more.
A little more.
A little more.
Until we look up one day and realize we have become incredibly skilled at maintaining relationships we aren’t actually sure we want. All because we were so busy making sure we were wanted. This is why phantom anxiety can be so exhausting. There is nothing actually happening. But I am responding to something.
I am responding to the possibility. The possibility that someone is upset. The possibility that I’ve disappointed them. The possibility that they are pulling away. The possibility that I am no longer wanted.
And my body doesn’t always know the difference between something happening and something that might happen.
So I monitor, anticipate, adjust, perform and abandon myself preemptively because if I can leave myself first, it may not hurt as much when someone else leaves. If I don’t know if you’re disappointed, or what you’re going to say, or what you’re thinking, if the uncertainty stays uncertain, the phantom anxiety will haunt my waking and sleeping until I become a wraith with it.
Becoming yourself requires you to feel, want, honour your yes and no, to stop organizing your life entirely around keeping the peace, being good, being useful, or being easy to love but your psyche has its own security systems. When looking inward once meant risking rejection, abandonment, disconnection, or shame, those security systems learn to keep looking outward. It is much safer to know what everyone else wants than to ask yourself what you want. The terror of looking within is not necessarily that we won’t find an answer. But we might find an answer that threatens our belonging.
So perhaps we don’t begin with authenticity, perhaps we begin with acceptance. We may not start with self-love, but we can start with self-acceptance. With creating enough safety that I can discover what I feel without immediately needing to change it, to want something without knowing whether anyone else will approve, to say no without rehearsing an explanation that makes my no more palatable, to let my desire exist before I decide what to do about it.
We can’t “just listen to themselves” when your psyche has spent years protecting you from the consequences of doing exactly that.
First, we have to make it safe enough to look.