The Worst Anxiety You’ve Felt Might Not Be Yours
Updated: Feb 7, 2025
Colleen & Dana are well-established healers and coaches. They are the creators of The Black Belt Mind, NAP, & YIM, incorporating Colleen’s Traditional Chinese Medicine training and Dana’s extensive coaching & martial arts experience into systems you can use to improve your health, career, and every relationship in your life in unprecedented ways.
Do you feel held hostage by anxiety sometimes? Do you feel like you should be able to get rid of it, but you can’t? Like nothing you do works, and you’ll never be able to escape it? All kinds of anxiety can feel terrible, but the worst anxiety, the anxiety that can feel the most impossible to shift, could very well not even be yours. You could be feeling the effects of an inherited trauma, and that gives you all the room in the world to start to release it truly.
What kind of anxiety can be inherited?
All of it. It could be the type of anxiety where you feel tense, restless, or nervous. It could be physical, with palpitations, sweating, shaking, or hyperventilating. It could be darker with feelings of panic or doom. It could show up as trouble focusing, digestive distress, or feeling exhausted. It could be about barking dogs or going swimming, about disappointing people, relationship mistakes, or being afraid you’ll fail.
How is anxiety passed down?
In one word: epigenetics. We outlined some of the ways inherited trauma (epigenetics) can impact people in another Brainz article. The quick summary is that more and more evidence is being found that unprocessed, unresolved trauma can ‘flip a switch’ in your DNA, and continue its impact generations later.
The cherry blossom experiment
An experiment was run where mice were given an electric shock while wafting a chemical over them that smelled like cherry blossoms. Unsurprisingly, the mice started to associate the smell with the shock and became agitated, even when no more shocks were given. The smell alone made them anxious.
But this is the interesting part: the next generations of mice also became anxious with the smell of cherry blossoms, even though they had never been shocked. Even though they weren’t raised by the original mice who were shocked.
What does that mean to me?
Let’s switch the story and pretend that it was a grandparent of yours who developed an aversion to the smell of cherry blossoms after a trauma. Let’s further pretend that there aren’t any stories about that in your family. After all, they might not have realized how much anxiety the smell gave them. They might not have wanted to relive the thing that happened by talking about it. They might have been doing their version of “keep calm and carry on.” Their genes, however, could pass that anxiety down to you.
Now let’s pretend that you are on a date with someone wonderful. It’s going great and you stroll through a park full of cherry blossoms. Your conscious mind is on your date, while your epigenetic inheritance is screaming that you are in danger. You start feeling tense, restless, agitated, and you end your date early.
Or let’s pretend that you have an interview for your dream job. You’re prepared, you’re excited and as you interview in a bright sunny room with an open window wafting in the smell of cherry blossoms, you find it hard to focus, and you start feeling dread: you botch the interview or you can’t seem to make yourself follow up on it.
But the problem goes one step further
You tell yourself a story about the anxiety.
Humans are story-tellers, and when something doesn’t make sense, we make up a story to make it make sense. Since you don’t know that it’s the cherry blossom smell that caused the anxious feelings, you make up a story. Perhaps the story is that the date got boring or the job interviewer was rude.
Usually, our stories place us at fault
However, one of the most common stories we tell ourselves about anxiety is that we’re not good enough. We can’t seem to get the hang of dating, we’re terrible in job interviews. When it happens time after time, though, the story becomes simpler: I always mess up. I’m the problem; this anxiety is overwhelming, and there’s just no hope of it changing.
One simple step to a way out
There are ways out, regardless of how much the anxiety tells you that you’re trapped.. We’ve found in our work with Inherited Trauma and NAP (the New Agreement Process) that it can be relatively simple to clear out ancestral trauma. It’s great if you know the story of how it started, but you don’t have to.
The first step, however, is simply this: recognize that the anxiety that you’ve never been able to sort out, the mistake you seem to make no matter what, and the bad choices you can’t seem to avoid might not be yours. You are acting on them, yes. You have the power to change them, of course: but they might not be yours.
That simple step gives you some space. It lets you change the habit of blaming yourself. It lets you take back some of your power. It gives you a chance to start thinking about patterns in your family that you could be a part of, and that gives you the opportunity to step out of the pattern. It gets you curious, and it gives you room for hope and progress.
In fact, the more we work with groups and include inherited trauma in the work we do, the faster people move things. Even things that people are 100% certain are theirs, even if they remember the incident that started the anxiety around heights or the party where the social anxiety started. Even when they don’t remember a time before they felt anxiety, addressing inherited trauma as a reality or a possibility helps it clear faster.
You deserve to feel better. If allowing yourself the possibility of ‘your’ anxiety not being yours feels right, feels like you have room to breathe, or feels like something you’d like to learn more about, you can explore it here with us.
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Read more from Colleen Robinson & Dana Pemberton
Colleen Robinson & Dana Pemberton, Wellness and Leadership Strategists
Dana and Colleen bring partnership to a whole new level in their work together. Vastly different in many ways, they deliver their own brand of magic to the groups, companies, and individuals they work with across North America. Colleen’s experience as a Chinese Medicine Practitioner, fascination with the intersection between science and spirituality, and focus on healing combines with Dana’s “boots on the ground” approach based on a lifetime of martial arts training (he started at age 3) and several decades of coaching. Together, their focus is to help you find and clear the old patterns that are holding you back, and replace them with simple concepts you can apply to move forward with ease.
