Story Time: Anxiety

Hey Teachers, today is going to be a story time edition. I promise there will be nuggets to relate to and show you how thought work has helped me manage my thoughts and feelings.

So I started asking myself the hard questions, like what if it wasn’t a problem that this time it does feel hard and overwhelming. See because it felt hard to me I was making it mean that I wasn’t good at my job anymore. I was making my feeling of overwhelm mean that I couldn’t handle these situations. So I started rewriting my narrative. What if it being hard and overwhelming didn’t mean I wasn’t adequate or I wasn’t able to handle it.

I was so frustrated with myself that right before a dysregulation I felt my body get tight, and tense and I started feeling anxious. (no one outside of me ever knew, but I could feel it, and I hated it: I made it mean that I was no longer fit for this job) But what if it's okay that I feel anxious right before a dysregulation? What if I just allowed myself to be human and have human reactions to aggressive behaviors. You see your brain knows what is going to happen during this dysregulation, so your brain knows what you will have to endure so it is normal for it to send protective nervous responses throughout your body. Instead of making it mean that I wasn’t meant for this job anymore, or that this situation was different. I talked back to my brain and said no this is just a normal human response, I learned to allow my anxiety instead of fighting it, I allowed my body to feel the anxiety sensations: my body would tighten, my heart rate would increase, and I would talk to myself: You are allowed to feel anxious, this is part of the human brain response it doesn’t mean anything about you or your ability to be the Teacher this student needs.

Learning to not be mad at myself or frustrated with myself for feeling anxiety was my mountain last year, and it allowed me to learn how to build a stronger relationship with myself. I learned that I was making my human reactions mean things about me that just were not true. I was making it mean that I wasn’t being the Teacher my students deserved (You can ask everyone I work with and they would completely disagree! I even told one of my colleagues what I was going through and she reminded me your brain is telling you a story and you would tell me, is it even true. She’s like you are allowed to be human, something I so often tried to remind her. I love Teacher friends, always there ready to ground you from the high expectations that cause so much unnecessary overwhelm)