Sunday Anxiety

Excerpt from my book, "The Wisdom of Anxiety":

Sunday anxiety is a common experience that strikes many people who struggled with school as children or with work as adults. It’s the anxiety that hits when we know we have to show up on Monday for a life that currently triggers anxiety or causes us to recall past anxiety. Years ago, I worked with a client who struggled intensely with this particular anxiety. Instead of acknowledging it directly, she would project it onto the familiar screen of her partner’s face and listen to the well-worn song on the track of her psyche called “Not Enough.” She would analyze their day (were we connected enough?), analyze his face (cute enough?), and analyze herself (am I enough?). Eventually she was able to recognize this as the hypervigilant part of herself: the part that was scanning the horizon, looking for lurking danger.

As we talked it through, I encouraged her to give her hypervigilant Sunday anxiety a name—the name of someone who had accompanied her through decades of life. Now was the time to invite it out from the shadows and make it real so that it didn’t have to make a sideways appearance, demanding attention by banging on the backdoor and making a ruckus about her lovely husband. Once she had a name, I encouraged my client to make a preemptive strike. Instead of waiting for the anxiety to play the “Not Enough” song the next Sunday, invite it in through the front door for conversation. Then she could dialogue with it directly and ask what it was needing. With a loving parent at the helm of the dialogue, did they need to time travel back to those painful Sundays as a child, when she knew that the separation of school was on the horizon? Did they need to sit on that single bed together, loving parent and young child, while the child told the adult her story and buried her head into an imaginary loving shoulder while she cried? When my client sought out her Sunday anxiety and engaged in a dialogue, she simmered the anxiety down to the core need—needing time and space to revisit past grief and loneliness—and the presenting projection disappeared.

It takes courage to travel into these uncharted waters that make themselves known in the liminal zone of Sunday evening. It takes courage to trust that you can handle what you find there. It takes courage to become your own friend, the one that can cradle your pain and seek comfort when the pain feels too big to handle alone.

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