“Where am I gonna go? What am I gonna do?”

This is the inner dialogue of Anxiety…

I hope you’re finding yourself having a lovely week so far! I feel inspired to share a little story with you.

Recently, I worked with a woman who came to me because she was experiencing bowel incontinence and high anxiety and, because she had to stay close to a bathroom, she couldn’t really leave her house.

And because she couldn’t really leave the house, she was also experiencing steadily worsening depression and listlessness because of how limited her activities had become.

We worked together for 10 weeks. In our first session, it quickly came to light that she’d been experiencing anxiety since she was 18. Over 50 years!

So, we explored a little further, and through hypnotherapy, and we uncovered the underlying belief she had been carrying in her unconscious mind, probably since she was 18, that her body was expressing.

In hypnotherapy we work with what we call “rules of the mind”, and one of these rules is that our bodies must react in a way that is consistent with our thoughts.

In other words, what we tell ourselves – what we believe – our bodies express physically.

My client’s mother kicked her out when she was 18. She had nowhere to go, and when her mother kicked her out, she took on the belief that she wasn’t welcome anywhere. This pivotal event in her life set the stage for her high anxiety.

Her inner mantra became “where am I gonna go? What am I gonna do??” Cue, the pretty serious survival mode… She felt like she’d have to pick up and leave at the drop of a hat, that she wasn’t welcome anywhere, and so she always experienced high anxiety in public settings.

So now, 50 years later, her body had become the story of her belief, and was playing out that story every day. “Where am I gonna go and what am I going to do?!” became “I can’t handle this! This is too much! I have to keep it out!” (“It” being other people’s energy, stress, anxiety… anything unknown or unexpected.)

In survival mode, our brains do their job – to keep us safe. AND what happens is, we can get stuck in that mode, and our bodies keep playing out that story.

So her body followed her mind. Her body said, “oh, we need to keep other people’s energy out? We can’t be in public? No problem! I can help you with that!” Nothing malicious. Just innocently trying to help. In a bathroom, she could be alone, away from others.

Her body gave her a “solution” by giving her terrible rumbling in her gut. That way, she would have an excuse to leave an event or situation she didn’t feel comfortable in by needing to flee to the closest bathroom.

But then over time, experiencing high anxiety in her body every day, what happened is the rumbling would happen every time she left the house. Her body was acting out the story of “I have to push other people’s energy away from me”, and so her body was literally in a “pushing out” pattern all the time.

This is how it works. Our bodies step in to “help” us when we carry around a belief like “I’m not enough, I can’t deal with this, I’m alone, it’s my fault, this is too much, I’m different, no one loves me, how could I possibly…” etc etc etc.

After only a few sessions, my client started to have full days with zero accidents. Within a few weeks, she was able to drive longer distances, and she was able to sit in a cafe and read for hours – her favorite thing to do.

At our 6 month follow-up, she shared this with me: “Hannalies, you gave me my life back.”

When I get feedback like this my heart swells with gratitude and my eyes tear up. Stories like hers are why I do what I do. I 1000000000% believe that we have the power within us to completely shift our beliefs.

We get to change the stories we hold that manifest through our bodies. We get to create the lives we really want to be living, simply by being willing to look at what old beliefs we’re still carrying, that aren’t working for us anymore.

Like fixing a record stuck on repeat, all it takes is adjusting the needle.

Your Aliveness is calling.

Are you ready?