In my last post, I wrote about feeling more like myself after 40 than I ever have before. That realization has come with another, much harder truth: before I could begin discovering who I was, I had to understand what had been happening inside me for most of my life.
For years, I thought I had an anger problem.
I knew I could be impatient. I knew I had a strong need to control situations. I knew I sometimes reacted much more intensely than the people around me. Situations that other people seemed able to accept, dismiss, or move past could feel enormous to me.
I could not understand why they did not see what I saw or feel the urgency I felt. Their calmness did not reassure me. It often made me feel more frustrated, more alone, and more convinced that they were not taking the situation seriously enough.
At the time, I did not understand those reactions as anxiety. I thought they were simply part of who I was.
I was raised to believe that when I struggled with impatience, anger, or the need to control, I needed to turn to Scripture, apply what I was reading, pray for guidance, and ask the Holy Spirit to help me change. Faith was the framework I had for understanding myself. If I was not responding the way I should, then I needed to pray more, exercise greater self-control, and try harder to get it right.
I want to be careful here because I am not blaming my faith. Faith gave me values, discipline, hope, and a place to turn when life felt difficult. It remains an important part of who I am.
But faith was the only framework I had, and it was not the only kind of help I needed.
There was no real discussion about mental health. I had no understanding of trauma, emotional regulation, or the ways our past experiences can shape how we respond when we feel threatened, rejected, unseen, or out of control. I did not know that there might be reasons certain situations created such an intense reaction in me.
I believed these were character flaws I needed to correct.
When prayer and willpower did not change them, I did not question whether I needed a different kind of help. I questioned myself. I felt ashamed that I could not seem to become more patient, more controlled, or less reactive. I thought I should be able to fix it, and I could not understand why I repeatedly failed.
What I also could not see was how often I expected the people around me to help me feel okay.
When a situation felt out of control, I wanted someone to help me control it. I wanted the people closest to me to recognize its seriousness, respond with the same urgency, and do whatever I believed needed to be done. Somewhere inside me was the belief that if they would just help me fix the situation, I would not have to feel what I was feeling.
I was not consciously saying, “You are responsible for regulating my emotions.” I did not even know what emotional regulation was. But looking back, I can see how often that was what I was asking of the people around me.
When they did not respond as I hoped, I felt unsupported. I felt alone. I felt as though I was asking for help and no one understood how desperately I needed it.
What I could not say was: I do not know how to make myself feel safe right now. Can you please help me?
Instead, that fear came out as frustration, control, defensiveness, and anger.
There was shame in it, too—both during the reaction and in the aftermath.
I knew my responses could be more intense than those of the people around me. I could see that something other people considered manageable felt overwhelming to me. But I did not know why, and I did not know how to make myself experience it differently.
At the same time, I became incredibly defensive about that shame.
When someone questioned the size of my reaction, I did not hear concern. I heard criticism. I heard confirmation that I was too much, too emotional, too unpredictable, or simply too difficult to understand.
So I defended myself.
I defended why the situation was serious. I defended why my reaction made sense. I defended why someone else should have responded differently. I wanted people to understand that if they had taken the situation more seriously, helped me fix it, or responded in the way I needed, perhaps I would not have become so overwhelmed.
And then came the aftermath.
Once the intensity passed, I was left with everything I had said, everything I had done, and the effect it had on the people around me. That part was horrible. It was overwhelming and defeating.
I would tell myself that I was going to do better. I would promise myself that the next time I would remain calm, think before reacting, or handle things differently. I truly meant it every time.
Then something else would happen. I would become overwhelmed again, react again, and feel as though I had failed all over.
The shame was not enough to change me because shame could not teach me what I did not know. It could only convince me that I was failing at something everyone else seemed able to do.
I also want to be honest about the impact of my behavior. The people around me were not wrong simply because they did not understand what was happening inside me. My reactions were sometimes far too much for the situation. They were not necessary or proportional, and I was not always easy—or enjoyable—to be around when I was in that state.
The people closest to me often received the worst of it. They were the ones near enough to absorb the fear, anger, control, and frustration I did not know how to contain. While I was suffering inside those reactions, they were also suffering from their impact.
Understanding my anxiety now does not erase that.
It does not undo what I said, how I behaved, or what it may have felt like to live alongside reactions that neither they nor I could predict. My pain may explain my behavior, but it does not make the effect of that behavior less real.
What understanding has given me is the ability to hold compassion for everyone involved.
I can have compassion for the woman who was overwhelmed, ashamed, and desperately trying to feel safe. And I can have compassion for the people who loved her but often received the brunt of what she could not yet understand or regulate.
Both are true.
The people around me could see the reaction. They could not always see the fear, shame, and loneliness beneath it.
But the hardest truth is that I could not see those things either.
For most of the first four decades of my life, this was the cycle I lived in. I became anxious, tried to control what was happening around me, reacted when I could not, felt ashamed afterward, promised myself I would do better, and eventually repeated it all again.
It was painful, but it was also familiar. And despite everything happening inside me, I continued functioning. I worked. I planned. I prepared. I accomplished. I tried to anticipate every possibility so that nothing could catch me unprepared.
Control and perfectionism may not have brought me peace, but they helped me keep moving.
Until nearly five years ago, when my mom was diagnosed with terminal cancer.
My mom had me when she was only 18 years old. Because she was so young, I had always assumed I would have her well into my own 60s. The possibility of living most of my life without her had never felt close or real to me.
Then, suddenly, we knew she was dying.
The news turned my world upside down in a way I could never have anticipated. For the first time, I was facing something that no amount of planning, preparation, or problem-solving could change.
Even before she died, I could feel the overwhelm building. I also felt myself beginning to avoid parts of what was happening. I think I had already started grieving, although I did not have language for that either. Part of me understood what was coming, while another part could not fully allow it to become real.
Then my mom died in my arms.
In that moment, knowing she was dying became something entirely different. Something happened inside me when the loss became real. I was overcome by a depth of sadness and disorientation I had never experienced. I felt completely lost.
How do you live a life without this person? How can this actually be your reality?
I had faced other painful and difficult circumstances, but I had always been able to search for a way forward. I was a problem solver. I could make a plan, identify the next step, work toward a solution, or find something I could do to improve the situation.
There was no solution to this.
There was no plan I could create that would bring her back. There was nothing I could fix, accomplish, control, or work toward that would change what had happened. The strategies that had carried me through every other difficult season of my life had no power here.
Grief enveloped me. The feelings became so overwhelming that I began to panic about whether they would ever stop. I could not see an end to them, and because I could not see an end, I could not find anything to hold on to.
It felt like grasping at air—searching desperately for something that might anchor me. I kept believing that if I could find some insight, some answer, or some future point when I would feel better, then I would have somewhere to go. I would have something to work toward.
But grief did not work that way.
I could not think, plan, work, pray, or talk my way out of it. I could not organize the pain into something manageable. I became so consumed by what I was feeling that I could no longer see a way through it.
That was when the panic attacks began—intense episodes unlike anything I had experienced before. The more frightened I became by the grief, the more I panicked about being trapped inside it. What began as loss became a downward spiral I did not know how to stop.
There were nights filled with crying and moments when I genuinely felt as though I were losing my mind. Eventually, the sadness became so overwhelming that waking up and facing another day inside it felt almost unbearable.
I remember looking at my son one day and realizing that I had to do something different. I could not continue trying to survive this alone. I had to find a way to help myself, even though I had no idea what that help would look like.
That was when I decided to begin grief therapy.
I had attended therapy briefly after my divorce because I wanted help finding myself again, but this was different. This was no longer about working through a difficult transition or understanding what I wanted next. I was struggling to imagine how I was supposed to continue living when I could not imagine ever feeling okay again.
I spent approximately a year in grief therapy. After that time, my therapist told me that she would have expected to see more progress than I was making. She believed my anxiety and earlier trauma were interfering with my ability to process the loss. What I had understood as grief alone was described to me as complicated grief.
The anxiety I had spent years trying to manage through control was now preventing me from moving through the one experience I could not control.
My grief therapist recommended that I continue working with her while also beginning therapy specifically focused on trauma.
By the time I arrived at my trauma therapist’s office, I felt desperate. I wanted relief, but I also wanted what I had always wanted: an answer, a plan, and a finish line.
I remember looking at her and asking, “How long is this going to take? How long will I need to do trauma therapy before I finally start feeling better?”
Even then, I was searching for something I could control. If she could give me a timeline, I could create a plan. I could count the sessions, measure the progress, and work toward the moment when the pain would finally end.
She told me that, considering the amount of trauma I had experienced, I was probably looking at two to three years of consistent therapy.
Two to three years.
In that moment, I hit a wall. I realized that what I was carrying was bigger than anything I could manage through willpower, productivity, prayer, perfectionism, or control. There was no quick solution. There was no version of this in which I simply worked harder and got it right.
I had entered therapy believing that grief was the crisis and anger was the problem. I was beginning to understand that both were uncovering something much deeper. Beneath my anger was anxiety. Beneath my need for control was fear. Beneath my defensiveness was shame. And beneath all of it was trauma I had never been given the language or tools to understand.
Losing my mom did not create the anxiety that had shaped so much of my life. It exposed it. Grief overwhelmed every strategy I had used to hold myself together, and for the first time, I could no longer control my way back to feeling okay.
I thought I was angry.
I was anxious.
So I looked at my therapist and said, “Okay. I give in. Let’s do it.”
That was not the moment I gave up.
It was the moment I finally stopped trying to rescue myself with the same strategies that had been failing me for years.
I surrendered to the work that would eventually save my life.
Julie | The Wildflower Within 🖤
Keep Becoming.
A Note of Support
This post discusses grief, panic attacks, and a period when waking up and facing another day felt almost unbearable. If you are struggling emotionally or experiencing a crisis, you do not have to face it alone. In the United States and its territories, you can call or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org to chat with a trained crisis counselor. Support is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and conversations are free and confidential. If you or someone you know is in immediate danger or needs urgent medical attention, call 911.
