Why You Are Feeling Insecure

Reasons for anxiety

Here’s something I read recently (translated from German to English):

Common reasons for anxiety when using hallucinogens:

• Loss of control.

• Disintegration / changing of identity, which can especially frighten those people who care a lot about putting forth a certain image of themselves.

• […]

I thought that was so interesting. Because I think that it’s not too different from when I’m sober. I think, formulated a little differently, it would sum up probably 80% of why I get insecure. I’ll give it a try:

Common reasons for me feeling anxious or insecure:

• Feeling like a part of my identity that I don’t want to let go is being threatened.

• Also just being a human being.

I guess you could put it differently: If there are parts of me that I don’t think are okay, I won’t be able to make them go away (they do still belong to me after all). But I can do the next best thing, which is to pretend that they aren’t there. I can ignore their existence.

However, that masquerade is not bulletproof. It’s only a false front. It’s the false identity of me that I create and try to maintain. If that identity were to be challenged, however—if my mask were to be ripped off—that would force me to look at what I’ve been ignoring. Which would be very uncomfortable.

How it works

That is why you’ll feel insecure in some areas but not in others.

For example, if someone were to question my athletic abilities, I don’t think I would care much. I like sports, and I tend to be good at them. I’m not hiding anything there. So, I’m not scared of having my identity challenged in that area. I’m not secretly afraid of someone exposing any part of me I don’t want to accept.

It’s a different story with me being seen as shy. In school, I held back a lot of myself and was more cautious than I would have liked to have been.

So, ever since I’ve graduated, I’ve had this chip on my shoulder about not being outgoing enough. And I have spent a lot of time developing that quality. But there is still some pain from when I was younger that I haven’t dealt with.

That’s why I’ll feel attacked every time somebody says that I’m anything other than very outgoing. In fact, there have been times when people have said that I can be too loud. And guess what? I took it as a compliment!

How crazy is that? I’m so afraid of being seen as shy that I’d rather go too far in the other direction!

How can we learn to deal with our insecurities better?

If I may circle back to the hallucinogens quote from the beginning: I suspect that the reason why taking LSD (or other drugs like it) can create such frightening experiences is because they are threatening to reveal parts of us we aren’t (yet) willing to accept as our own.

Or, as Tucker Max puts it:

“In my experience, a “bad trip” is when you aren’t ready or expecting for what comes up on psychedelics. But also in my experience, these very challenging experiences can be the most important experiences. If dark and hard things come up, its because they are in you and need to be felt before they can be let go.

To put it simply, the only way out of it, is through it.“

So, I guess the way to deal with our insecurities would then be to try and notice when we are feeling attacked. Because that could be a sign of some pain we haven’t felt yet or some part of us that we haven’t yet accepted.

And then we can do the uncomfortable thing of facing that pain. We can take the time to try to start accepting that part of ourselves that we have been pushing away for so long.

Which would hopefully lead to us not feeling attacked so often. Which in turn would mean we get insecure less and can feel more at peace in our lives. Yay!