An Anxiety Called Mother
A lot of us may have learned in therapy that oh! That really shitty, mean voice is actually an internalized caricature of a real person in our lives. It’s not necessarily that “I’m really mean to myself.” It’s that your brain brilliantly downloaded the programming of an abuser and turned up the volume so you could predict and move proactively before they did. You can’t hurt me if I’ve already hurt myself first. I’m already judging and criticizing myself, so when/if you decide to give me feedback, I’ll be “ready.”
It sounds extreme, which arguably the brain often is. But it’s also protective: better to practice devastation than be blindsided by it.
For some, the internalized critic is a parent or caretaker. Mom, Dad, or Grandpa lives inside your brain, doing their job to keep you safe small.
But I’ve come to realize there might be another internalized parent, too. We might not have felt safe growing up. Maybe there was emotional uncertainty, constant moving, or silence in the face of something horrible. No one knew how to hold you through it. You learned: no one else will keep me safe. So now there’s an anxiety inside of you that does.
You became the alarm system, the guardrail, the keeper- because no one else reliably was. That vigilance was safety for little you.
For someone with secure attachment, the wiring says:
“I can lean on others.”
“The world, while imperfect, will hold me enough.”
“I can risk play and exploration because I trust repair and return.”
For you, the wiring says:
“If I relax, I’ll get abandoned, shamed, or blindsided.”
“If I stop scanning, no one else will catch me.”
“Fun = danger, because safety depends on vigilance.”
For me, the fear whispers: If I play with life, if I risk joy, I’ll be punished. Developmentally, every kid experiments with putting things out there-goofiness, love of gymnastics, the weird song they made up in the backyard. Whatever the world meets with delight tends to calcify; it becomes part of the self. But my internal mother knew my play, my childish humor, was often met with contempt. So she learned to equate joy with danger. That’s the fear now: that exploration isn’t safe, that self-expression will be punished.
So your fear and anxiety patterns aren’t just “bad habits.” They’re your internalized mother- the one you had to build. She is the safety you didn’t get externally. That’s why she feels impossible to let go of, even when you rationally see she’s suffocating.
That relationship finally softened for me when I realized how ridiculously kind it was of my body to create its own maternal force in me- however misguided. I didn’t abandon myself. I did the opposite: I anxiety-ed my way into holding myself in the world. She is immensely powerful, immensely present. Yes, she shows up as a racing heart or elephant-chest- but the racing heart is her speeding to the rescue. The elephant chest, an inverted hug gone wrong.
The task now isn’t to rip that wiring out- it kept you alive. It’s to rewire gently. To let your inner mother practice safety in new ways: through presence instead of panic, boundaries instead of barricades. To let your system taste tiny micro-moments of relaxation, and discover that the world doesn’t collapse. To risk trust in safe-enough people, rituals, and in your own body. And maybe thank her occasionally throughout the process.
