There’s a Painful and Unique Form of Anxiety Out There - And You Might Have Never Heard of It

Meggie Royer
Jul 22, 2017 · 5 min read

Anxiety isn’t necessarily an entirely bad phenomenon. For instance, sometimes it leads to beneficial action — anxiety about global warming and the heat death of the planet might lead some of us to reduce, reuse, and recycle, or to intern for an environmental non-profit. Psychologists also warn against what they’ve termed “unrealistic optimism,” or the opposite of anxiety. If you’re too unrealistically optimistic, you might ignore useful information about things you believe will impact you negatively. But with anxiety, you tend to take in all the available information about a certain situation, making for a more realistic and objective appraisal.

And yet, despite the hidden benefits of anxiety, there’s another type of anxiety that we talk about too little, think about too little, and consider too little, one that brings to mind hardly any benefits at all for the sufferer in question. I call this type of anxiety “abuse anxiety.” When we typically discuss anxiety as a phenomenon, we’re talking about generalized anxiety disorder, public speaking anxiety, social anxiety, performance anxiety, or other extreme forms such as phobias and OCD.

But I’d like to throw out abuse anxiety as another form that may be all too common. As a survivor of rape from my first romantic relationship, I experience frequent and debilitating abuse anxiety. Not anxiety in the sense that I worry I did something to deserve the rapes, or that I was a failure as a girlfriend or have any sort of deep flaws as a human being, but deep, unabiding, intense anxiety that any new relationships I enter into (romantic or otherwise) will end up abusive as well.

This is, to say the least, disruptive and painful, and hardly talked about. It’s well known that anxiety is a common psychological effect of domestic violence and dating violence, but most narratives of such resulting anxiety are narratives of anxious guilt — “Did I do something to provoke the abuse? I must have done something wrong or said something wrong; I shouldn’t have pushed them too far; I should have let them have control of the finances in the first place.” But the intense and almost paranoid fear of new abusive interactions is another form of anxiety entirely.

It affects almost every interaction I have, along with my mannerisms, the personal information I choose to divulge, who I choose to interact with, how far I choose to pursue a platonic or romantic relationship, even the kinds of activities I decide to participate in with my peers. I’ve found that frequent searching for warning signs of possible abusive behavior is something I engage in almost constantly. And many “warning signs” are not really true red flags at all, but simply signs that my traumatized brain has come up with to keep me safe and sheltered. For example, if a new acquaintance looks too much like my rapist, or even shares his name, then I view this as a solid reason to cut off the relationship before it progresses further. If they like the same bands or dog breeds as my rapist, that’s another reason to cut them off. I’m constantly tiptoeing on eggshells, checking for signs of hidden anger or hidden dangerous tendencies. After leaving my rapist, any new relationship, platonic or romantic, was, and is, considered by me to be a liability.

I have a frustrating and hard-to-break habit of asking new acquaintances early on what they “want” out of our potential relationship. Do they want to be friends? Do they want to be more? What I say next, and what I choose to pursue next, depends on their response. If they’re looking for something romantic, then I have to decide whether to divulge my history of abuse, and typically, I do. Divulging my history has always seemed like a potential way for me to prevent it from reoccurring, as if anyone would be swayed from abusing someone else due to knowledge of that person’s past abuse. It’s not a workable preventive strategy, and deep down I know that, but on the surface, I have to do it anyway. And it’s uncomfortable. I deeply fear and dislike revealing personal information about my trauma, and I’m sure it’s uncomfortable for those who have to listen to it. Knowing what to say or do when someone reveals a painful secret is a form of deep human confusion that we all struggle with, with the exception of therapists and psychiatrists.

And sometimes, the sad result is that people decline to move further along in our friendship or relationship because they’re worried about inadvertently hurting me again. When this happens, it feels like I’m self-sabotaging — perhaps if I had stayed silent about my abuse, they would have continued further with me and things would have been peachy keen. And that’s what abuse anxiety is. It’s self-sabotage. Not just the revealing of a history of trauma, but the tiny and totally unrelated signs that I consider to be red flags, which are instead not even flags at all, but rather streamers.

It’s deeply painful to know that my abuse anxiety has likely prevented me from engaging in relationships that would have turned out to be meaningful, enjoyable, and fulfilling. I’ve spoken to other female abuse survivors about this. We don’t have an official name for it (other than my newly-invented one) and we all think that we’re the only ones struggling with it. It comes as a shock when we find out we’re not. The term “abuse anxiety” is simplistic, but it gets the job done.

And maybe it really does have hidden benefits, just like regular anxiety. Maybe it really has kept me away from more abusers. But while this is certainly something important to contemplate further, I can’t, and won’t ever, lose sight of the fact that abuse anxiety is not a gift. It’s the opposite of looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. I wear shades instead. And I will always long for the day when I will forget I’m wearing them, or someone will finally, at long last, remove them for me.

Written by

Meggie is a writer living in the Twin Cities who recently graduated from college with a BA in Psychology. She currently works as a domestic violence educator.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade