Your Anxiety Is Just a Smokescreen for Authentic Feelings
It is a racket feeling for something completely different
Recently someone I admire followed my account here, and I was overjoyed. But embarrassed to scream and jump around in front of my family, the 44-year-old me went to another room, squeaked with excitement and continued with what I was doing like middle-aged women usually do.
When my husband got in there 15 minutes later, I still had a smile on my face.
“You’re still happy about that guy, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes! It’s a big deal to me.”
And all that time a feeling of anxiety lingered in my body. Why was I anxious when a good thing had just happened to me?
You don’t have to be scared to feel apprehensive. There’s a whole range of emotions you can cover up with anxiety. In other words, anxiety is your racket emotion.
According to transactional analysis, a racket emotion is a familiar negative feeling that you picked in childhood to get your parents’ attention and solve a problem. Your parents didn’t let you express some feelings, but they encouraged you to express a racket feeling. In this case — anxiety.
