We love our kids. We love our lives. Sometimes we are so grateful for what we have, however, that we fear losing it more than we allow ourselves to enjoy it. This fear of losing those things for which we are grateful is called "worrying." Although sometimes worry can be helpful to us, for example when it allows us to act proactively in preventing potential disasters, more often than not it gets in our way by preoccupying us with possible loss when we could enjoy what we have gained. When we worry about others, we cause an even bigger problem since such worrying sends the message that we do not have faith in those others to handle their lives responsibly and efficaciously.
Healthy "worry" is not really "worry" at all, but rather should be called "concern." Concern activates us toward taking sensible precautions to ensure our future well-being. It is healthy to plan for the future or to work toward goals. Some people are so good at managing concern (taking precautions and working on goals) that things usually do go their way. When we worry, however, we are more than concerned. We are scared or sometimes even terrified. We are thinking in drastic terms. Who of us has not, at times, thought things had to go our way, or by some very specific plan, or everything would be ruined.
Excessive worry is typically related to past experiences of things going really badly in situations for which we have taken an irrational level of responsibility. If, for example, when we were young, someone close to us treated us badly or constantly criticized us, one typical reaction would be to think we deserved what happened. If we deserved what happened because we did something "wrong," all we would need to do to prevent future trauma would be to stop ourselves from doing "wrong" things. From this perspective, it feels better to think we are responsible for the bad things that happened than it does to realize how often bad things happen for no particular reason or because someone else had problems. That is, it feels better to think we had some control over things than it does to feel like bad things happen to us in a completely random fashion.
To the extent that these early experiences were traumatic, we overemphasize the possibility of disaster in our current lives. We become desperate to avoid disaster when really we only need to be vigilant. If we think of ourselves as having done something wrong when others treated us badly, then we need only do things "right" to avoid such traumatic pain in the future. We must now work like crazy to make everything work out "right." The need to do things "right" gets exaggerated and develops into a need to do things "perfectly." If we can be "perfect," we will not be wrong, we will prevent every possible problem, we will not be traumatized by others seeing us be wrong, and we can prove ourselves worthy of love. If we are worthy of love, we will not lose love or the affection of the one's we love.
Unfortunately, making everything work out "right" requires us to maintain control over everything in our lives. Maintaining control means working hard. Within reason there is nothing wrong with that. But it also often means trying to make others do things our way. When others clearly will not do things our way, or when we clearly have no control over a particular situation in our lives, it seems there is nothing left within our control but to worry. We worry about things not working out because we think everything will go to pot, that we will prove ourselves unworthy of love, lose those we do love, and perhaps find ourselves to be worthless.
One of the worst outcomes in all of this is that we often will lose those we love if we try to control them. Sometimes we worry about the one's we love so much that they feel we do not have faith in their independence and ability to take care of themselves. Very few people (not healthy one's, anyway) want to have someone else constantly telling them how to do things. We don’t want someone thinking they always know the right way, which implies that our ways are wrong. When someone treats us like we do not know anything or cannot do anything right, we tend to shrink from contact with them because they make us feel like we shrink in importance when we are around them.
Thus, when someone is trying to be "perfect" so that they will prove themselves worthy and not lose love, they make themselves into people who are very likely to lose love. In the attempt to prevent the disaster that might befall our loved one's, it is all too easy to lose their love because we do not communicate faith in their ability to succeed or their ability to recover from failures. While it is healthy to try to teach others from our experience, it is necessary to have compassion and understanding for their points of view and what they already know. Sometimes it is also necessary to let them do things their own way because they cannot possibly learn without trying and failing.
Often, when someone worries and tells someone else how to do things, it's as though they have taken that other person’s ability away. It is difficult to compete with someone else’s way of doing something at the same time we are trying to find our own way. Worrying can create a vicious circle in which those we love stop trying their own ways of doing things and thus never learn from experience and never gain the confidence necessary to do things on their own. If their way of doing things has to be better than ours lest they have to fear our criticism, then they can never feel like their own way of doing things will result in acceptable outcomes. Clearly, we can never hold someone’s hand all the time, so it is essential that they have confidence that doing things their own way will result in positive outcomes.
Worrying is unhealthy for us and it is unhealthy for those around us. The antidote to worry is faith. We must have faith that things will work out most of the time if we work toward our goals with a healthy amount of concern. Equally important, we must try to have faith that our loved one's have the strength, tenacity and foresight to succeed most of the time, in their own way, and pick themselves up after their failures. In fact, having faith in our loved one's actually infuses them with the confidence they need to succeed. If we learn to balance our love and concern with faith that things will work out, we maximize our chances for living full, successful, and fulfilling lives, and for maintaining our connections with loved one's who are thus free to live independent, fruitful, and fulfilling lives of their own.
