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How Anxiety Traps People and How You Can Break Free
At the FBI Academy, new agents like myself spent five months role-playing, alternating between being the bad guy who needed to be arrested and the good guy whose job it was to take scum off the streets. The role-playing was meant to instill confidence in ourselves when we actually met one of these goons in real life.
Fast forward to an arrest a few weeks after landing in my first office. I pulled a gun on a guy wanted for extortion and murder. He looked like a ham hock with a face, not a baby-faced agent who complied with FBI rules of defensive tactics training.
The guy, who most recently went by Jethro, was big and ugly. My anxiety was so intense that I held my gun, drawn and fully loaded, close to my body because I didn’t want Jethro or my colleagues to see my hand shaking.
My brain became a blob of Jell-O. Instead of moving through the anxiety that gripped my gut, my emotions took over, and I found myself quivering in a feedback loop from hell. I worried about how to be brave in my situation, while all the time, I was only becoming more anxious about my anxiety! With my emotions firmly in control, my anxiety morphed into fear as I watched Jethro take a step toward me.
My colleagues were fast to close in with guns drawn. Jethro backed down once he knew he was outnumbered, but…
