27/10/2026
There’s a certain kind of anxiety that doesn’t respond to reassurance.
You do everything you can to ward it off: you tell yourself you’re safe, you build a stable, reliable life. You say no more often than yes, without realizing you’re organizing your life around avoidance.
But you feel it. You always feel it. Something is coming for you; something catastrophic and irreversible.
You fear you'll have a breakdown and you know you won’t recover from it.
So you do everything you can to prevent it. You tighten your grip on your children. You stay braced and stay inside. You're in a state of constant anticipation thinking that will prepare you for when it finally hits.
Your life gets smaller; your dread gets larger.
In 1974, the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott offered an idea radical for its time: the thing you’re most afraid of has already happened.
He meant this literally.
At some point early in life, something overwhelming happened. You were abandoned, rejected, disappointed. Whatever it was happened at a stage of development so young, there was no "you" to experience it as an event. So it never become integrated as a memory.
It wedged itself into your nervous system as fear.
And when it returns later, when you're a developed self, it doesn’t feel like something that happened. It feels like something that will happen, and so you feel dread.
Which is why avoidance doesn’t work.
Because you can’t escape something that already occurred.
I wrote about this fear, D.W. Winnicott, and the strange relief that comes when you finally understand that the breakdown you're afraid of already happened.
Read the full article in the How to Live Newsletter: https://www.thehowtolivenewsletter.org/p/fearofbreakdown
