The Anxiety Opportunity: How Worry Is the Doorway to Your Best Self

by Curtis Chang

My wife and I have been realizing that some of our marital conflicts are driven by the underlying difference in our respective fight-or-flight reactions. A particularly challenging aspect of this process involves recognizing our different reactions as morally neutral. Neither is a sin. Nor is one reaction intrinsically better than the other. We need both because sometimes it is better to flee from the wolf and sometimes we’ve got to fight the fire. But as a hijacker of relationships, anxiety deviously cloaks itself in moral clothing. When we don’t recognize a common anxiety underneath differing reaction patterns, we lock in on surface differences and place a moral label on them. We judge and blame the other. The fight person labels the flight person as “lazy” or “inattentive.” The flight person labels the fight person as “rude” or “nagging.”