I am walking briskly down Mariahilfer Straße, the busiest shopping street in Vienna. I do not have any destination in mind — just want to stretch my legs, yet my forceful personality still shines through with energy and passion in every step. The noises of the crowd overwhelm me, so I am hiding in my inner world, listening to the music in my AirPods. Suddenly, an unusual thought crosses my mind: “What if I stop this high tempo and take off my headphones?”. I do this and meet with a now-familiar companion of my life — anxiety.

Throughout my life, I have been forced to act in spite of my anxiety. I have learnt to push through my fears — and quite successfully — in situations like:

  • Job interviews: I dread assessing others as much as being assessed;
  • Meeting with new people: being afraid of rejection;
  • Learning new skills: my self-doubt kicks in.

It was thanks to the humanism of psychoanalysis when I began to see anxiety differently: not as a “pesky fly”, but as a pointer to something deeper — something haunting me since childhood. No longer did I want to push myself mercilessly — I wanted to achieve understanding, self-compassion and peace.

My first conscious memory of anxiety is as vivid as if it happened today. I was six years old and my parents brought me a book (I could already read then). They asked me to retell a page from it and sent me to my room to prepare. In my childishness, I was careless enough to remember only a few sentences. When I returned to my parents, they mocked me and turned me down. In that moment, a stark thought crystallised: “Either I am smart or I am not loved”. This event — and the following trajectory of my upbringing — led me to obsessively check how “smart” I was at any given moment. For a boy, the stakes of “lovability” were too high to ignore.

My future childhood and adolescence only deepened the question: “Why do I need to do to be loved?”. It was a bittersweet existence: an intelligent and handsome young man with a strong academic record and charming charisma — yet unable to believe he could be loved for who he was.

I remember how at the mercy of my teachers I felt in primary school. I could only bring home A’s — my parents had no interest in which subjects I liked or disliked. I had to be liked by every authority figure at school — any deviation meant my mother would withhold “love” (quotes will be explained later) and my father would beat me. I had nowhere to run but back home — to one narcissist and one abuser. This, in essence, built the foundation of two anxieties that have followed me throughout my life:

  1. Separation: “You will be left alone”;
  2. Annihilation: “The world will destroy you for who you are”.

I felt completely on my own: there was no-one to see my suffering. The most painful moments of my childhood were watching my relatives run and have fun — these were loved children, whose parents had not subjected them to the “hunger games” of acceptance and security. My runs? Attempts to flee the fear of abandonment.

Upon leaving Ukraine, I was surprised not to feel the onslaught of loneliness, even though I was, in fact, alone in the world. My initial explanation of compensating for this feeling by throwing myself into work fell to pieces once I achieved a more balanced attitude towards my job. Only then did I realise how often I had felt lonely with my parents — my solitude was helping me to see the uncomfortable truths instead of believing pro-forma phrases, such as “But deep down, your mother still loves you … in her own way”. Excuse me, what?!

The key to maternal love is that it is (mostly) uni-directional. A mother cares for her child not because she expects something in return, but because she wants to show her kid how wonderful the world is, how lovable they are. It is very easy to love an infant totally dependent on their mother — this task becomes increasingly difficult when a child grows up and develops their own personality, with all the resulting tantrums :D

The biggest breakthrough in my psychoanalysis came when I realised how much love I still wanted from my mother. Her figure became the prism through which I saw all the women in my life — shaping my separation anxieties and, to my relief, my phantasm. Phantasm — the realisation that her Neronian demands were inadequate and my goal was to disentangle myself from the way she wanted to see me and become who I want to be myself. My anxiety, once a “pesky fly”, has become a helpful companion. It knocks on my door “You have your own way” and pushes me to revisit my life.

Working with annihilation anxieties follows a similar path: one must see their abuser and rebuild trust in others through corrective emotional experience. Put simply, I am gradually restoring my trust in the world by working with a male psychoanalyst. I know that I can tell him anything and he will not punish me. This trust is emotional, not just cognitive — a growing bridge to the safer world.

To sum up, we remember more negative events from our childhood than positive, and we do not get to choose our parents. If someone feels content with their life, there is no need to dive into their loneliness and anxieties. But for those who choose to, psychoanalysis offers an intriguing journey into their anxieties: monumental childhood relics, not mere “pesky flies”.