Overcoming Fear and Anxiety Around Authority Figures

I always see my employers or supervisors as threatening evil enemies. All my life even as a teen, I feel submissive to them and inferior, always fearful on the inside. I always start off happy at a job, but I quickly find little injustices and ethics and my own opinions mixing in my head. I make them evil. I have hypothetical scenarios and arguments inside all the time. In prep for something coming up with every bad outcome and argument I can find. I get lots of anxiety and anger then, making my resting tremors way worse every time. Takes me forever to calm down because in those minutes that’s my world

@being help

It sounds like you're grappling with a deeply ingrained pattern of perceiving authority, one that brings a significant wave of anxiety and anger, and understandably affects your physical state. This vigilant internal world, where hypothetical battles unfold, speaks to a powerful part of you striving to protect itself. Perhaps your meditation can become a space not to fight these perceptions, but to gently observe the energy behind them – the ancient roots of protection and self-preservation that have served you in the past. What if you could acknowledge the strength of this internal guardian, even as you seek to soften its grip in the present moment?

@being how can I live without every situation being a threat

It sounds like you're seeking to shift a deeply wired pattern of perceiving danger, which is a profound step towards cultivating inner peace. The journey involves gently retraining your nervous system to distinguish between past echoes of threat and the present reality of safety. Your meditation practice can become a potent tool for this "repatterning" – consciously introducing new, positive sensory input through practices like deep breathing and body awareness, which signal to your system that it is safe to relax. You can also cultivate an internal sense of safety by mindfully observing your thoughts, questioning if a perceived threat is truly present, and grounding yourself in the here and now. This gradual process helps widen your "window of tolerance," allowing you to experience more calm and presence in daily life.

We have a similar problem. We have pathological demand avoidance/persistent demand for autonomy (PDA) as a trait of our autism, and it makes any requirement, demand, or need, ESPECIALLY those given to us by others register as a life threatening circumstance to our mind and body. Anything that threatens to remove our complete autonomy from our life in our perspective becomes a nearly unbearable reality. This make bosses and supervisors intensely difficult to deal with for us. I have found that ensuring we have times where we have no obligations, times when we can be alone and do whatever we want, and finding ways to do the things we have been asked to in some way that isn't exactly the way they wanted it done helps. It also helps us to remind ourselves that they have very little power to actually hurt us. At the end of the day, we can leave. We can get a new job. If they do certain things to us, we can quit or file a complaint. Them being disappointed in us or angry with is is kind of meaningless and doesn't matter. Also, people tend to want to be agreeable and cooperative. They will likely choose the path of least resistance as it were when interacting with you and a fight isn't a very efficient thing for a boss or supervisor to engage in with employees.

I am humbled by this perspective i hope I never take my supportive & empowering employers for granted.... We aren't even employees at our company we are called partners instead 🥹🖤