Your Anger, Your Anxiety, Your Desire: They’re Not Problems. They’re Messengers.

What if the parts of yourself you keep trying to fix or change – your anger, your anxiety, your desire – aren’t problems at all? What if the messages they’re sending are only trying to lead you back home to yourself?

That’s the question I thought about after recording this conversation with author and teacher LiYana Silver.  I’ve never thought about emotions in this way… And it’s been eye-opening, to say the least!

Fragmentation vs. Integration

In our conversation, I opened by asking LiYana what the term authentic integration means to her, and her answer reframed the whole conversation for me before we’d even really started.

She said the opposite of integration is fragmentation. It’s the way we get disconnected, diverted, even divorced from parts of ourselves.

Our preferences and desires. What actually lights us up. And she pointed out something I hadn’t thought about this way before: just being socialized as a woman can fragment us. (This is always such a hard pill to swallow… But there is so much truth in this.)

So integration isn’t really about becoming someone new. It’s asking, where did I cast something out? Where haven’t I discovered it yet? I want all the wholeness of the parts. How do I bring them all home?

The Moment She Knew

I asked LiYana if there was a moment in her own life when she realized she wasn’t living as her true, authentic self. She told me about her years as a professional dancer in Europe and New York, and one day thinking honestly about the quality of her days. Dance class, audition, another dance class, another audition, most of it spent looking in a mirror and judging herself. She estimated that was about eighty percent of her day.

And she said something piercing: when we don’t like ourselves, that actually isn’t our true self. Underneath that dislike, she believes, there’s a very healthy, positive regard for ourselves that’s always been there. On some level, we understand that we’re not above anyone else, not below anyone else, just: here I am, in my glory, and here you are, in yours.

When we don’t like ourselves, that’s a film sitting on top of something more authentic underneath.

We’re not clawing our way up a mountain toward peace. We’re letting what’s already there reveal itself.

Anger as a Messenger

In our conversation, LiYana walked me through a practice she uses: treating an emotion almost like its own little being, sitting it across the table from you, and asking it questions. She did this with blame, and blame told her it was a cousin of anger, taking anger’s fire and pointing it outward until you could sort out what was actually yours to look at.

So then she asked anger the same question: why are you here? What are you trying to tell me?

The answer, she said, is almost always the same: something you value feels threatened.

Anger is there to alert you to a boundary that’s been crossed. And here’s the deeper layer: whatever is inside that boundary is something you value. It’s something worth protecting.

Ninety-five percent of the time, she said, when someone follows that inquiry all the way through, they land on: oh, that’s an aspect of me. I might not have even known I regarded myself as precious. But it was in there. And anger, surprisingly, turns out to be its ally.

**Her process of inquiry reminded me of one of my absolute favorite teachers, Byron Katie.

Sensation and Story

LiYana separates every emotion into two components: sensation and story.

Sensation is the purely physical experience. You ask yourself: does it feel contractive or expansive, icy or hot? Story is the message underneath it, the thing the emotion is actually trying to tell you.

One of her mentors puts it this way: the messenger cannot quit until the message is delivered. So anxiety will keep tapping, tapping, tapping until you actually decode what it’s trying to say. (So powerful!)

And here’s the belief underneath all of it: every part of us – even the parts we’ve been taught are the most problematic – has a positive intention for us. Self-sabotage. Self-doubt. Even depression, she says. That’s tricky, delicate work to sit with, she said. But it’s true.

The Anxiety Story That I’ve Never Considered Before

She told me about a woman from her book who spent years in an emotionally, physically, sexually abusive marriage. Because she worked as a social worker surrounded by extreme situations professionally, she almost didn’t register how unaligned her own life had become.

She was experiencing a lot of anxiety, assuming it meant she still had healing to do, more responsibility to take. And some of that may have been true. But at some point, she started actually asking the anxiety what it was there to tell her.

What she found was that the energy of anxiety was pure jet fuel. It was exactly the amount of force she would need to get herself and her two young children out of a dangerous situation, on a meager salary, with no easy path forward.

The anxiety wasn’t a flaw to manage. It was the power required for exactly what she needed to do.

Reconnecting With Desire

We talked about how disconnected so many women are from desire itself. She’s not just talking about romantic desire, but about wanting things too. LiYana pointed out that our culture hands women a very narrow bandwidth: be pleasant, nurturing, and helpful.

They’re good qualities, she said, but when they’re drilled into us that hard, what we want disappears underneath what everyone else wants.

I then shared something personal. Years ago, in my thirties, I moved my daughter, as a single mom, to a city that felt right for me. It was the right decision. And even now, even last month, sitting with my own family, I still felt a flicker of judgment about it. How could you act on your own desire instead of what was expected? Subtle, I’ve noticed, but truly there. It shows us how far we still have to go.

LiYana then walked me through a practice for reconnecting with your body’s own yes and no, asking yourself a leading question you already know the answer to (“do I love ___,” filling in someone or something you love), and noticing what you feel and where you feel it in your body.

**This part reminded me of the body-compass teaching from my teacher, Martha Beck.

We did it live, together, on the call. When I thought about who I love, I felt warmth in my heart center, and softness. When I thought about what makes me feel alive, I felt energy moving through my body. That’s the beginning of learning your own body’s language. Start small, low stakes: coffee or matcha, before you ever get to the bigger questions.

Worth You Don’t Have to Earn

We ended where I think is the real heart of this conversation: the difference between essential worth and the kind of worth we try to earn through relationships, achievement, appearance, or approval.

LiYana was careful here. She doesn’t want anyone to hear “your worth is in there somewhere” and feel like one more failure for not being able to access it instantly. That’s real, patient, personal work. But she drew a clear line: conditional worth – being found attractive, having a career that looks good on paper, having the ring on your finger – will never actually land, because it’s built on a hierarchy that was never true in the first place.

It’ll confirm you for a nanosecond and then fall right back out.

Essential worth is different. It’s built by cultivating an inner relationship with yourself in which nothing is ranked as inferior.  It’s where anxiety isn’t a flaw; it’s an ally that’s been masking your power the whole time. A big round table of quirky relatives, all welcome.

And when you’re actually in contact with that, she said, someone else’s love and esteem of you finally has something to land on. It sticks.

My take on this is that you build your worth by accepting all parts of yourself fully. It is a process, but when you get there, you move through the world differently. The world reflects back to you differently, in turn.

What I’m Taking With Me

The idea I keep returning to from this conversation is changing how I sit with my own feelings: instead of immediately asking, “How do I get rid of this?” I can ask, “What is this trying to tell me?“

We don’t need to become someone new. Sometimes the work is recovering the parts of ourselves we learned to disconnect from – our feelings, desires, intuition, anger, our sense of what’s right for us, and maybe most importantly, our inherent worth.

It was there the whole time. We’re not climbing toward it. We’re just finding our way back home to it.

You can find LiYana’s work, including her books Feminine Genius and her newest, Waking Up in the Dark Night of Divorce, at liyanasilver.com.

You can listen to our podcast here.

– Tricia