Some of author Judy Batalion\u2019s earliest and most vivid memories are rooted in sudden, overwhelming waves of panic. Long before she could articulate what anxiety meant, her body reacted to the world as if it were a persistent threat. When she was just three years old, her family frequently visited Bonimart, a discount department store distinguished by a bubbly orange logo. While other children might have focused on the toys or the displays, Batalion\u2019s heart would hammer against her ribs with a terror that the heavy doors would lock and she would be trapped inside forever. <\/p>\n
At day camp, her extreme fear of water meant she spent swimming lessons doggie-paddling dry on the concrete deck, unable to bring herself to step into the pool. In kindergarten, a paralyzing dread of abandonment triggered daily stomach cramps before dismissal as she envisioned being stranded, alone and forgotten, for eternity. Her father tried to help her navigate these overwhelming emotions by explaining the difference between possible versus probable outcomes. Outside the doors of Bonimart, he developed an informal, gradual exposure program to help her cope. Each week, holding tightly to his hand, Batalion would take one more step inside the intimidating store. Through these exercises, she began to understand a fundamental premise: there was nothing truly to fear, except the fear disorders themselves.<\/p>\n
Yet Batalion was not an isolated outlier in her family, nor was she simply the trembling black sheep. Anxiety was woven deeply into her biological and historical inheritance. She comes from a lineage of Holocaust survivors, meaning that constant worry and hyper-vigilance literally saved her genetic line. Her grandmother had successfully sniffed out unfolding danger in Europe; soon after Nazi forces occupied Warsaw, she overheard neighbors reporting on who was Jewish in the apartment building. Recognizing the immediate peril, her grandmother knew it was time to run instantly. Her parents and sisters who chose to stay behind were ultimately murdered. <\/p>\n
That raw, life-saving trauma trickled down through generations of blood and memory. It established a household culture built entirely on being perpetually on alert. Stress and vigilance had undeniable evolutionary benefits, and her family clung to them for dear life. Years later, Batalion\u2019s college roommates would crack up with amusement at her mother\u2019s frantic answering machine messages warning them to sit at the very back of airplanes, declaring that cutting cuticles causes botulism, or demanding confirmation that lip gloss contained zero petroleum products. <\/p>\n
Given this background, it was perhaps unsurprising that at the age of 12, Batalion developed a severe stomach condition during her very first trip to New York City. While standing near the Statue of Liberty and looking out onto a bustling horizon of possibility, she was suddenly overcome by nausea. That night, running a fever, she began vomiting relentlessly and racing to the bathroom. Although her acute physical illness eventually abated, the underlying symptoms lingered, leading to a formal diagnosis of ulcerative colitis.<\/p>\n
This pivotal health crisis raised a lingering question that medicine has long debated: was this merely a classic "nervous stomach"? The exact medical causes of colitis have historically remained elusive. For decades, the condition was frequently considered psychosomatic, incorrectly pinned on individuals possessing what medical professionals at the time labeled a "neurotic psychological profile." By the 1990s, autoimmune theories gained mainstream scientific vogue, and her doctors heavily stressed that ulcerative colitis was categorically not caused by stress alone, even if Batalion found that difficult to fully accept. <\/p>\n
Currently, modern medical consensus embraces a more nuanced view involving the complex, two-way mind-gut connection. Science notes that roughly ninety percent of the body’s serotonin, the hormone that regulates mood, is actually produced in the gastrointestinal tract. Consequently, psychological stress triggers physical gastrointestinal symptoms, while gut inflammation simultaneously releases chemical signals that trigger neurological stress. It is a feedback loop that offers little immediate comfort to those caught within it.<\/p>\n
Eventually, through the heavy use of steroids, Batalion\u2019s condition went into remission, where it remained until her grandfather, her Zaidy, passed away. The emotional blow triggered a severe colitis flare-up, and this time, her medications failed to work. Faced with worsening symptoms and growing medical concerns about the long-term risk of cancer, doctors made the definitive decision to remove her entire colon. Following the painful organ amputation, she felt physically better, expressing immense relief. <\/p>\n
However, her lifelong anxiety was not so neatly excised alongside her digestive tract. While she could now leave a party without constantly monitoring the proximity of a restroom, a deeper question remained: did she even know how to live without worry? Anxiety abhors a vacuum. The phantom terrors of Bonimart\u2019s doors morphed into fears of turbulence, heights, and eventually mutated into severe health anxiety\u2014an ultra-sensitive bodily fear alarm. <\/p>\n
Individuals who experience health anxiety are hyperaware of their internal sensations, remaining permanently convinced that any minor physical symptom is the direct harbinger of a life-threatening disease. Batalion would panic intensely before routine doctor visits and even faint when a blood test result returned the slightest fraction out of bounds. She remained entirely certain that cancer was coming for her next, operating under the assumption that she needed to stay vigilant even without a colon. After all, perpetual alertness was the mechanism that had kept her ancestors alive. <\/p>\n
While she intellectually recognized that these catastrophic thoughts were absurd, she kept her deep-seated fears strictly secret. That defensive wall began to crumble during a routine family trip to a local pharmacy for flu shots. Her fourth-grader, a child who was otherwise ultra-mature and graceful, suddenly went berserk, staging a hysterical rampage through a midtown CVS that required family members to physically hold her down. In that chaotic moment, Batalion realized a sobering truth: despite her best efforts to bottle up her internal panic, her anxiety was unintentionally leaking out and passing down to her children, teaching them subconsciously that the world was fundamentally unsafe. <\/p>\n
"I get it," Batalion told her daughter later, attempting to bridge the emotional divide. "I once fainted trying to put in contact lenses." <\/p>\n
Her daughter countered with razor-sharp logic: "Why wouldn’t I be scared? A stranger with a bad haircut in a dingy drugstore was going to painfully poke through my skin with a needle!" <\/p>\n
Her child\u2019s perspective hit home, forcing Batalion to confront a fundamental parenting dilemma: how could she teach her daughter, and herself, to remain alert without descending into panic? How could they learn to calmly acknowledge a genuine threat, accurately assess it, and take appropriate action without catastrophic escalation? And threaded quietly beneath those questions was another anxiety-inducing thought: what if her daughter eventually develops colitis too? <\/p>\n
Recognizing that the cycle had to break, Batalion dove into reading about trauma and actively sought out therapeutic support. She consciously worked to rewrite her family narrative, shifting the perspective from one of inherited weakness to one of profound resilience. Instead of viewing her lineage through the lens of permanent damage, she reframed it: her family was so remarkably strong that they survived the Holocaust. She reminded herself of physical endurance, noting that she had experienced the agonizing sensation of internal distress while chasing toddlers around the Coney Island aquarium, and she was still standing strong. <\/p>\n
She even attempted to pass this reframed perspective on to her daughter, telling her that her body was intelligent enough to recognize a harmless faux virus and produce protective antibodies\u2014though the comment was met with an eye-roll. <\/p>\n
Batalion acknowledges that these intellectual and cognitive realizations have not miraculously halted her occasional doom spirals or completely erased the visceral, physical sensations of unease. Witnessing her young children navigate their own vulnerability forced her to confront her own youthful helplessness, making her realize that she needed to face the lingering fear and underlying anger toward her chronic illness that she had long repressed in her rush to simply move forward. Healing required confronting the very fear that was partially caused by the illness itself. <\/p>\n
While she may no longer stand outside a discount department store having worst-case-scenario palpitations, she views herself as still working through her father\u2019s metaphorical twelve steps, while fiercely hoping she will never need to design a similar program for her own children. Her grandmother\u2019s vigilance successfully preserved her life during humanity’s darkest hours, but Batalion’s ultimate goal is clear: may the passing down of crippling, generational anxiety finally end with her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Some of author Judy Batalion\u2019s earliest and most vivid memories are rooted in sudden, overwhelming waves of panic. Long before she could articulate what anxiety meant, her body reacted to the world as if it were a persistent threat. When she was just three years old, her family frequently visited Bonimart, a discount department store […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1877,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[495,808,671,672,1897,998,208,209,703,211,693,210],"class_list":["post-1878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-jewish-family-life-values","tag-anxiety","tag-author","tag-breaking","tag-cycle","tag-generational","tag-healing","tag-jewish-family","tag-jewish-values","tag-journey","tag-kveller","tag-survival","tag-torah-parenting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1877"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spiritualparent.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}