Anxiety has become the most common issue that clients bring to therapy. Although it’s very common, it can take many forms – a sense of vague uneasiness , or more serious distress, right up to outright panic, that can be hard for people to understand or put words to. But whatever it is, it’s your body trying to signal something to you. It’s time to listen.
Anxiety is tied to threat, and when the nervous system is working well it’s a useful tool to alert us to danger, and prepare us physically to either run from it, fight it off, or otherwise stay safe in the face of it (this is the fight or flight response). Without anxiety in our lives we’d be walking into traffic or getting into fights we can’t win all day long. But it needs to be proportionate, in tune with reality, and it needs to turn off and reset when the danger has passed. Therapy can help when the anxious feeling remains even when there’s no obvious reason for it.
What does anxiety feel like?
There are different ways that anxiety shows up – it can be physical (the thumping chest, the lump in the throat, the electric jangle in every nerve), or mental (racing thoughts that won’t stop, imagining all the ways in which it will go wrong), emotional (pessimism, withdrawal, dread) or behavioural (avoiding friends, avoiding work, avoiding anything and everything despite wanting more from life).
Anxiety can also be quiet – just a gentle unwillingness to engage, a preference to always wait and see, rarely to act, until another year has passed and nothing has happened, nothing has changed. In this way there is overlap with depression – both signal the need to stay still, and quiet, and hope the threat resolves itself.
Why do I feel like this?
In therapy there are no easy answers, as everyone’s experience is unique. But anxiety rarely comes from nowhere, and is often rooted in the past. All of us have to learn to deal with threat as we’re growing up and developing – and as children we are exceptionally vulnerable. Threat is everywhere when we’re young! That might be the threat of punishment, or of neglect, or of not enough attention, or too much attention, from parents or teachers or siblings or strangers. The threat of not fitting in. The threat of not standing out. The threat of humiliation, or shame, or disconnection from our tribe. There are as many ways to experience threat as there are individuals to experience it – no two lives are the same.
How can therapy help with anxiety?
When we feel anxious, we generally deal with it in one of two ways. We either face it, or we ignore it. Both strategies have their place! It doesn’t help to spend every minute of every day acknowledging and facing every possible catastrophe that may be coming our way, but nor is it a good idea to ignore the engine warning lights on our mental dashboard. We need to be able to discriminate between present threats, and past threats. Between real threats and imagined threats. Between threats that we can influence or change, and those that we can not. First step is to acknowledge there is a light on the dashboard, blinking away, and ask it what it wants us to know. All emotions are messengers – and we should not shoot the messenger.
My approach to anxiety therapy
I work face to face with clients in Bournemouth, and online across the world. My approach is based on Polyvagal Theory, which seeks to understand how the nervous system responds to threat. It does this via activating, or deactivating energy. Anxiety is an example of activating energy – the pounding heart, the restless hands, the racing thoughts, these are all symptoms of a body that is getting ready to fight, or to flee. The nervous system has detected a danger, and we have to figure out if the danger is in the past, the present, or the future. We then need to decide what to do about it – can the danger be influenced? If it’s in the past then likely not, in which case we may try to show the anxious part of you that the danger has passed. You escaped and survived it. Our anxious parts often need nothing more than acknowledgement, but all they have been receiving is instructions to be quiet and go away.
If, however, the threat is in the present or future then we may want to decide on a plan of action – how best can you prepare for it? Can you influence or change it? Are there actions that you could take but which you have so far not taken? Are there actions that you are taking which perhaps you need to stop? If your body is providing you with activating energy in the form of anxiety, it wants you to act. therapy might start with asking – what do you need to do, or stop doing, in order to get back on the right path?
Take the first step
If any of this resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. I offer a free 30-minute consultation — no obligation to continue, just a chance to talk about what’s going on, ask me any questions you have, and see if working together might help.