What’s behind your anxiety

“What does your anxiety look like?”

“How do You experience it?”

These are some of the first things I ask clients who come to therapy seeking help with anxiety. I might have an idea of what anxiety looks like for me or for other clients who have already shared their stories with me, but each new client is different. Getting to know their unique experience of anxiety is essential for me if I want to support them. Together we then uncover the patterns and ways of relating to the client’s world that are connected to their anxiety. Becoming more aware of these provides an opportunity for making different choices and creates space for healing and growth.

The perceived threat

Frequently, if not always, some excavation work is involved in shedding light on what our anxiety is rooted in. We all have ideas about life, the world and our place in it. Most of the time, these are so deeply embedded, we don’t really ever think about their relevance or usefulness. However, they are often the very cause of our troubles with anxiety. When some deep belief or value we hold becomes threatened, our whole body can go into a stress response, literally as if its very existence was in danger. This is called ‘Fight-Flight-Freeze Response’ and it is very useful when there is actual danger or a threat to our safety.

Here is a simple video to explain how the Fight-Flight-Freeze Response works:

Overloaded nervous system

Sometimes this response gets triggered in situations that do not actually pose a threat to our safety, but internally we perceive it as so. This can be due to traumatic experiences, prolonged periods of stress, the use of certain substances, some physical illness, built up emotions or grief and loss. As a result of these experiences, our nervous system can become overloaded and start to assess relatively harmless situations as threatening and triggering our stress response. What often happens next is that we start to fear the physical sensations or the way we freeze and get stuck, unable to get on with life when anxiety hits. We are now anxious about being anxious.

Unpacking your experience of anxiety

When we learn to differentiate between our physical sensations, thoughts and emotions, we create some space between them. Separated, they are no longer an overwhelming scary mess of feeling completely out-of-control. We can then start to unpack things a little further. As we do this, certain messages related to our anxiety may keep coming up. Often these are ideas about what is “good” and what is “bad”. There may be messages about what is (or isn’t) “good enough” and what it means to do the “right thing”. Things that have a strong meaning to us or are linked to what we perceive as our identity may come up if we feel these are at risk of being damaged. Very often these ideas are connected to our desire to feel accepted and loved - something we all need in order to thrive in life.

Support with the unpacking

The support of a trained psychotherapist or a counsellor is really important when you’re exploring your anxiety and where it’s coming from. They will do the digging with you and help you spot the patterns in your thoughts, beliefs and behaviour. Together you can look at who’s beliefs these really are, where did they come from and do you want or need to keep holding onto them. As you do this some internal conflict and difficult emotions may come up. That’s not only understandable, but also an important part of the work. Your therapist will be making sure you don’t become overwhelmed during the sessions and they will help you learn how to stay regulated. Not becoming completely overwhelmed allows you to stay close enough to your experience to really look at it, but not get consumed by it. That’s a good place for exploring, seeing things clearer and from different angles.

Healing in a relationship

When you have a strong emotional experience in the presence of another caring person, who can tolerate the emotion and stay with you, it can be profoundly healing. It is something we all need as children when we are learning about emotions. There used to be some questionable ideas about emotions and raising children in the past. And to some extent there still are. Many parents carry their own wounds that prevent them from meeting their children’s needs around experiencing and expressing emotions. Due to this lack of insight and resources, many of us did not get the most helpful responses from our caregivers when we were experiencing strong emotions as children. Not knowing how to allow ourselves to feel emotions, express them safely and let them pass is strongly linked to anxiety. This is something we are meant to learn in a relationship, not alone. When a need is missed or unmet in a relationship, the best place for it to heal is, again, in a relationship. This is why therapy is a good place to work through these issues.

Emotions and anxiety

Feeling anxious in relation to a specific experience, is actually just an emotion like any other. Perhaps you’ve been living your life believing that you’re only allowed to feel what’s frequently called “positive” emotions and as soon as a “negative” one comes up, you need to immediately get rid of it. Maybe this worked for some time and you might have become very good at it. There’s probably been some way of keeping yourself distracted and taking your attention away from the emotions you don’t like. You may be quite disconnected from your body, where our emotions are experienced. Anxiety is directly connected to what we do with our emotions. Other built up emotions can present as anxiety if they have no way out. Learning to recognise, acknowledge and express emotions plays an essential role in minimising the impacts of anxiety on your life.

The stories we tell ourselves about our emotions influence our experiences. Whatever your narrative is around your anxiety will have an effect on how much it impacts your life. Finding a way to allow yourself to feel your emotions without placing judgement on them is an important step towards reigning in how much anxiety limits your engagement in life.

Download the free Guide for Processing Emotions to help you get started on learning how to process emotions in a healthy way. This will support you in preventing a build up of emotions as well as using coping strategies that can be unhelpful in the long run.