What is Anxiety?
Anxiety can be debilitating and triggered by apparently insignificant events, leading to confusion and bewilderment. We recognise that it is a powerful emotional state and don’t need counselling for anxiety to tell us that. Yet anxiety occurs in our bodies as a form of disregulation. Each of us experiences it in different ways: you get hot flushes, I get a cold sweat. Your heart may start racing, mine freezes to a standstill. This bodily component is a crucial clue. We can use this information to help us engage our neurological processes in our own healing. By understanding the processes at work we can learn to regulate our emotions through our own bodies.
What shocks some people is to discover that a certain level of anxiety is completely normal. In fact it is completely indispensable in living a healthy life. If we dont feel a little anxiety we won’t be able to get to places on time or do a job well.
How to Deal with Anxiety
Extrapolating this idea, anxiety is part of a continuum, with excitement at the other end. Viewed like this, anxiety is simply energy that has become stuck in a self destructive cycle of thought instead of leading us to action. We perceive this stuck energy as anxiety. Our goal when counselling for anxiety is to unpick the background processes at work and the emotions that underly it. Through this process, when the triggering event occurs, there is a natural flowing of the body’s energy. This naturaly feels alive and spontaneous instead of the previous negative cycle.
How does Therapy Help with Anxiety?
This process will involve examining deeply held beliefs around things which we may not even be aware of. For example being raised with such high expectations of achievement that we believe that we must always be top of the class. For such a person, coming second or third may feel that they have let down the family name in some way. This kind of hidden expectation can lead us to be over-anxious when, for example, going for a job interview. We may have been living with this kind of relationship to achievement for many years before we realise it. Though it may have been helpful at one time, it is no longer serving us and we may start to seek help.