THE PRISON OF ANXIETY
Recently, I have been working with a handful of people who suffer from extreme anxiety. Some even have panic attacks where their heart races, their hands sweat, they may get a headache, they may have knots in their stomach, they may fear they are having a heart attack, and they may need to get away from people or out of a room. These feelings cluster together in a most frightening, escalation of sensation for about 10-20 minutes. Finally, they subside. But usually the person has left the situation, room, or setting by then, so they think that leaving was the solution to their discomfort and fear.
For those of you with similar experiences, such episodes and the alleged “solution” that follows probably causes you to think that staying away from social gatherings or large spaces or tight spaces or whatever you fear will keep you safe. But then, you start to worry about possibly ending up in a situation, or being in one when you hadn’t anticipated it, and you worry about that. Sometimes the worry brings on a mini panic attack in itself. Even avoiding the world fails to offer complete safety. You probably feel trapped, entombed in a prison of your anxiety.
Working through anxiety is no picnic, either. First, you will have to learn that if you allow yourself to feel the fear for 10-15 minutes, it will go away all on it’s own. Really, it will. I often tell my clients: Feelings just are. They are neither good nor bad. We do not choose them or control them. We simply feel them. What we choose to DO with them, (how we act on our feelings), can be good or bad. But simply having feelings just is. All humans have them. Having feelings alone never killed anyone; only how some individuals chose to act on their feelings may have done them harm. Anxiety and panic are extremely uncomfortable feelings. Despite how it feels, though, you can endure them.
Next, you may need to consider taking medication, which is a tool, not a crutch. Living with anxiety and doing something about it is certainly not a sign of weakness! Taking anxiety medication as prescribed for 6 months or a year can break the cycle of panic and give you the confidence you need to be able to see past the fear and into peace.
Then, working together we can come to discover the rupture in important relationships that gave birth to your anxiety. Maybe someone repeatedly let you down emotionally, if not also physically. Most likely, you felt helpless and out of control. You developed anxiety as the warning light, notifying you of “danger ahead”. Whenever you start to feel overwhelmed, out of control, or like something might not go right, the danger signal of anxiety sounds the alarm. When this happens, you attend to the anxiety, often choosing to escape the situation that made you feel unsafe in the first place and the uncomfortable feelings go away.
Your criteria used to determine if a person or situation as unsafe is probably frozen in time or seen through the distortion of catastrophic crisis. You may use a child’s or victim’s reference to determine what is safe and what is dangerous. But as adults not in the throws of crisis, we have many more tools—emotional, physical, and legal—to navigate life to keep ourselves safe. Going back and figuring out where your hurt and sense of danger occurred and learning to embrace all of your tools of defense take time and can be a difficult. Yet is it also a highly rewarding process.
Helping people struggle with such great pain is a very humbling experience. Seeing them touch their strength is motivating and inspiring. Watching them move beyond their prison of anxiety to stand safely on their own is the most incredible feeling, for them and for me. It can be for you, too. So stand tall and free, going wherever you want and doing whatever you please without fear and anxiety.