Anxiety is a natural part of human experience and we need it, it is part of our survival response. It ensures that we can detect danger in the environment and respond appropriately to guarantee our survival and live to see another day.
However, our natural anxiety can become stuck in a loop that is pervasive and affects our ability to carry on with daily activities. When this happens it is an indicator that we are living with some form of unresolved trauma in our body and our brain is perceiving danger when danger is no longer present. This is our brain’s way of trying to keep us safe and ensure our survival. However, experiencing this can leave us feeling scared, apprehensive, hyper-vigilant and we begin trying to rationalise the anxiety away and begin avoiding what we believe are “triggers”.
This means we begin to shrink our world and stop doing things that we previously did, as we believe these are the causes of our anxiety. The more we avoid situations, places, people and experiences in the belief of reducing or eliminating our anxiety the hungrier and more pervasive it becomes. Anxiety comes to take up the space where our life used to be. Living with anxiety is exhausting and becomes a full time job. Everything needs to be filtered through our anxiety and whether it will “allow” us to do what we really wish we would want to do. We can then get caught in a loop of self-recrimination and self-criticism, as we admonish ourselves for being “weak”, “pathetic”, “broken”, and plain “useless”. This serves to feed our anxiety and it continues to grow, as we continue to shrink. This loop can be broken and you can live a life free from pervasive anxiety.
This is probably going to sound counterintuitive but we cannot fight anxiety, we need to befriend it. By fighting anxiety we give it more strength, it becomes a battle between it and us. A battle that anxiety invariably wins that leaves us feeling more dejected, defeated and anxious! This then leads to more self-criticism and self-abandonment, which strengthens the hold of anxiety over you and your life. You cannot fight an invisible force. Rather than viewing anxiety, as an invader that has come uninvited and is ruining your life, view it as a messenger that is trying to tell you something either about your current situation or something that you have gone through in your past.
Not everyone needs professional support to work their way through anxiety, but it can be valuable to have the guidance of a trained counsellor to help you navigate your way to the life you want to live. Somatic therapy is a powerful but gentle approach to healing that empowers the individual to be their own agent of recovery. It is a body based therapy that works at soothing the physiological symptoms of anxiety and teaches strategies that allow the individual to regulate their emotional states and become connected to their mind, body and spirit. When we are connected to who we are, we are able to be compassionate to ourselves and this promotes our growth and ability to embrace the challenges of life with love, grace and wisdom.
Comments