Anxiety Treatment

An up to date understanding of anxiety

The surface symptom of a deeper cause

Anxiety is the surface-presenting symptom of varying degrees of old emotional pain being just below the level of conscious awareness. This emotional pain is close to coming out, and because painful emotions are deemed as ‘bad’ or ‘dangerous’ or no-go zones by the defence system of the body and mind, the fight-or-flight mechanism is activated.

This fight-or-flight mechanism is fear- and adrenalin-based, which is why an anxious person experiences the symptoms of being on edge and strung out, hypervigilant, feeling as if something ‘bad’ is going to happen or go horribly wrong. As a result they end up needing to keep busy and distract themselves from the emotional pain which is trying to get their attention. This busy-ness will be either physical activity or mental activity or a mix of the two.

The presiding emotional component of the anxious state is fear and all the shades of this primary colour of emotion including dread, nervousness, agitation, distrust, worry, terror, withdrawing and so on.

Unless anxiety treatment involves processing this fear at an emotional level, the treatment may only be a ‘coping/ management’ type of scenario and the real cause of the anxiety may not be resolved. As most of us are conditioned by our parents, our culture and society as a whole to not let ourselves in on our deeper, more powerful emotional natures, we have over a lifetime built up ways to avoid sitting still and being with our feelings.

Over-doing and workaholism are two ways which are socially acceptable, even socially rewarded ways of avoiding our emotional pain. Unfortunately the painful feelings are deeply buried, with layers of denial and defences piled up over them. Without a form of emotional release therapy such as we offer, even the best personal efforts are unlikely to work. If someone sets the intention to allow the old pain to be felt and forces themselves to be still, the likelihood is that the activity will become mental as opposed to physical, and rather then being workaholics they become thinkaholics, thinking too much to avoid feeling their pain.

This aspect of our defences explains why sleep problems and too much thinking/obsessing are symptoms of the whole ‘anxiety’ reality. This can go to the point of mania, as in manic episodes that manic depressives or bipolar sufferers experience in their ‘up’ periods in which they go through periods of massive activity.