Therapy for Anxiety
Anxiety is, unfortunately, a common experience in our current society that many people deal with to some degree. If anxiety is making life significantly harder than it needs to be or is getting in the way of some important areas of your life then addressing it in therapy can be a smart decision.
These are common anxiety symptoms…
- feeling tense, nervous, restless, or on edge
- dread
- dwelling on negative experiences
- overthinking a situation
- excessive planning & preparing
- intrusive thoughts of catastrophe (losing job, serious accidents, death)
- inability to control worry
- panic attacks
- trouble sleeping
- irritable with others
- tiring easily
- difficulty concentrating
- muscle tension
- using foods, drugs, alcohol or superstitions to cope
Vicious Cycles
When people experience these types of symptoms they can easily get caught in a vicious, self-defeating cycle. Here are three common cycles.
Self-Invalidating about Feeling Anxious
This is a cycle where self-invalidation or minimizing can follow anxiety symptoms. The mind can say something along the lines of
“I shouldn’t be feeling this way, my life isn’t hard compared to…”
From this point of view someone might feel like they should just “get over it” or “just stop worrying so much” but this never works and only backfires to create more anxiety.
The reason is because anxiety is emotional, not logical. Rationality & “knowing better” don’t change these types of emotional patterns.
Self-Critical about Feeling Anxious
In this cycle the reaction to the symptoms of anxiety can trigger waves of self-critical judgments focused on what it means about me that I'm feeling this way. Usually this involves adding a layer of shame on top of anxiety that we might not even be aware of. Some sense that I’m bad, wrong or weak for feeling anxious.
Anxiety about Feeling Anxious
Any of the symptoms noted above (worry, feeling on edge, etc) can then cause a further reaction where the mind interprets the existence of the symptoms themselves as proof that something is wrong. This of course causes more anxiety leading to an endless loop with no end.
Emotion Focused Therapy for Anxiety
The main type of therapy I use is called Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) and it’s typically quite effective for helping people to work through struggles with anxiety.
All those bullet points above are symptoms of anxiety, not the root cause of anxiety. The focus of EFT is to address the root causes.
Though each person’s healing process is unique & tailored to them, a quick idea of some of main parts of the process include:
1 | Identify the Stuck Patterns
Typically the symptoms of anxiety are downstream results of larger upstream processes that we’re not aware of. We all have blind spots in our self-awareness and beginning to become aware of our self-defeating patterns is a very helpful step.
2 | Building Emotional Regulation
We tend to struggle with downstream symptoms of things like anxiety because we have not built the capacity to tolerate or regulate the more intense emotions that lay underneath.
3 | Developing Emotional Awareness
People caught in chronic anxiety often tend to not be aware of the other elements of their emotional experience. Instead they tend to get caught in the familiar groove of feeling stressed, anxious or overwhelmed.
4 | Understanding the Bigger Picture
It’s helpful to understand that our tendency to get caught up in negative, self-defeating patterns come from somewhere. When the above processes are attended to it often allows us to make connections of where we picked up these patterns to begin with.
If you'd like to understand more about the EFT process you can read more here.
Next Steps
I offer counseling & therapy for anxiety in Hood River. If you’d interested in potentially working with me the best next step is to check out this page.