Have you tried all the strategies you can think of to manage your anxiety? Many popular counselling approaches suggest challenging the irrational thoughts, doing more deep breathing, relaxation strategies, changing your diet, or exercising more. While those things can be helpful, they often leave the root cause of the anxiety unaddressed.
Often we end up becoming enemies with our anxiety, hating it, or feeling frustrated that we can't control it.
Why Do I Have Anxiety?
Chronic anxiety is a sign from your body that something in your life is too much for your nervous system, or that your body holds a memory of lack of safety.
Research in trauma counselling shows that chronic anxiety is often linked to unresolved distress from childhood or life events (van der Kolk, 2014).
Our brain is wired for protection as a top priority. When it perceives a threat, it triggers the fight, flight, freeze, or fawn responses. Anxiety comes in when the nervous system gets stuck in a threat response due to past experiences that didn't feel safe. This occurs regardless of if the person remembers those events.
In Internal Family Systems Therapy, anxiety is seen a protective part that emerged to keep you safe. It may be trying to prevent you from re-experiencing fear, shame, or rejection that was similar to what happened in earlier life experiences. Anxiety can also be strategy to keep us in our head and out of our bodies where the uncomfortable sensations are felt.
When we try to get rid of this anxious protective part, it can often signal more threat to our brain. It's as if the anxiety becomes the new threat to target and the fear response gets even louder!
So How Do We Make this Cycle of Threat Stop?
We befriend the anxiety. Which is the opposite of what most people try to do. When we can feel some compassion and understanding towards the anxiety as a protective part of ourselves, and really get to know why it's there it often starts to soften. Through counselling we can work with your system to address the root wounding that caused the anxiety to take hold in the first place.
Learning how to feel the anxiety in our body in safe, titrated ways can teach our brain that the sensation isn't a threat and something to get rid of. It builds the capacity to be with the hard feelings which gradually reduces the alarm in our brain around feeling it.
This can be done through offering:
Mindfulness and Self-compassion. Learning how to be with our bodies in a compassionate way helps the anxious parts of us feel heard rather than ignored or suppressed.
Co-regulation with safe people, which can help rewire the threat response over time.
Bottom-up counselling and interventions (breath-work, body-based therapy, IFS counselling, EMDR counselling, neurofeedback) can help shift the nervous system from a state of alarm to regulation.
Want to learn more or get started? Reach out to us to schedule a free 15 minute phone consultation @ info@revivecounselling.com.
References: van der Kolk, B.A. (2014). The body keeps the score: Brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. Viking.
