Featured in Medium: 5 Metaphors That Can Change Your Relationship with Anxiety
Clinic Coordinator & Therapist, Kara Lissy, shares ways to change your relationship with your anxiety.
Many of my sessions with clients struggling with anxiety start similarly: some variation of “I just want to stop feeling this way” or “How can I make my anxiety go away?” For the first few years of my career as a therapist, I focused on tips, techniques and tricks to distract, argue or invalidate anxiety. Sometimes they worked, albeit temporarily. But little did I realize I was subtly sending the message that anxiety was a problem to be fixed rather than an emotion to be accepted.
When I took a seminar in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), an evidence-based treatment, I saw my relationship with my own anxiety (and other thoughts and feelings, for that matter) change dramatically. I’ve learned many helpful anecdotes, frameworks and theoretical orientations from ACT, but the one takeaway that reigns supreme in my practice (and in the way I treat myself) is the acceptance of anxiety and negative thoughts as a normal part of the human condition.
Yup, I said it — if you get anxious, you’re doing it right.
The problem is not our anxiety per se but our relationship with our anxiety. Do we ignore it completely, leaving it no choice but to build up over time and come back swinging? Do we get angry and punish ourselves for feeling anxious, adding insult to injury? Do we completely engulf ourselves in our emotions, letting go of all logic and reason?
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