Building a Relationship with your Anxiety

A fellow therapist recently told me that she felt most clients she encountered who were treated for anxiety were only ever taught grounding strategies. While breathing strategies, grounding skills, and relaxation techniques can be helpful for managing anxiety symptoms, in order to truly treat long-term anxiety, we need to be in relationship with the anxiety. 

Questioning how this might work is natural. The first step in building relationship with anxiety is to externalize it from yourself. 

You are not your anxiety. 

Read that again. Your anxiety is a part of you that works really hard to try to keep you safe. Unfortunately, it's not always great at its job. It exaggerates, and highlights things we don't always want to spend time focusing on. Of course, this pattern can feel really frustrating and cause a lot of distress. In building a relationship with anxiety, part of what we are trying to do is to understand anxiety's intention as a protector. 

Anxiety wants you to know it cares about you so much. It wants you to be 100% safe at all times. The problem is, that desire is not based in reality. There is sadly no way for us to achieve that level of safety. Now, don't let your anxious brain hook into that sentence. The next step of building relationship with anxiety is to foster acceptance. 

We must learn to accept risk, but we also must learn to accept the discomfort that comes along with anxiety. 

Anxiety is not dangerous - in fact, it often does do a good job of keeping us safe. We want to have levels of anxiety that alert us to actual dangers, not levels that cause us distress unnecessarily. Building a relationship with anxiety allows us to find this balance. The less we fight our parts, the less energy we have to put into managing our own system’s balance. We can teach our brain that we accept the risks around us and are wise enough to keep ourselves safe, and we don't actually need extreme levels of discomfort and distress to do that. We have to help the anxiety part trust that we are capable so it can relax.

Finally, an underestimated part of treating anxiety, is recognizing the suffering of suffering that many anxiety patients experience. This is a layer on top of anxiety that says why me, why am I broken, why do I have to feel this way… When we build a relationship with anxiety, and lean into acceptance, anxiety loosens its grip on us. Acceptance helps us reduce the suffering of suffering. If we want to treat anxiety, we need to also address the additional layers of suffering, like shame and negative self talk that add even more distress. These behaviours and actions are not anxiety themselves, but they contribute to what feels so agonizing about having anxiety.

Ultimately, anxiety can be a chronic condition for many, and building a relationship with it can change the way it remits and relapses. Anxiety may walk with you at many times of your life, but you can be the leader in the relationship, and forge the path alongside it, and you CAN find ways to bring ease, comfort, and acceptance to your experience.