Anxiety help for some

I recently watched six TED Talk lectures on anxiety. As you probably know, there is an aura about TED Talks of deep personal usefulness, of real moment and of extreme sincerity and meaning. In the case of these presentations on anxiety, this is regrettable, as each one of them was more or less effete. The audience could not be helped, beyond hope’s first blush, by the ideas of these gentle wisdom messiahs.

Olivia Remes advised responding to anxiety by “feeling like you’re in control of your life,” and “overcoming something by doing it badly.” This “catapults you straight into action.” Two other recommendations were to “forgive yourself” and have “a purpose and meaning in life.” Jordan Raskopoulos has mitigated her chronic anxiety by indulging in “a lot of hobbies,” controlling her environment, and engaging in a therapy which “takes you out of yourself” so you can “analyze your own behavior.”

Angela Ceberano sees her “fears, worries and my anxiety as a good thing. I take on fear.” Steven Zanella conquered his anxiety when he became a father and realized he had never given himself the caring advice he would give his daughter, were she to ever become an anxious and panic-prone person. “What if I showed myself the same love and support that I felt for my daughter? I had always approached anxiety with anger and negativity. I needed to let go of that anger. I retrained that voice in my brain to speak to me in the way that I imagined it would speak to her – with patience, love and kindness.” Colin Bien found “the key”: to “acknowledge and accept the attacks. Then you can change your reaction to an attack” which can “shorten” and make it “less intense.” He also improved his diet, substituting fruit and yogurt for toast and croissants. Mel Schwartz, a psychotherapist, found that “anxiety is due to our relationship with our thoughts.” We are, he said, “trying to ward off uncertainty. When our thoughts are constantly seeking certainty, wanting to know the future in advance,” we are made anxious. His solution was for us to embrace the “uncertainty” of the quantum universe. “Invite what we fear in (and) and the fear starts to dissipate.”

I have not been terribly successful helping against a person’s entrenched anxiety when that anxiety has come out of a fearful-dependent child-parent relationship. Much anxiety is created in that way; see my earlier post – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2013/11/normal-0-false-false-false-en-us-x-none_22.html.* I have treated quite a few adults who cannot go to that formative pain to pour it out because they remain the frightened child. They can’t bring themselves to question the grafting of their heart to their cold, solipsistic mother’s or father’s.

Here I want to present an answer that worked for one highly anxious woman – but not one of those regressive souls. She could not travel by plane or be a passenger in any vehicle. From the session note:

“Possible historical sources of client’s anxiety were set aside owing to her insistence that she is ‘very independent and content.’ I offered her a ‘technique’ that I have used with success. Happy and secure as she is at her ‘base,’ she should be able to ‘invoke a real sense of serenity from your history.’ This could be called ‘uncognitive therapy,’ as she would be asked not to create bright or rational thoughts or reframes about herself, but to find true feelings embedded in the best parts of herself.”

This deserves a bit of clarification. The idea, which I had theretofore proven in myself, is that while the anxious feeling can bend us to tunnel-vision thinking, there exists for many people an immanent, if not subterranean, sense of positive life feeling that is richer and wider than that tunnel vision: laurels of personal expansiveness we might rest on. A positive self-feeling – a basic goodness and power – that may come from birth, a golden time in childhood or simply one’s nature, it will be soothing, even smiling, like a loving mother who, in enveloping us, grows our heart “with gladness.” We simply have to remember it, find it where it’s been sleeping. When I have summoned it, anxiety has evaporated, as a worried child is instantly aright when his parents have returned home.

Unfortunately, many of our clients do not have this sense. They were undermined too early, and developed a personality disorder-type ego syntonicity about their fears:

“This session’s approach was to focus on the constant anxiety-regenerating factor of client’s nearly infantile attachment to her ‘crazy’ mother. This connection is, we understood, a source of what might be called ‘toxic comfort’ to her. I related an anecdote in an Alice Miller book: A little girl ran away from a kindly old lady who showed her some affection, to return to the cold comfort of her mother’s neglect. Client and I, from this perspective, discussed an idea that she herself has entertained in the past: moving away, possibly far away, and setting up adult-style boundaries with her mother. A bit further afield, I likened her panic episodes to the ‘grim, monotonous play’ (L. Terr) of a trauma victim, where – as she described her self-induced fears – she appears to ‘need to panic.’”

I know that many of our clients never healed from fear in childhood. Presenter Zanella described a moment when he had been required to make an impossible choice. His parents were fighting, and his mother had locked her husband out of the house. Reaching out to him, father ordered: “Open the door and let me in.” His mother told him not to. He froze, unable to know what to do. How difficult is it to grasp that he has remained frozen even now, his voice breaking during a TED Talk, in that anxious dilemma? How easy to see that all the cognitive legerdemain of all the worriers and lecturers in the world couldn’t move that child to a safe place?

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* Another idea to deal with anxiety – https://pessimisticshrink.blogspot.com/2015/12/intervention-tidbit-7-answering-anxiety.html.