Certainty is at the heart of the anxiety ‘condition’. When I speak about anxiety, I am talking about anxiety that affects daily functionality, has long term impacts on the lives of individuals, and which has associated rumination, worry and stress related affects that are associated with it. In other words, what could be termed ‘clinical’ or long term anxiety.
Short term anxiety, we know has real benefits and is a function of being human. It protects us from harm and ensures that we are ready to react to an actual harm which may happen. However, in today’s modern lifestyle, worry about a range of things, some of them learnt early on in childhood, can switch on generalised anxiety that leads to a sense of unease, worry, distress and a ‘background noise’ of something not being ‘quite right’.
Which is why, there are some common themes that cut right through anxiety conditions like generalised anxiety, panic disorder or social anxiety. These include the need for certainty, a belief (that is not true) of the individual assessing a task as being overwhelming and with the associated belief that they will not be able to cope, and the consistent background noise of something ‘not being quite right’, and which needs to be thought through. The latter – the need for uncomfortable and intrusive thoughts to be ‘thought through’, never leads to any solution, but leads to an indefinite rabbit hole which simply re-enforces any fear.
Cutting through these three core themes is the therapeutic need for some form of exposure work that an individual will have to undertake in the future. Gentle and gradual exposure work to counter anxiety is the core work that helps to build self-confidence, reduce the perception of one’s inability to cope and to understand that the supposed catastrophic reaction that the individual repeatedly perceived, has not happened. It is a sub-conscious and conscious re-assessment and re-filtering of the fear inducing situation or phobia and which then has to be followed up by repeatedly doing the same activity again and again.
As a therapist, I work consistently with clients through exposure type activities. It is a core part of the work that I do in working with clients with anxiety.
Finally, it is important to know that there is a way ahead in countering phobias and thoughts associated with catastrophic type fears. The first step is to ask for that support.
