Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed by anxiety?
Anxiety has many faces. Perhaps your mind can’t stop racing and your thoughts keep you up at night. Maybe you keep rehearsing in your head situations that will happen in the future, anticipating everything that might go wrong and feeling helpless as you try to predict every outcome. Or you might be repeating conversations that happened in the past, feeling burdened by doubt, regret, or guilt.
You may experience social anxiety, feeling constantly afraid of being judged by others, certain that they dislike you, or worried about what they will think when they see your flaws and insecurities. You might feel trapped in relationships or perhaps you’re afraid you will be hurt, abandoned, rejected, or unloved by those you care about.
When we are in this headspace, it might seem impossible to feel grounded or to think clearly. Instead, we feel fragmented, scattered, disoriented, restless, and at times terrified. Whether we experience an undercurrent of ongoing anxiety in our daily life or acute panic attacks, this experience can be overwhelming and draining.
How can anxiety therapy help you?
Anxiety in itself is a human experience, a natural adaptive response to potential danger. However, it can also be debilitating and get in the way of our life and relationships. Sometimes we have an idea of what is making us anxious: a specific upcoming event, a recent situation, or a specific worry or concern. More often, it is hard to make sense of why we’re feeling the way we do.
Anxiety counseling is about more than thought patterns that need to be corrected. The underlying fears can run very deep, and at times they can become part of who we are. Our anxiety therapists in Chicago can help you increase awareness and understanding of your own experience, including the identification of triggers and unconscious fears behind your reactions so that you can live life without this constant weight on your shoulders.
What is anxiety?
The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes”. On the other hand, the Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual thinks of it as “fear in the absence of obvious danger.”
The first definition focuses on the symptoms and the latter on the underlying experience, which we think is equally if not more important. The lack of “obvious danger” makes it more puzzling and important to understand the root of this experience.
We don’t believe anxiety in itself is a “disorder.” That pathologizes a normal human experience and a natural reaction to conscious or unconscious danger. We all experience anxiety to a greater or lesser degree, whether it is based on the stories we tell ourselves in our heads, what we learned to anticipate in relationships, the pressures and crises of the external world, or a mix of all of the above.
That said, anxiety can sometimes be very draining and debilitating, getting in the way of functioning, relating to others, and living authentically. The causes of anxiety can be very personal, complex, and run deep. Experiences of anxiety rarely come alone. They can be accompanied by depression, irritability, guilt, or shame.
We sometimes know our triggers and why they cause anxiety. Other times we may have an idea of what our triggers are, but feel confused about the intensity of our emotional reaction. And often we may not even know what is making us feel this way. This is where psychodynamic therapy, a form of anxiety treatment that gets to the root of the issues you’re dealing with, can help. Along with your therapist, you will be able to increase your awareness, make sense of your anxiety experiences, address its root causes, and find new ways to deal with challenges and stressors.
Symptoms of Anxiety
Even when we are not aware of or understand the fears underlying our anxiety, we can experience cognitive patterns and body-based symptoms. Cognitively, we feel intensely worried about past, present, or future events. We can find it difficult to concentrate or pay attention, as our minds are racing through the anticipation of catastrophic scenarios. In our bodies, anxiety can make us restless, fatigued, or on edge; we can feel tense and our muscles feel sore, our breathing agitated and our heart rate going too fast. Better handling these symptoms is part of the process of anxiety therapy.
Usually, these symptoms have meaning and they’re trying to communicate something to us, whether it is a deep seated fear or worry, or a sense of unsafety. Along with your anxiety therapist, you will start to understand what these symptoms are trying to say, listening to them in a different way in order to change from within.
Feel grounded in yourself again.
Sources of Anxiety
Anxiety is usually triggered by worries about things that take place in the future. These triggers are associated with specific contexts, such as social anxiety, performance anxiety, attachment anxiety, or sexual anxiety. Our fast-paced world and the pressures we experience at school, work, and society can also be important triggers. These are examples of situations in which anxiety can be a natural response.
However, triggers and sources are not the same, and anxiety counseling can help you differentiate them. This is especially important when the feelings are very intense. The sources of anxiety can be defined by the fears underlying our anxiety, which can be defined as fears of loss. Working with a skilled anxiety therapist can help you recognize and tolerate the fear of different kinds of loss:
Loss of a significant other. This fear can lead to feelings of abandonment, loneliness, and not belonging, and create an uncertain and unknown future that might feel overwhelming. The “other” doesn’t need to be an actual person in our life, but something we hold important in our life, including people, groups, communities, life choices, goals, or ideals.
Loss of love. This fear can be experienced as rejection, leading to feelings of unworthiness and of being unlovable. Our sense of self might feel threatened, as we carry the fear that “if they really knew me, they wouldn’t want me.”
Loss of bodily integrity and functioning. This fear involves threats to our physical safety and our ability to function. It includes the experience of being “trapped,” even if not in a literal sense, limiting our sense of agency or control over our life.
Loss of affirmation or approval of our conscience. This experience is usually associated with self-judgment leading to feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, and shame, based on our past actions or the stories we tell ourselves about our self-worth.
Loss of self-regulation. This fear involves losing control of our own feelings, thoughts, behaviors, or body sensations.
Annihilation anxiety. This might be a fundamental “danger” our anxiety is warning us about. We might feel, consciously or not, afraid for our physical, emotional, or psychological existence or survival. It involves fears of being overwhelmed, trapped, invaded, fragmented, or of losing our personhood and sense of self.
Beyond “anxiety management”
Treatment for anxiety sometimes involves working with a counselor to acquire coping skills to manage anxiety symptoms. This can be important to feel more grounded and find ways to handle our emotional experience, but it’s not enough. This is especially true when our anxiety feels embedded in our personality or in how we navigate life and relationships, whether they are impacted by social anxiety or anxious attachment patterns.
Anxiety and trauma
Ongoing or chronic anxiety can be an expression of trauma. Complex trauma stems from childhood experiences of unresponsiveness, misattunement, neglect, rejection, abandonment, or abuse. These experiences, whether we remember them or not, play a central role in who we become, how we feel about ourselves, and what we learn to anticipate from others.
This process can create insecurity in our relationships, questions about our self-worth, doubts about the importance of our needs, and mistrust in others. These questions might turn into ongoing fears that lead to ongoing feelings of anxiety. When complex trauma is part of the root of our experience, it’s more important for anxiety treatment to include therapy with an in-depth, trauma-informed approach.
How treatment with our Chicago anxiety therapists can help
There are several anxiety treatment options, including taking medication to manage our symptoms. Some anxiety counseling approaches focus on thought patterns and their impact on our emotions. While these approaches can be valuable in some circumstances, they usually do not address the complexity, depth, and meaning of our experiences of anxiety.
Treatment with our Chicago anxiety therapists will allow you to increase your self-awareness and understanding of the origin and meaning of your anxiety. This will help you confront and process the fears and feelings at the root of your anxiety symptoms. You will do this in a safe and non-judgmental environment. You and your therapist will explore your experiences, recognize patterns that anxiety has created in your life, identify deep-seated fears, and develop a sense of self-acceptance and compassion.
Anxiety therapy can help you find new ways to relate to yourself, reclaim a sense of agency and hope, improve your relationships, and take steps toward living a more authentic, centered, and fulfilling life. Our anxiety therapists in Chicago can support you through this journey in person or via telehealth
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Reference: Psychodynamic Diagnostic Manual
Banner photo credit: Uday Mittal