Anxiety Treatment has two parts, meditation and insight. The previous post, Dealing with Anxiety, covered meditation. Here we will go into the psychological side of anxiety treatment. Meditation reduces symptoms very well, but we also need psychological reflection. Reflection helps us with humility and understanding this complex culture. When anxiety is avoided, it comes out in ridged attitudes, various addictions and obsessiveness to name a few. Also, meditation provides the stability to look into the nature of anxiety.
Three levels of anxiety
The psychological side of anxiety treatment can be looked at in three levels, personal, cultural and spiritual(relation to the unknown). These are all connected, but let’s start with something easy. For example, you are going to work but you are going to arrive late. You can feel the anxiety in your body as it tenses, maybe thoughts begin to race, trying to figure out what you are going to say. You may even be able to feel the helplessness that you actually do not know what will happen.
Each person will have a different reaction to “being late”, from no anxiety to a panic attack. It all depends on your history and relationship to your inner life. Some people are not aware of their inner life and keep it stuffed down pretty well, others are more sensitive, that is good, but then how to deal with the sensitivity is the next step.
Meditation with insight
First, as I described in meditation, it is important to know and accept that you are experiencing anxiety. You can even say to yourself, “feeling anxious”, “feeling anxious in my stomach” or wherever it appears in the body. Breath in anxiety, let it go on the out breath.
Next is insight, along with breathing meditation. Ask yourself some questions about the anxiety. The purpose of the questions: Getting to the sub-conscious story. The sub-conscious story is important even if it feels ridiculous, trivial or whiney. If the sub-conscious is not made conscious, it goes on and on, and has power over you. It is the child part of yourself that is vulnerable and needs you to listen.
What am I anxious about right now?
What assumption am I making that may only partially be true?
Where is this coming from?
Is it useful now in this situation?
Example of a dialogue with yourself:
What am I anxious about right now?
Answer: I am afraid of being late because I could loose my job, people that I work with will be let down, I will get rejected in some way, and people will not like me anymore.
What assumption am I making that may only partially be true?
Answer: I know I won’t loose my job, people are occasionally late and it is not a big deal. Even the people I work with are pretty reasonable and I have a good relationship with most of them. There is only one person that could be a jerk to me and he is a jerk to everyone.
Where is that coming from?
Answer: I grew up going to a school that was really strict. They got really mad when we were late and were very shaming about it.
Is it useful now in this situation?
Answer: No, these people I am working with now are no-way like the school I went to. Maybe I will hear a little bit of disappointment about being late, but it won’t be a big deal.
This is just a rough outline of how you question yourself to expose the sub-conscious story line. When you do this you have the option to choose what you are going to believe, the old story or the probability of what may happen in this here and now reality. Also, the next level of this story is that, you do not know what will happen when you get to work. Wow, I can’t control everything!
