Overcoming anxiety: Therapy's role in finding true freedom

If anyone’s seen the Disney film Inside Out 2 (and even if they haven’t!), they will know that anxiety, if left to its own devices, can wreak utter havoc in our lives. 

When unmanaged, it can overwhelm us with unsubstantiated thinking about just about any future terrible scenario and sometimes be so severe as to cause panic attacks. Our heart races, our head pounds and we may experience other physical symptoms like headaches, stomach aches and muscle tension. 

Anxiety is no joke and living with it constantly can be hell on earth. When anxiety is in the driving seat, just as in Disney’s film, it runs our lives, causing us to make decisions we wouldn’t normally make, the consequences of which, ironically, cause us more anxiety as we ‘chase our tails’ looking for solutions. 

Is there a solution to anxiety? Many of us want to ‘get rid’ of our anxiety as the symptoms of it are so unpleasant. In doing so, however, we often set up an inadvertent catch-22 situation where we become doubly anxious when we feel anxious or have anxious thoughts as we have plenty of experience of how ‘bad’ this can be. 

The original anxious thought (don’t forget Aunt Gerry’s birthday) suddenly becomes an overwhelming tidal wave of ‘shoulds’, ‘musts’ and ‘ought to's'. Once the brain has been given one thing to remember or do, like a dog fed a treat, it snaps to attention eagerly looking for more. 

And of course, there is more. They start with the relatively simple ‘and while you’re at it don’t forget to buy more cat food’, progressing to the more irrelevant ‘remember that embarrassing thing you said to your boss at the Christmas party last year’ and then, if you’re a true anxiety expert ‘look, you’re having anxious thoughts again. You’ve failed at not being anxious. And that’s the ultimate failure.’ 

As imaginative and creative humans, we have a never-ending reservoir of possible, imagined or past scenarios to use as fodder to ‘do better next time’. Because of course, this is all anxiety is - a misguided attempt to help us, borne of, I hate to say, probably our school system and over-emphasis on ‘getting it right’ which continues well into adulthood. 

How therapy can help 

As we have seen, therefore, anxiety is our brain’s attempts to have us ‘fit in’ with what is expected of us. To ‘get it right’ by the blueprint we have been given by society, including our parents and teachers. 

As young children, we have no ‘filter system’ for the information we are given. If we are told getting straight As is important, that becomes (to quote Inside Out 2 again) a ‘core belief’. 

Of course, many of the things our parents and teachers tell us are true. Good grades are important as they unlock opportunities for us to work in professions that we may enjoy later down the line. The error we make however is when our sense of peace becomes dependent on our perceived external reality. If our sense of self-worth is linked to what we achieve materially, we will suffer enormously when things don’t ’go our way’. 

The answer to anxiety is therefore quite simple - throw out the core belief that keeps our sense of security and self-worth tied to something impossible to substantiate or maintain, and feel a connection with ourselves at a deeper, lasting level.

Therapy can help with this as we learn to unpick rigid belief systems about ourselves and, as Carl Rogers calls them ‘conditions of worth’ we may have set for ourselves (I am only valuable if X…).

We might also begin to examine where these beliefs come from, if they are realistic and if they are serving us today. ‘I am only valuable if my house is clean’, is certainly a belief that will cause a great deal of anxiety, for example. 

Many people feel that without anxiety they will get nothing done. By sinking into the idea that we are quite enough as we are, the dishes will pile up, we’ll miss out on work targets and fail to be functioning members of society. 

We must see this fear as coming from its very origin - society. Many of us are being dictated to by outside forces that have nothing to do with us anymore. We have ‘learned the lessons’ of school and now it is up to us to do the best for ourselves. 

When we truly know ourselves (which therapy can help enormously with), we know what we need to do. We are no longer operating from someone else’s blueprint for life and, as a result, we are no longer ruled by the fear of ‘getting it wrong’.  With self-awareness, we can learn to live by our own rules. In this way, we will see we can only ever get it right. And, as we will also see, this is the way to true freedom from anxiety.