When it comes to anxiety, IYKYK. 

What if I told you that your anxiety could become your most trusted advisor?  I mean this seriously. I regularly see clients shift their relationship to anxiety such that it ceases to be a problem. Just imagine that for a moment.

We all experience anxiety a little differently and for different reasons.  Some common experiences are increased heart rate, racing thoughts, shortness of breath, and tightness in the throat/chest/solar plexus.  

For some of us, this state is the steady backdrop of our entire lives. For others it becomes so extreme that we begin to avoid situations that might bring it on.  

If it’s unpredictable, then we become anxious about getting anxious.  We might medicate ourselves in order to keep doing the anxiety provoking activities. 

There is so much suffering and self-judgement in anxiety for a lot of us.  We say to ourselves, “what’s wrong with me”, “why can’t I just….?”, or even crueler things like, “stop being such a baby and suck it up!”

The NARM way of framing anxiety changed everything for me.  

Imagine that there is something spontaneous and authentic arising in you.  This can be anything from a movement to a desire or an emotion (more often than not, its anger).  Then, you push it down, deny it, tell yourself it’s not ok.  This happens so fast, you might not even notice the original impulse or feeling. I use the image of my left fist rising up (something authentic) and my right hand pushing it down (that’s not ok).  The tension between those two energies is the experience of anxiety.

The good news is that we can stop denying (judging, shaming, dampening) our authentic experience.  It takes practice and usually the support of a great coach or a therapist to even discover what we are denying and why.  

When we really get this, the first sign of anxiety becomes an unmistakable SIGNAL TO SELF that we are abandoning ourselves or denying our authentic experience.  I can’t overstate how revolutionary this is.

Why do we come to believe that we have to do this pushing down and denying in the first place? 

It turns out that there were very good reasons in our young lives to disconnect from aspects of our authenticity. Maybe this aspect of you (maybe anger or exuberance) was punished or overwhelming to your caregivers (because of their own trauma).  Maybe you only saw very scary examples of this authentic quality in adults and decided it was all bad. This all happened before we had the capacity to differentiate our inner experience from our behaviors.  As adults, though, we get to have every bit of our inner authentic experience and then DECIDE what to enact.

As I mentioned, one of the main things people tend to deny is their ANGER.  Surprise, surprise, this has consequences. See my post about anger for an exercise on how to work with this emotion specifically.

As we begin to accept and honor our authentic experience, the opposing tension and the experience of anxiety fades.

If anxiety is something that troubles you, reach out..