Dealing with anxiety

Learning to confront and vanquish fear and anxiety is an essential part of any addiction recovery program. Do it. You'll thank yourself for it.

We could spend several days together exploring the impact and repercussions of anxiety in your life. However, as each person is a unique individual, a tremendous amount of information would be required on this site in order to respond to everyone's needs.

So let's not lose sight of our objective by wasting our time analyzing the signs or treating the symptoms. In order to learn to deal effectively with anxiety - and eventually to prevent it - it is essential to understand and deal with the causes.

What, then, is anxiety? Fundamentally, it is fear. Two distinct fears actually. We can work on them independently but, as we shall see, it is preferable to confront them together. For although these fears may be quite distinct, they each influence and feed off the other.

Working independently on the fears that together make up anxiety would help you deal with the fears themselves, but not necessarily with your anxiety. It is when the two combine or become intertwined that it gets you in its grip.

Let's take a closer look at those fears and see what they're made of, shall we?

The irrational belief that develops from these two fears is: "I cannot risk facing any danger and must therefore flee from or avoid any situation where I perceive a threat". The moment you unexpectedly find yourself in such a situation, or begin to anticipate one, the fears make themselves known and anxiety rears its ugly head.

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Can developing new abilities help me?

While the first fear may be born from insecurity, the second originates in a feeling of inadequacy. If we surmise that insecurity is a result of feelings of inadequacy (inability, incompetence, etc.), then by dealing with the inadequacy, we can conclude that the insecurity will dissipate on its own.

This is how most people try to deal with their anxiety. Many organizations, therapy centers and online therapy sites also unfortunately base their intervention strategies on this premise. They believe that by adding to a repertoire of abilities, you will feel more secure and thus less anxious in threatening situations. I say this is unfortunate because simply developing additional abilities is doomed to fail in the long run. Why? Let's take a look.

Think back to when you were in school. How did you feel when exam time came around? Pretty nervous, huh? A bit anxious, maybe? I know I felt that way. Now, how did you feel when you finally saw your passing grade? Whew! Relief at last! I'll bet you felt confident and secure in your newly developed ability too, right? So, it would appear that developing new abilities does make you feel more secure. Let's put that to the test.

How did you feel when you applied for your first real job knowing that you would then have to prove that you were able to competently exercise the abilities you had learned in school? Yikes! If anxiety came with a Richter scale, it would have probably scored at least a hefty 6 or 7. But, didn't you feel confident and secure with your passing grade? What happened to that sense of security?

The abilities you had developed were not yet pragmatic ones. They had been developed in a wholly artificial setting - school - while you were secure in the knowledge that help was readily available should you need it. Those abilities had not yet been integrated into concrete, practical experience. Once you found yourself in a situation where you had to exercise those abilities independently, well...

As a strategy to deal with anxiety, simply learning new abilities is inefficient and it can actually backfire. Imagine being in a situation where exercising one of those new abilities is appropriate. You use it and nothing much comes of it. Will you still be just as confident of the other ones you learned in the same context? Probably not. After that pragmatic experience, anticipating another situation would likely drive your anxiety right off the scale.

So, although you may have found yourself infused with fresh hope after passing your exams with flying colors, you had absolutely nothing concrete upon which to base any degree of confidence. Insecurity. It was still there. It's the same with any ability learned in a context of learning.

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What's missing then?

Let's take a closer look at the statement made above. "If insecurity is a result of feelings of inadequacy, then by dealing with the inadequacy, the insecurity will dissipate on its own." Although the logic in that statement is sound, its conclusion is based on a false premise – or rather an incomplete one. Within the context of anxiety, it does not take into account the perception of danger or of a threat.

The perception of danger is an innate survival mechanism. It's perfectly natural to perceive danger. Don't ignore it; it's why you're still alive. However, that perception can become quite problematic when it is influenced by a fear of the unknown, of the unquantifiable or of the uncontrollable, etc.

Fear of the unknown can be debilitating. It can handicap your ability to analyze situations, evaluate possible outcomes and prevent you from taking action. Or it can heighten your tendency to over-analyze and, in an attempt to create an illusion of control, to develop innumerable imaginary scenarios. Because you feel insecure, these scenarios are usually very negative. Once again, this prevents you from taking action.

The perception of a threat, on the other hand, can be influenced by either a dominating fear of the unknown, or exactly the opposite: fear of anticipated consequences. (There are those scenarios again!)

Anxiety resulting from the fear of anticipated consequences - a readily identifiable threat - is due to the projection, or extrapolation, of past experiences into the present situation. In other words, we draw a conclusion based on the presumption that what happened before is going to happen again... no matter what. ("Oh, no... "X" is going to happen. I can't face that!")

Anxiety resulting from a fear of the unknown is the result of a learned or conditioned association with previously threatening situations or stimuli and subsequent discomfort. This association is often of a subconscious nature.

A common example of this type of anxiety is the insecurity that can be provoked or triggered by involuntary recall of a previously life-threatening situation. For example, by the sound of a passing helicopter or jet in those traumatized by their experience of war (post-traumatic stress disorder).

It is that second type that can be the most difficult to deal with because the threat remains unidentified and cannot be linked to any specific experience. The inability to identify a threat gives rise to a deeply unsettling feeling of insecurity.

This often develops into generalized anxiety because we continuously, and again subconsciously, try to identify what it is exactly that we find threatening. Thus, an enduring fear takes hold as every situation in which we find ourselves presents undertones of unidentified threat.

Developing abilities to face danger will therefore not, in and of itself, help reduce your wariness of danger nor make you feel more secure when threatened. There are just too many different fears doing their work inside you.

As it is precisely these fears that make up anxiety, simply developing new abilities cannot help you deal with it. Think about it for a moment. In order to render these abilities pragmatic (in other words, to add them to your inner reference catalog of past experience), you would have to intentionally place yourself in precisely the threatening situation that your anxiety is telling you to avoid at all costs! It doesn't work.

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So, what can I do?

We will begin by evaluating the two elements that make up the first fear: your perception of danger and of the threat. Then, through a controlled series of questions, we'll dispute that perception.

You guessed right: we're going to do exactly the opposite of the statement above. Rather than dealing with feelings of inadequacy (lack of pragmatic experience) in order to feel more secure, we're going straight to the source: your insecurity. Think of it this way: would you intentionally crash your car to test the airbags and make yourself feel safer? Don't think so. Same deal here.

As we progress with the work we are about to undertake below (I say "we" because we are doing this together), the irrational belief noted above will be progressively replaced by "I am able to face certain dangers and can risk finding myself in certain threatening situations".

Note that the strategy below can be used to more effectively manage both situational and generalized anxiety. Here is a simplified definition of each:

• Situational: fear of anticipated consequences of a proposed plan of action in a known set of circumstances.
• Generalized: excessive, uncontrollable and often irrational worry about everyday things, which is disproportionate to the actual source of worry.

Note also that this strategy is not to be considered a "cure". As anxiety can be a symptom of a much deeper angst, it may require a fuller, more global program of help to get to the roots and effect change. See Schema Therapy for such a program.

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Dealing With Anxiety

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