I don’t have any magic plans or strategies for living with anxiety, but I do have some ideas. What I’ve seen helpful for some isn’t necessarily easy or automatic. It can be a lot of work, and it can be frustrating if you feel like you’re not making progress, or losing ground in your efforts to work with it effectively.
But what I do think is the most helpful thing to do to start is to just stop and listen.
Listen to what you hear coming from inside yourself about a situation where anxiety comes up. I think of these messages as a kind of script, a string of thoughts, worries or concerns that we come up with and use in the face of a situation where anxiety gets triggered.
In my experience, these scripts are almost always designed to be a way of predicting a negative outcome of a situation (‘If I sit at that open spot in the cafeteria, they won’t want to talk with me;’ or ‘I want to go talk to that group at the party, but they keep glancing my way. They must think something’s wrong with me’) that’s directly connected to where we feel wounded; we anticipate and expect that the experience is going to confirm what we are most afraid is true about ourselves: that we are unlikeable and unlovable. That, to me, is where shame is the most powerful, most corrosive and most destructive. And what we fear is true about ourselves is actually rarely true. We came to those conclusions because we could come up with no better way to explain the experiences that hurt us.
Next, I think it’s important to practice acceptance.