I suspect most people dealing with anxiety would report some version of the experience that their anxiety is never gone, but it can subside as we feel safer and safer. The opportunity, then, is to have experiences where your anxious self comes to see and understand that what it feared and expected didn’t actually happen: when we sit down at the cafeteria table, our friends are actually glad to see us; that people at a party are actually not talking about something that’s wrong with me, but about something totally different.
When we’re working with parenting our anxious selves, I think that it is helpful, and maybe important, that we consciously, intentionally and literally think of it as taking them along with us into situations where anxieties get triggered. It’s a way of addressing our fears, but not trying to push our way through them. It’s more that we try to guide ourselves through the experience of safety when we thought it would be something unpleasant or hurtful. A child who’s afraid of a busy street won’t feel safe if we talk to it; it has to have its hand held and cross the street to have the experience of safety.
One of the techniques that I’ve seen work for some is this. When anxieties come up:
- First listen to them, accept them for the truths or concerns they are expressing, reassure them, and then understand that we have to see the situation in present time, and not be limited to the way things look through the ‘lens’ that anxiety sees things.
- Using that, try to see the situation through your ‘parent self’ eyes, and not only through your ‘anxious self’ eyes. I think in terms of pictures, and what I mean here is that you can work on figuratively pushing how your anxious self sees the situation off just a little bit to the side, so you can see the situation in present time through your ‘parent self’ eyes. This doesn’t mean you are invalidating the way your anxious self sees things; it simply means that you are acknowledging how they see it, but also seeing things in present time so you can make choices that give your anxious self the experience of being understood, protected and safe. It’s like a parent seeing the busy intersection for what it is, but also understanding what the child needs to cross it and feel safe and protected.
- And the third step I’ve seen work is that, once you have this experience of seeing the triggering situation with your parent eyes and your anxious eyes, that you talk to yourself and tell yourself that things turned out well. Talking to yourself may sound strange, but I do mean actually talking to yourself so your body hears your own words. It’s my observation and view that anxiety is such a physical phenomenon as well as emotional and psychological, that it helps to reassure ourself that we are okay. If a parent holds a child’s hand and crosses a busy street and doesn’t then turn to the child and point out that they are safe, and ‘that’s the way we make sure we’re safe,’ the parent leaves it up to the child to draw its own conclusions, and it may not be what the parent actually wanted.
What’s left? Rinse & repeat!