#061 - How fear can help with anxiety

I know the experience of anxiety deeply, and about the running from it as well. The body sensations, energetic experiences, hot racing thoughts, and the drive to fix it, or collapse in the face of it, are all familiar to me. I often ask folks to slow down when they say they are anxious so we can find out, together, what they are feeling somatically. Often it is a fast energy, with contracted points in the body, and if not handled gently can escalate to panic pretty fast. No wonder we, as a culture, want to do anything we can to not feel these particularly frightening sensations!

Anxiety, to me, seems to be closely related to the cognitive experience of these somatic sensations. It is feeling these hot and fast disturbing energies and wanting to find a solution to them by getting away from a situation, or going towards something that will help. This is often a mental process. I feel the disturbance and I jump up to my mind to find a solution. And as I said before this stuff is hard to be with so of course we will try to find a way out.

A middle of the road solution that can help, which is not solely a cognitive solution or a somatic solution, is to name the fear under the anxiety. It looks something like this: You’re going on a date with someone you kinda like and this strong anxiety arises within. It’s going fast, you’re going fast, and your trying to find a way to chill out so you’re not a mess when you meet up with your date. But you’re having a hard time calming down and you start thinking how this person will never like you because you’re such a mess, or broken, or weird, or fill in the blank with your favorite painful internal belief.  So instead of trying to fight the internal critic, just try saying “It’s ok to be scared,” or “Of course you’re scared,” or “Its ok to be frightened.”

What I have noticed is that the fear is very deep and relational, usually something around being abandoned or losing yourself. And that’s great, you have a working ego that wants to keep you safe! So instead of trying to get rid of these basic ego experiences of wanting safety and protection why not relate to them in ways that’s helpful? (Cuz, for real, you’re most likely always going to have an ego that wants to keep you safe).

From this place you won’t magically get rid of the energy in your body, but you may not be as freaked out by it. The nature of anxiety, to the ego, is a signal that something is wrong, and we gotta figure this out, now! But when we say something like “Of course you’re scared you’re going on a date with someone you like and you want to be loved and accepted and aren’t sure of what will happen” then a layer of shame gets lessened and you can deal with the very human experience of wanting something and being scared you won’t get it. 

Somatically this practice is also helpful because it often takes the center of your attention off your thoughts of finding a solution to a place deeper inside like the belly, chest, or throat where the fear is residing. When we can directly relate to the fear at this deep somatic and sensation level without making it wrong we have a real chance at releasing this energy and coming back into balance. Then from this place of balance we might think of something that will help the situation, or often it just takes care of itself and we find we can tolerate the energy of the situation with some excitement and curiosity. Give this practice a try a time or two and see what the results are, it may be a helpful key for you or another step on your journey to finding out what works, just remember to keep being curious!