#061 - How fear can help with anxiety

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#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 feeing 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!

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#060 - Dating with Disorganized Attachment

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#060 - Dating with Disorganized Attachment

When I was in grad school a teacher asked the folks in the class to raise their hands to indicate which attachment style they most identified with. For most of us at the beginning of our grad school experience we were just starting to learn what “attachment style” meant. We “knew” that secure attachment was the best and anything else was bad. Beyond that, very few of us understood the nuances of attachment styles. So those who raised their hand as being securely attached were given the stink eye, because competitiveness in grad school extends to attachment styles too!

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#045 - Losing fear of ourselves

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#045 - Losing fear of ourselves

For many years I spent my time managing and controlling my outside circumstances (and, honestly, still work with this!). My belief I could find safety through control was a purely unconscious drive. All I knew was that the world felt overwhelming to me, and that I was restless and irritable. I would make the connection that when I was in a certain situation or with a particular person I felt anxious, so I tried my best to stay out of or control those situations or people. I rarely thought that my real problems were my internal reactions and unacknowledged fears, which drove me and dictated my life.

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