Anxiety Therapy in British Columbia
A lot of the folks I work with who describe anxiety say things to me like “I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel this way.” I used to say that too. I thought anxiety was just my normal state of being.
Imagine there was something you could do that would actually change your experience of yourself, your emotions, and allow you to move through life in a less anxious way. Imagine this was something available to you no matter where you lived, no matter how bad your anxiety is, or how long you’ve felt it.
The truth is with AEDP therapy, even therapy done online, research participants have noticed clinically significant improvements in their mental health, including in their experience of anxiety, and these improvements last over a year after the therapy is finished. (Realistically, probably much longer, we only track results for 6 and 12 months following therapy completion at this point.)
Have I got you curious? Or are you immediately thinking ‘well that’s great for other people but it wouldn’t work for me’ or ‘I’ve been in therapy for years and I am still anxious so I don’t see how that could be true’. If you’re skeptical, that is ok. My hope is that by the end of this post, you’ll be curious enough to learn more and consider the idea that this might help you too. What do you have to lose?
Understanding Anxiety
What is anxiety? The Merriem-Webster dictionary defines anxiety as apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness, usually over an impending or anticipated ill. This is important to note…anxiety is not about what is happening right now, in the moment, but what might happen. If what you’re feeling uneasy about is actually what you’re currently experiencing, then that would be categorized as fear.
Often, anxiety is associated with catastrophic thinking, worry, and many hypotheticals. If you really think about it, from an evolutionary perspective, anxiety makes sense. We are the humans whose ancestors survived, and to do so, many dangers needed to be overcome. Of course our brain is wired to be sensitive to threats. When this becomes a problem, is when the threats never materialize. Think of all the energy you have spent in your life worrying or feeling anxious about things that never happened, and what you could have done with that energy instead.
It would be bad enough if anxiety just lived in our mind, but as we know, our felt experiences actually live in our body. This means anxiety comes with many physical symptoms including: muscle tension, restlessness, difficulty concentrating, sleep disturbance, cold sweats, nausea, and increased heart rate. Anxiety can even lead to panic attacks, which when first experienced, can be scary enough to cause a trip to the emergency room, as many folks believe them to be a heart attack.
Anxiety seems easy enough to overcome right? If the hypothetical situation isn’t actually happening then just stop worrying about it. Unfortunately, we all know it’s not that simple. When we are feeling anxious, it’s almost like our mind has its own agenda and it can feel impossible to figure out how to stop worrying or feeling that familiar tension in the pit of our stomach.
We live in a world that moves at a speed that is much faster than the one our ancestors lived in. Not only that, but we are subjected to vast amounts of content, digital information, and stimulation. In the span of a few decades, how we live, and the common tools of life have changed dramatically. It is no wonder that many of us feel anxious. The slow process of biological evolution has not had a chance to catch up to the environment we find ourselves in.
Anxiety can feel debilitating and impact every aspect of our lives, including work, relationships, and ability to care for ourselves and others. Often, when we feel out of control, or when aspects of life feel out of control, anxiety can fixate on a specific topic, facilitating the belief that if only that feels certain, everything else will fall into place. For this reason, anxiety can show up as a phobia. It can also attach itself to our feelings and beliefs around social relationships, causing us to become isolated. You may also be feeling a general current of tension that doesn’t feel connected to anything specific, in other words, a generalized anxiety. Or, you may be having panic attacks, which can be particularly challenging, because not only are the panic attacks themselves scary and difficult to endure, but we can develop anxiety about the idea of having a panic attack.
Whether the anxiety you’re experiencing feels mild, or severe, or how it’s impacting your life, please know how you feel can change.
How Counselling Can Help You Manage Anxiety
If you haven’t heard about AEDP therapy before, you can learn more about it here. In AEDP, we believe that one of the main reasons anxiety develops is as a way to avoid feeling emotions that have previously been experienced as unbearable. What am I actually talking about here?
Imagine you are a little kid who is feeling afraid of flying, and your family is taking their first holiday on an airplane. Imagine your parents are stressed trying to get everyone to the airport on time, and the environment is feeling chaotic. No one is paying attention to how you’re feeling, or spending time to explain to you what to expect, helping you regulate and process your feelings. It is easy to imagine in this situation that your fear would get bigger, maybe you’re feeling nauseous, and tense, or you start to feel sick. You might even cry, or have trouble breathing. Now picture the adults around you getting frustrated with you. Telling you to knock it off and behave yourself, or worse, mocking your fear. They might say you should be ashamed of yourself for being afraid, or that any kid would be grateful to be in your shoes and get to experience a vacation, making you feel like there was something wrong with you for being afraid. You get called a baby for being scared and for the rest of your life this story gets told as a family joke, with everyone remembering your fear and laughing about it.
It is easy to see how an experience like this would lead someone not only to have a phobia of flying or travel, but also develop anxiety about feeling fear, because in this experience their fear was experienced entirely alone and made unbearable. Not only that, these kinds of experiences in childhood can cause us to feel a deep sense of shame, or develop the belief that there is something wrong with how we felt or even worse, wrong with us. Anxiety can form around the sense of trying to prevent others from seeing or noticing our ‘wrongness’, so they continue to tolerate us.
In AEDP, we define the root of psychopathology (mental health symptoms) as the experience of unwanted aloneness in the face of unwilled or unbearable emotion. You can imagine how in a different family context, where the adults were patient, took time to help their young child regulate, gave them some choices to feel some sense of control in their environment, and helped them access some courage or bravery, the outcome would have been very different. Even in the case of parents who were initially stressed but later realized their lack of attention had caused their child distress and meaningfully apologized, validating the fear that had been felt and discussing how to do better next time, the pathway to future anxiety could have been minimized.
In AEDP therapy, we go back to these experiences, and process the original fear in a different way. We can also work through the resulting shame that may cause feelings of inadequacy, or result in self-criticism. This allows your brain to develop the pathways it needs that were previously not accessible. As an adult, we can go back to these moments, and provide a correction, giving your inner child the care that was not available at the time, to resolve the emotions that have gotten stuck, and as a result, relieving the associated anxiety.
While this sounds deceptively simple, it is not. It requires much care, compassion, and enough safety, to genuinely take in a new experience in a way that leaves our brain able to access those pathways again outside of therapy in the real world. It requires another person to validate what we went through, and role model the care that was missing so that we can learn how to be more compassionate and empathetic with ourselves. Above all, we need to be with someone who is not afraid of our emotions, to be able to learn for ourselves that the feelings that felt unbearable in childhood have a different quality to them when we are adults, and that in fact we do now have the skills and capacity we need to help ourselves regulate. In a way, the therapy space is a petri dish for life, allowing us a chance to experiment with what is possible in the ways we relate to others, changing our internal working model for the better.
We know that for the brain to wire in a new pathway, we need to have a new experience. Something different has to happen, and be integrated to be available to us out in the world. This is why traditional talk therapy and medication alone cannot rid us of anxiety. Talking about anxiety can at times serve to deepen the existing neural networks and reinforce the pathways that are already present, and medication just minimizes or numbs us to the symptoms without actually changing or resolving what is causing them.
Thankfully, experiential therapy, like AEDP, works just as well online as in person. No matter where in the world you live, you can get support. There is hope. If you’re curious about learning more before investing in therapy, I’d highly recommend the book “It’s Not Always Depression”, by Hillary Hendel, which discussed in detail how anxiety and depression are caused by unprocessed emotions, and gives detailed examples of how these can be processed in therapy using AEDP.
What to Expect in a Counselling Session for Anxiety
What do we actually do while counselling to deal with anxiety? It is important to know that there is no way I know of to do this work that avoids feeling uncomfortable. Doing something new with our emotions and experience of anxiety can often feel weird, unfamiliar, and maybe even scary. When our emotions haven’t been validated in the past, trusting someone new to hold space for them can feel very vulnerable. To get somewhere new with our experience of anxiety, we have to do something different from what we have been doing in the past, and it will not feel enjoyable at first. Please know that nothing that feels bad is ever the end, and once unprocessed emotions do get to see the light of day and are worked through, even though there is pain, folks report feeling good, right or a sense of truth about their experience.
Starting therapy can be something that causes anxiety in itself. In AEDP, we support healing from the get-go, so often the first session explores what it’s like to be in a space where you are seeking help, sharing personal details about yourself with someone new, and how that experience feels in your body. An AEDP therapist will ask you questions like: What are you noticing now? What just happened? How is it to feel this? How is it to do this with me?. We stay focused on the here and now and what is emerging in the moment to create and wire in a new neural pathway focusing on having a different experience of emotions while relating to another person. We also spend time integrating what the experience was like to emphasize what has shifted, and increase your ability to access the new pathways you’ve worked so hard to build while outside of therapy.
Thankfully, due to modern technology, all of these AEDP techniques work just as well online as they do in person. You’ll want to make sure your camera is working and you are in a well lit space so your therapist can see you, and also that you have privacy and can’t be overheard. Even a session in your car can work well if you live in a shared space. If you have concerns or questions, ask your therapist about them during your consultation call. Therapy is expensive and an investment, so you deserve to be set up in a way that best supports change.
Our Expertise in Supporting Individuals with Anxiety
At the Commons Wellness Collective, we are trained to support you in developing a new way of relating to your experience of anxiety. In addition, we have all felt what it’s like to sit in your seat. As part of our AEDP training, we practice experiencing therapy with each other to understand what it feels like to go through these sessions.
Many of us also work with our own AEDP therapists, to shift our experiences of anxiety. I can share firsthand that I was someone who experienced severe anxiety in my twenties, including panic attacks, and saw many therapists for support, but it wasn’t until I started working with my current AEDP therapist that I saw real shifts. Now, even when navigating life stress, I do not feel anxious in the same way.
We will work with you to slowly increase your capacity to be with your emotions as they surface, be able to have care and compassion for yourself, take in the care we have for you, and re-process the experiences from the past that have resulted in trauma. Because of how relational AEDP is, you have control over the pace we work at, and we will let your nervous system be the guide to make sure that we stay in your window of tolerance by constantly checking in on what you’re experiencing in the moment. Every session finishes with a review of what the session felt like that day, so there is also a chance to share feedback and thoughts about your experience. For real and lasting change to occur, you have to be fully on board, and you are the expert on your own experience. We are there to guide and support you, to look for and facilitate something new, so your brain doesn’t just go down the existing pathways by default.
Start Your Path Towards Calm and Control
It is possible to learn a new way of experiencing emotions, and change your relationship with anxiety, reducing the symptoms that are getting in the way of you experiencing the fullest life you can. We aren’t just hoping to reduce the distress you feel, but also improve your ability to flourish, increasing your self esteem, self confidence, and experience of joy.
We would love to answer your questions and talk with you about how AEDP might support you on your mental health journey. Please reach out!