What is your anxiety keeping silent about?
Let’s find out.
Self-sufficiency is gained through long practice of self-knowledge and self-reflection. The uncertainty that has now entered so many lives would have been hard to bear even in peacetime.
Anxiety signals that attention has shifted strongly into the future. Its language is unexplained sensations in the chest and stomach: a tension that is hard to give shape to and that swells from within.
Anxiety is always about the future. More precisely, about being unable to control your life in the long run.
In ordinary times anxiety pushed you to work yourself to exhaustion, buy on impulse, be jealous, “devour” tons of information online, strike up dubious acquaintances, and rescue the people around you by forcing good on them.
Now many have lost their usual ways of quenching anxiety and discharging it on the world around them. So moods and states to match can arise.
If you are still reading the news feverishly, regardless of the hour or of what the information means, try to stop.
What personal meaning do you want to find for yourself in the news?
Be honest: are you still waiting for the longed-for “it’s over, we can go back”?
Or perhaps you quench your anxiety by caring for others too much, never resting?
Maybe that is your calling. But more often, if you look behind the outer shell, you will find a tight knot of psychic energy that is very frightening. Something you would rather not notice, see or feel inside yourself.
A common way to calm anxiety is to project it onto those around you.
Children and loved ones usually bear the brunt.
If you feel tension in your relationships, tearfulness, heightened touchiness, an inexpressible pressure from within, then most likely this is your fear of uncertainty, which drives you to do anything at all so as not to see it inside yourself.
Self-sufficiency and the ability to regulate your states are a sign of a mature psyche, and this skill can be trained. That is what we will do on the “Practical Psychology” course, which starts in May 2022.
Since anxiety is a state that cannot be put into words, I suggest first giving it any shape at all.
Here is a short practice from EOT (the emotional-image method):
“What My Anxiety Keeps Silent About”.
Take a deep breath in and a long breath out, and breathe like this for a while until you come back to yourself. Picture your anxiety and describe it (or use the picture above)
- Where in your body is it now?
- What colour is it?
- What or whom does it remind you of?
Write down your answers and draw the image of your anxiety. Now you can see it.
Answer these questions in writing:
- If your anxiety could speak, what would it tell you?
- What are you most afraid of losing?
- Which future event frightens you most?
- What lies “behind” that event, and what consequences does it carry for you?
- What future is possible in that case?
Write a plan of 3-5 real actions you can take to bring it about.
Remember that you can feel anxious and act at the same time, overcoming your moods.
Enjoy the practice!
Anna Shyman, programme leader, trainer and teacher at the “Psyvision” centre.
We can now hold online meetings on Saturdays, where we will go through your questions, work with metaphorical cards and subpersonalities, and learn to bring your psychological state into balance.
To ask about taking part, please write to us using the messenger button at the bottom of the page, or fill in the form below to get a call back or sign up
