As an anxiety therapist, I’m all about teaching ground-floor, real-time skills to help patients see results fast. Part of the reason for that is that I cut my teeth in the industry in private-pay clinics, where people were shelling out $100+ a session and at least once a week. That meant that there was a fair amount of pressure on clinicians like myself to help get them real results quickly. I learned to thrive on giving patients very practical strategies to weaken the severity of their symptoms. My job wasn’t to analyze them or their childhoods; and it wasn’t to be an especially astute and empathic listener – at least not most of the time. Most anxious patients weren’t looking for someone to merely listen; and they didn’t want analysis unless that was going to grant them definitive relief. That was because they had tried so-called “talk therapy” as a first resort, and it didn’t work.
People want results. And, if they were going to have to pay out-of-pocket, they wanted to be able to see some results fairly immediately. That makes sense. So I learned to communicate a simple but profound idea to every patient from nearly the beginning of our work together.
“Your anxiety disorder isn’t happening to you; you’re happening to your anxiety disorder.”
This shift in thinking was helpful to patients for several reasons. First, it cleverly summarized almost sixty years of research-studies; and therefore, they knew it wasn’t just another opinion being hoisted at them. Second, it meant that the therapist wasn’t the most powerful person in the room. The patient was. If responses to anxious thoughts and feelings fuel symptoms (and that’s what many decades of studies now unquestionably show), then patients had the power to reduce the severity of their symptoms by resisting their responses. Anxious patients, therefore, weren’t there to get good therapy; they were there to do good therapy. And for most anxious patients, this was very empowering information.
All this was helpful both for patients and for me. You’ll recall, there was a fair amount of pressure on me to “get them better,” or at least get them results fast. This shift in thinking took the onus of responsibility off of me. Because where there is no power (to control patients’ responses), there is also no responsibility. But patients were all too happy to learn that they could get themselves better if they would only work to resist and stop behavioral responses. The crooked path that lie before them – and now before you – is the challenge not to manage your anxious thoughts or feelings, as difficult as such thing might be. It is to manage your responses to them. That’s the most direct path between where you are and where you want to be.