Anxiety And The Unconscious

Unconscious material that must be known in order to serve the humans healing is triggered by the body in the form of anxiety. Of course, living in the midst of something unidentified can be distressing. We can't yet tame what we can't yet name. As far as panic and anxiety are concerned, all we know, based on our freaking out, or our symptomology is that something is calling to be seen/heard/felt/known. Until then, we remain in our anxiety; out of whack and out of alignment.

Perhaps you can open your mind and put a new frame around the picture you have of what you think anxiety is. You can think of it as a disorder, or an affliction, or an illness. Or, you can put a more adaptive frame around your anxiety picture: a warning system will work, or something like a flashing yellow light. What if anxiety were an indicator that unconscious material is surfacing in your mind, body and spirit. Unconscious material. That's all.

Psychotherapists help unconscoius material become conscious with power tools like EMDR and CBT. These methods and protocols help you to construct a story. Once you have a story, you have predictability and facility; your ego achieves an important sense of mastery which ultimately quells the anxiety.

Denial, avoidance, repression, addiction serve a great deal to alienate you from your healing process. These coping strategies don't give you access to consciously processing guzzillions of molecuels of emotion and cognition. They are all low level and unevolved defenses that over time function to weaken the structural integrity of your mind, body, and spirit and create what I call "blind vulnerability".

Anxiety is like a tug on your coattails or a finger tapping on your shoulder, asking you to pay closer attention to something you are missing. When life brings a seriously challenging even like a death in the family, or loss of income, or an accident of some sort, poorly evolved coping strategies leave us more vulnerable to more stress.

Low level defenses don't do much to fortify our ability to think in consciously healthy ways. But, diving into the symptoms, that will create a chance to control the painful emotions responses that inevitably come with stress. It helps to be prepared with more adaptive and higlhly developed strategies. It helps to get at the root cause of the anxiety and with the help of therapy, expand your consciousness and bring yourself back into balance.