A New Relationship With Your Anxiety
My approach to anxiety treatment is not about just managing and controlling your anxiety symptoms. Instead, the goal is to develop a new relationship with your anxiety. This involves the willingness to experience, even welcome your anxious thoughts and feelings without trying to avoid them or figuring them out. When you are able to be in the presence of your anxiety in an open, nonjudgmental way, you create enough emotional flexibility to choose your actions, not based on what the anxiety wants you to do, but what is more in line with what you value.
Of course, you may not have spent a lot of time thinking about and naming your values. Values are more than just general and broad ideas that we turn to from time-to-time for inspiration. Values invite us to consider questions like: What, really, do you want your life to be about? Deep inside, what is most important to you? If you weren’t struggling with your anxiety all the time, how would you be living your life?
And it’s not just considering these questions. It is spending some time with them. Let them bounce around inside you. Let them inspire thoughts, images of what you would be thinking, feeling, and doing in different areas of your life. Let’s say that one of your values is to be a person who gives yourself to helping the less fortunate. Don’t just write it down and say, “There’s one of my values.” Think about it deeply. Picture yourself going through your life; what would be some specific ways for you to express that value? What are some ways in the past, or right now, that give you a chance to express that value? How does it feel to think about this value and its place in your life? It ‘s like you are writing an essay on “A Person Who Helps the Less Fortunate.”
Since this is not something that you do that often, there are a variety of exercises that give you a chance to explore your values in an imaginative, and meaningful, way. These exercises give you a chance to do more than talk about your values; you can experience them.
Attending Your Own Funeral
One that is especially powerful involves attending your own funeral. When someone dies, there is usually a person at the funeral who will present a eulogy, talking about their legacy, what they stood for, and what they left behind. This exercise involves imagining that you have died, but by some miraculous circumstance you are able to witness your own funeral. Imagine where it would be and the people who would be there. A family member or a friend stands up to talk about your life: what you really cared about, the path that you walked. Picture them standing before those who are gathered. What would they say?
If you want to make this a really powerful exercise you can do it two different ways. First, what would your eulogy sound like if you continued to struggle with the anxiety and the way it was shaping your life. Second, what would your eulogy sound like if you made the decision to develop an different relationship with your anxiety and, as best you could, lived out what you valued in the different areas of your life: work, friendship, close relationships, citizen. Don’t just write down ideas. Write out the eulogy as if the person is actually speaking it to those gathered there. What is the look on the face of the one who is talking? What are the looks on the faces of those who are listening?
If you want to do this exercise, I recommend that you find a time and a place where you will not be interrupted, so that you can dive deep into it and experience it. Then, you can look back over what you have written and find words that capture values you have, or values that are missing but you want to express.
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