Can You Really Manage Your ANXIETY?

You know what they say…. talk is cheap. 

No where is this truer than in psychobabble-land.  How easy the words…”It’s just your FEELINGS making you crazy….Not the real world… Not the FACTS.”  …roll off the tongue.

Oh, how glibly this truth can be spoken… If  you are not the person who is whacked out at the time.  If you are the Whacked Out One (the WOO), glib is a bit harder to muster.  In fact, the non-WOO could be in danger since their kind pointing out that we are not managing ourselves well … could just be enough for us to turn our WOO-ness toward the pointer-outer.

There was a time when I wasn’t quite sure anyone could really get a handle on strong emotions.   Several incidents convinced me that each of us has within us the power to manage anxiety better.  The first was the ”hot tea incident.”

Remember, just how well you are able to manage your anxiety around anxious people (the degree of FUSION, see recent posts for definition) depends partly on the nature of your relationship to the other.  In this case, the “other” was one of the first couples I saw for marriage counseling.  (Word to the wise… don’t be any psychologist’s third case.)  The nature of my relationship with the couple was… they were important because, like I said, they were my third case and messing up would register as “tragic.”

I seated the couple in a small room in the university health center which had next to it a snack room.  Only a pair of louvered doors separated the snack room from the consultation room, so that clients could clearly hear anything that occurred in the snack room.  Once the couple was comfortable, I went into the snack room to complete making myself a cup of hot tea.  I’d left the teapot boiling on the stove earlier.  I placed a teabag in a mug, brought the teapot over to the sink, and proceded to pour the boiling water into my cup.  Except I’d misjudged how much water was in the teapot, plus my hands were a bit shaky.  The result was that the boiling water raged out of the pot, roiling over my hand holding the cup.  We are talking really, really hot water.     And here’s the thing.  I did not so much as make a peep.  (Okay, if you’d been in the same room and could read lips, you could have picked out a couple of unfriendly pharases.)  In an ordinary situation in which it was not incredibly important for me to make a good impression, I would have screamed.  I would have let loose a few barn-learned epithets.  But I was quiet.  Something flipped in me then.  A knowledge I hadn’t had before.  I’d proved to myself that if a person wanted to badly enough, he or she could change an “automatic” reaction.  During the session, I quietly watched welts grow on my hand.

I re-mention the hot tea incident now, because understanding and dealing with FUSION, is tough sledding.  So tough that most people don’t even give it much of a go.  It’s easier to give other people responsibility for our feelings.  It’s easier to try to get other people to change.  (Not that this works, it’s just easier to focus on changing others than it is to focus on changing self.)  It’s easier to reach for short term anxiety binders-substances, shopping, relationship dependence, worry…

The “hot tea” incident proved there is hope.  Even those of us regular WOOs can manage our emotions better.  Even two percent is a huge gain.