Monthly Archives: December 2019

“Anxiety is a body event.”

Part of an occasional series about phrases that this therapist finds himself repeating, often.

Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash

As a clinician in private practice, one of the phrases that I hear myself saying over and over, often in this way is this: “Remember, anxiety is a body event.”

So what does this mean?

First, this statement, “anxiety is a body event”, reminds us that when we feel anxiety, it is made up of physical sensations. While you may not have all of the symptoms, people often describe an increased heart rate, sweating, tingling fingers, chest tightening, chest pain, nausea or pain in their stomach, feeling hot, and changes in breathing that usually show up like quick, short breaths.

These symptoms are often followed along by a deep sense of fear, of feeling closed in and needing to get out. You may feel as if you are about to die. This can also show up like an overwhelming irritability that may lead you to lash out at people around you. Anxiety is about “fight or flight”, so some of us are likely to want to run . . . and some of us get ready for a fight.

And all of this is NORMAL and NATURAL; we need this system! The problem is that this system has been triggered by some internal or external event that has bypassed your “thinking” brain and is talking directly to your body first. This reaction is about survival, and correct or not, your lower brain has decided to pull the switch to help you live through whatever is happening.

Emphasizing the body is important because that is where we need to first target our interventions.

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Depending on who the client is, sometimes we will take crayons or a pen and draw our nervous system together, linking our anxious brain with our lungs, our heart, our muscles, making a stop by the adrenal glands sitting on top of the kidneys, all the way down to our feet, since running is something that anxiety will often lead us to want to do.

So with that understanding of how anxiety, something that starts in our brain, affects our body, that leads me to the perhaps more important place.

Second, this statement, “anxiety is a body event”, reminds us that we need to talk to our body first before we talk to our “thinking” brain.

It is a common mistake. I see lots of parents who try to reason with their child that “No, there is a not a monster under the bed.” The child remains scared, so the parent thinks that saying this LOUDER and THREATENING some punishment will surely make this situation go away. At that point, the child has probably gone into “freeze” mode due to the anxiety getting worse, not better.

The quiet of “freeze” mode may look like calm, but actually this child is more scared, more worried about what you as the “big scary adult” are going to do next.

And even though I have used the example of child and adult, you can easily see where this happens between two adults, especially adults in a relationship. I will often have the spouse come in with a patient to learn about what anxiety is so that they can respond in a way that helps the situation be better, not worse.

This is why interventions with anxiety are often activities like focusing on the breath in your belly, taking a warm bath or shower, taking a walk, petting the dog, getting or receiving a hug.

In order to calm a “body” event, you have to talk to the body.

The body only understands soothing and calming, not communication filled with words like “But that isn’t real!” or “For the last time, you are not about to die!” Even though anxiety sometimes starts in the thoughts, most often the future-oriented, “what if” variety, it proceeds to the physical very quickly. The physical body is where the intervention must first be targeted.

So with all that “in mind”, remember that anxiety is a body event. We feel it physically, but that also means that the key to working through it in therapy and at home is physical too.

Originally published on Medium.com, Jason B. Hobbs LCSW, M.Div on May 17, 2018.

If you are interested in the subject of anxiety, my wife and I have a book forthcoming from Kregel Publications. Go here to follow the progress. Release date is expected to be Fall 2020.

“Our hurts return at different ages and stages.”

Part of an occasional series about phrases that this therapist finds himself repeating, often.

Photo by Brent De Ranter on Unsplash

As a clinician in private practice, a phrase that I hear myself repeating often is “Our hurts return at different ages and stages”. This phrase generally arises in working with the parents of a child or maybe even a young adult when some early difficult event in their life seems to have returned.

We feel like we have circled all the way around to the exact same spot again.

You may feel defeated or may say, “But I thought we had beat this” or “I thought I was done with talking about this.”

But here we are … sometimes dealing with the same problematic behavior. Sometimes we are treading through the trauma again, although there is something different this time around.

We feel like we are in the same place, yet it is different, all at the same time.

Our hurts do change us. Much in the same way that a physical injury means that we have to adjust; we find a new way of moving through the world and often a change in how we view the world. The world won’t be the same again. And there is a way that this change unfolds again and again, over the lifespan.

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Children go through developmental stages, with discrete tasks to work through.

Depending on when the trauma happened, there may be a great deal of self-blame associated with it. Children often see themselves as the center of the universe, therefore they often see themselves as having a major role in an event, even if the trauma was certainly not caused by them.

For instance, if the trauma is the loss of a parent, a child may have worked through the difficulty at the earlier age. But when moving into adolescence, the absence of that parent means something different to them. Even in their physical self, that child may look for their missing parent in their facial features or in the way that their body is maturing. “You look just like your mother when you …” is common for children to hear.

In addition, there is the realization that this missing parent will never watch them play soccer. The missing parent will not have a chance to criticize who they are dating. The child will not hear, “I’m proud of you” from the parent who is no longer present.

The original absence of the parent was a trauma, but the absence continues as the child moves into a new stage of their lives.

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Young adults hit milestones in their lives that remind them of the original trauma.

As the child turns into an adult, there are new questions about identity and finding one’s place in the world.

For the young adult who has experienced difficult events in their life, identity questions lead them to look to how their identity has changed with respect to what has happened to them, and specifically the trauma.

Who am I now? How do I tell my story?

Another aspect of identity is about relationships. Relationship questions arise because learning to be intimate with someone (whether emotionally or sexually) may bring up some of the violations that occurred with the original trauma.

So even though they may have worked through an aspect of the trauma at the age it occurred, we should be aware that it may come around again … in a different way perhaps … in a different guise.

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But … we didn’t circle around to the exact same place; it is more like a spiral.

Yes, we may finish with the trauma at that stage, but it does not mean that we don’t find it waiting for us at the next stage.

This is not necessarily a pessimistic stance. Because the spiral shape of change represents growth and development, not stasis.

Circling around and around again would be frustrating for you as a person, but also for parents who are raising children affected by trauma.

Being realistic about the nature of trauma means moving into a recurrence of symptoms with curiosity, seeing this as an opportunity for growth.

In a way, it should not be a surprise that you (or your child) encounter a different aspect of the trauma as you move into different developmental stages. But if it does feel like a shock or surprise, then simply step back, take a deep breath, and think about what you might need in that moment.

  • What worked before to help you through may work again.
  • The lessons you learned then may need to be adapted to a new age and stage.
  • And this new older you has the opportunity to see the hurt in a different and potentially healing way.

So when you find that you are working through the hurt again, recognize that this may be another “age or stage”. There may be new meaning and potential for healing here too … if we are willing to walk through it.

Originally published on Medium.com.