Many people come to my office wanting help for their anxiety. Much of the time, their anxiety can be clearly connected to events going on in their lives. I help them learn to stay in the present moment, to stop their habit of imagining worst-case scenarios and to breathe and ground their energy. They learn new skills to calm themselves and they go on with life.

Sometimes, though, there is no clear situation or event connected to the anxiety. They report that they just feel anxious most of the time, for no apparent reason. They get temporary relief from changing their thinking and doing their breathing and grounding exercises, but they quickly feel anxious again.

When this happens, we have to dig a little deeper. I explain that, many times, people learn to hold in disturbing emotions such as sadness, anger, or hurt. They’ve most likely been holding them in since childhood. They learned as children that expressing sadness, anger, and/or hurt resulted in being  chastised, punished, ignored, or ridiculed, so they learned to tense their bodies and hold their breath to  keep the emotions from coming out. Sometimes they have done this for so long that they are not even aware that these feelings exist for them anymore. But they are there, deeply held in the body and mind. They have learned to unconsciously stay on guard against expressing these feelings. So as adults, when any of these repressed feelings start to come to the surface, an internal alarm goes off that “dangerous emotions are about to erupt.” Thus, they feel anxious. Sometimes, even current sad, angering, or hurtful situations can set off the alarm.

Does this description resonate with you? If so, don’t despair because there is hope. It takes some effort and courage, but you can learn to change your automatic anxious response. You’ll have to learn to surrender. You will learn to notice which emotions are beginning to emerge just before the anxiety starts. Then you’ll learn to allow them, and to (bravely) breathe through them until they’ve been fully expressed. Our bodies were made to experience a wide range of important emotions; when you surrender to the emotional experience, the “alarm” becomes obsolete.

In therapy you will learn a process by which it is possible to train yourself to allow emotional experience. Basically, it involves learning to do focused abdominal breathing, relaxation, paying attention to bodily sensations, recognizing the sensations as emerging emotions, and allowing the emotions to happen. It takes dedication and practice, so the more you practice, the better you’ll get at it. Anxiety doesn't have to be debilitating!!!