Anxiety is not a feeling…

It is very common for people to say “I am feeling anxious.”

In fact, if you listen carefully, it’s a phrase you hear all the time. And that makes a lot of sense as anxiety is often believed to be something we feel.

But in 2016 when I was working on a talk for the Restoration Therapy Summit on anxiety and fear, my mentor, Dr. Terry Hargrave began to help me understand that anxiety is not a feeling. That rather, anxiety is a coping behavior. That is, anxiety is something that we do in response to a deeper, underlying feeling. In the language of Restoration Therapy, anxiety is triggered by a violation to our love and trust.

Love speaks to our identity, and that we are known, valued, wanted, unique, and belong. While trust speaks to our safety, and that there is openness, vulnerability, consistency and fairness in our experience of the world and relationships. When these are violated (and no one goes through life without varying forms of violations to these — both big and small) those deep, underlying feelings, can bring about an anxious response.

Therefore, anxiety is a symptom of something deeper.

Is this distinction important?

This distinction is very important, because if we don’t address the deeper, root feelings, we can spend all of our time just managing the symptom — anxiety.

When addressing anxiety it’s important to both bring relief to the pain of anxiety by learning important tools and practices to manage and reduce it. But at the same time we want to go below the surface and identify those deep underlying violations of love and trust — which produce many feelings that trigger anxiety. When we can do both of these things, we position ourselves in a good place to bring about healing to our anxiety.

When you think about your own anxiety, do you have a sense of what some of the deeper, underlying feelings are at the roots?