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Alan Gordon LCSW said: ↑

Ferndale, attending to your anxiety is benign. Ignoring the anxiety doesn't mean there's less of it, you're just distracting yourself from the anxiety that is there.

Eugene, good question! Like anxiety, pain is a danger signal. You could even think of psychogenic pain as a physical manifestation of anxiety.

Attending to pain is fine, the goal is to attend to these sensations free of fear. It can be hard for some people to attend to their pain without fear, because it's scared them for so long. But if you're able to, that is just as effective. Later on in the program, I'm going be going over a technique to help you learn to attend the sensations of pain free of fear.

Good question. Without getting into the physiology of it, most people are constantly distracting themselves from their anxiety; running from it. This avoidance just further perpetuates the fear. Imagine if you had social anxiety. Constantly avoiding social situations just serves to reinforce the fear. Leaning into these situations in a safe, mindful way, can help teach your brain that they are in fact safe.
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Thanks Alan, I dont think I explained my point right.

I completely believe that the way to deal with anxiety is to sit with it and accept it as part of me.

If I accept the anxiety, then it wouldn't need to serve as a distraction, and wouldn't need to persist, but even if it did, I would have accepted it, so no matter.

Iv done this with pain and tinnitus with great success. But to do this, I had to view each symptom as a completely harmless and beningn symptom of TMS.

Im struggling to do this with anxiety, due to the common belief that long term generalised anxiety damages health.

So how can I treat anxiety the same as my previous pain and tinnitus if I can't believe anxiety isn't harming me?

Thanks

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