Anxiety chooses the worst times to torment us and, because it is in our own brain, it torments us for what matters most to us at every stage of our lives. It is important to recognize that the content of worry, panic or OCD changes as our lives change. I think about some of my recent clients who are in very different stages of life:
- A 40-year-old man whose father recently retired and now, every time his son throws away unnecessary papers, his OCD tells him that he is throwing away his parents’ retirement money and that they will be bankrupt.
- A second-year medical student who recently earned an excellent score on the first standardized test of her medical career and who came to me with a large printed stack of emails she had sent while she was treasurer of her sorority in college. She was worried that she had done something wrong and that the IRS would put her in jail and her future would be ruined.
- A high school freshman who worries so much about every job, every assignment, and every grade that she has lost weight and has no friends because she studies all the time, worried about not being able to get into college. The first semester he earned a perfect 4.0 GPA.
All of these clients felt compelled to seek therapy to talk about the pressing problem they were facing, and each topic was new to the client. A year ago, none of those people could have had those pressing concerns the same way: This 40-year-old’s father was still working and making a lot of money; The medical student was a first year and was not focused on the standardized test or the opportunities that a high ranking would mean for her; The freshman was still in high school, where she didn’t care much about academics and had many friends.
To address these issues, I had to help each of them understand that this was just the latest content that anxiety had found to plague them. It wasn’t about the content itself, but how each responded to the content: worrying, avoiding, checking, overstudying, they had given anxiety more and more power. To improve, it was crucial to adopt a new attitude, to be able to step back and say, “It’s just anxiety (or OCD).”
Of course, we still had a lot of work to do, with real and imagined exposures and mindfulness, among other things, but recognizing that the content is not the problem (anxiety and the response to anxiety are the problem) is the first step. to get it. well, any content that anxiety has in store for us at different stages of life.
This blog was originally published on Anxiety Training for Mental Health Professionals.
