Five Myths About Anxiety Therapy in maryland: Myth #2 (Avoidance)
more anxiety myth-busting With Anxiety Therapy Maryland
Face all that? No thanks. I think I’ll wait it out. Find a better way with anxiety therapy in Maryland.
Myth #1 challenged assumptions about what anxiety might look like—go ahead and check that previous post if you haven’t seen it yet. Today, we’re going to bust a really big myth about what to do about anxiety (one that I see quite often as a Maryland therapist specializing in anxiety).
Myth 2: If it’s too much, then the best thing to do for myself is avoid this situation until i can handle it better.
This comes from an understandable impulse—we don’t want to suffer any more than we have to in life. If something feels way too overwhelming, maybe even panic-inducing, it seems to make sense to cut our losses, retreat, and wait until we are stronger to deal with it. Maybe next time will be better? Not usually. :-(
anxiety—avoidance—anxiety—avoidance—anxiety
Anxiety can increase avoidance. We know this thing is going to make us uncomfortable so we put it off. But avoidance doesn’t vanquish anxiety. It just puts it to the side for the moment, and then, unfortunately, creates more anxiety. Round and round the cycle goes. And time goes by, and our frustration grows, and sometimes consequences start piling up, creating even more stress and anxiety. Avoiding medical care because of anxiety makes it even harder when a lack of preventative care leads to more intense medical concerns that really have to be addressed. Avoiding situations or places that have prompted panic or anxiety in the past leads to it being more difficult to deal with these situations and places in the future.
But it calms me down
Yep. In the short term, it seems to work. We’re anxious, upset, or freaked out but then we decide, nope, not doing it, and we we feel better. For right now. But we’ve made the anxiety worse in the long run. Every time we repeat that cycle of anxiety-avoidance-short term relief, we strengthen that response, like creating a rut when we walk the same little path over and over and over until the grass is worn away and the dirt is exposed. Ruts are hard to pull out of—it becomes the automatic and easiest path. So the anxiety grows, and our avoidance grows, and our world grows smaller and smaller. Sometimes the world forces our hand a bit—we eventually have to face the thing we’ve been avoiding and we’re not sure we can do it. Sometimes we get tired of our world getting smaller and smaller and get determined to reclaim some ground by addressing the issue (and we still might not be sure we can do it).
Myth #2a—sink or swim
So if we’re not supposed to avoid, does this mean we should hold our breath, face our fears head on and just jump right into the deep end of our anxieties and hope it doesn’t undo us? Nah, we don’t need to do that. Hopefully we all know that it’s a truly terrible way to teach someone to swim so let’s not use that model. Much like learning to swim, there are skills you can learn, piece by piece, to help you practice and then do a new and difficult thing with support and then, eventually, on your own. You aren’t going to learn to swim by sitting in the house, avoiding swimming and the water. You’ve got to actually do the things—learn how to kick your legs, get your face in the water and learn to turn to the side to breathe, figure out how to float. In the best of scenarios, someone teaches you all that and gives you support, guidance and encouragement as you work on it all. Maybe you get a kick board to hold on to to help keep your body afloat while you learn how to make your legs power your body. Maybe you do exercises at the side of the pool, holding on to the edge while you put your face in the water to blow bubbles and then turn to the side to take a breath. Over time you put all the pieces together and, ta da!, you’re swimming. To manage anxiety, you’ve got to do the things—learn how to manage the discomfort that leads to avoidance, change the way your thought patterns work, practice calming your nervous system down in a stressful situation so you can think clearly and keep moving towards your goals. You learn and practice the skills, first with support, then on your own in a calm time, then, small step by small step, in the face of the things that are tough. Not avoiding, but not chucking anyone into the deep end to sink or swim. Really, it’s the way we learn most stuff—incrementally, with consistent effort and positive support. So, good news—no sink or swim; bad news—it’s fairly unglamorous effort over time, like a lot of life.
Anxiety Therapy maryland
Come back for future posts in this series about five myths about anxiety. In the meantime, feel free to reach out if you are interested in learning more about how I work with people looking for anxiety treatment in College Park or online in Maryland, or other services as a Maryland therapist.
