Anxiety and relationships
Anxiety, at its worst, can be debilitating. It can consume an individual by ransacking one’s physical wellbeing, take over the mind to the point that you are not sure where your thoughts are at and control your behaviours so that your world becomes so small you can no longer enjoy or experience ‘normality’.
You can lose sense of reality, feel like you are losing your health or believe that people experience you in a way that is so distressing you no longer socialise or put yourself into the world. You may develop rituals, rely on others to regulate you and you become angry if they can’t.
How our statutory mental health system generally treats anxiety is with cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) and/or medication. Finding a way to treat the symptoms which the individual experiences, in the hope that they will reduce, giving the person relief and more sense of control.
In my many years of working with people, I have observed something quite interesting in relation to being anxious. I have learnt that an individual will carry the symptoms of anxiety, as listed above, but will not often understand the root cause of their suffering is often located within their relationships.
This can be overtly obvious, such as highly stressful or abusive relationships where repeatedly, the other person is often highly anxious (hence the need for control or relying on you to regulate them, then getting abusive if you can’t) or in a more subtle way, such as dependency, enmeshment or micromanaged relationships, where you feel responsible for the others wellbeing and feel subsequent guilt if you don’t meet their needs. All this is anxiety.
Included in this is historic relationships, so if you have had (or have) an anxious parent or grandparent, you are more likely to feel anxious in your attachments in future relationships. You may even notice that your partner or friendships are someway similar to those early relationships. We tend to gravitate to connections that are familiar to us. Even if they are unhealthy.
Firstly, awareness is key, above everything else, psychoeducation and learning about your patterns of relating; why you do what you do, is the first thing to hold in mind. I use genograms to help you get the full picture, and knowledge really is power when understanding your role in your family (and work) systems.
Anxiousness is a physical and emotional response which happens when we are stressed by a situation. We are not ill or disordered in this response, our body is doing exactly what it was designed to do to keep itself safe or get some relief, even if it is only for a few seconds. We often deploy the same familiar coping strategies, which once upon a time, helped. Unfortunately we can (and most do) keep applying them without much success.
We need to go beyond offering surface-based treatments (i.e. medication, although this can be helpful for some in the short term) and move towards understanding and experiencing, at a deeper level what actually is going on, that is who or what we are responding too.
When we are ready to let go of our usual safety behaviours, observe our relationships and the patterns we repeat, we enter a vulnerable, but potentially empowering position. This is where recovery is. It is when the usual ‘go tos’ no longer work that people turn to counselling to facilitate this growth.