Anxiety and the alien planet
Common practice suggests that when assessing anxiety disorders, clinicians attempt to measure symptom severity, physical and cognitive manifestations, situational triggers, and functional impairment.
Are we worried, panicked, tense, sleepless, and irritable? Do we find our hearts racing, our bodies sweating, and our hands shaking? Do we have excessive fear of losing control and accompanied catastrophic thoughts?
The worst anxiety symptoms, which looks like loss, death, disenfranchisement or deprivation, is happening, or will happen soon.
Are symptoms tied to anything certain, anything occupational, a situation, or a task?
What effect do these anxiety symptoms have on our experiences? Our relationships? Our work? Our self-esteem?
This gives us a baseline. Something to work with by primarily telling us what it is doing to our lives.
“I’m feeling anxious” translates as a general feeling of tension inhibiting our well-being or functioning or productivity. Anything that’s not a feeling of calm or a familiar and accustomed sense of self means something is off. Often we call it generalized anxiety.
““Ill health one might be reconciled to, if the worst came to the worst, but what I cannot stomach is this regimen of rustication. I have the feeling I’ve dropped off the earth onto some alien planet.””
As a response to danger, real or perceived, we seek to resolve anxiety. We may attach it to something or someone so it becomes fear (the dark, spiders, rejection, failure) and therefore manageable/avoidable. Depending on the severity, it might feel as if we are dying when it is fairly certain we are not, like having a panic attack in Costco. Or we overestimate a threat while underestimating our abilities to cope. Our thoughts run away from us.
We interpret feedback from others as rejection of our person wholesale. Or it leads us to conclude, the world is dangerous, I can’t cope, and I am vulnerable. Vulnerable to what? Nothing short of annihilation. We get caught.
Something is off. Now what?
It's been suggested that anxiety comes from the inability to know the world one is in, to orient oneself to one’s own existence (Rollo May). One is confronted with an inexplicable weight, and a voice resounds, "If we are, then we could not be."
The goal is not that symptoms be extinguished but that the momentum anxiety provides be used in a meaningful way. To be propelled to engage, to know and re-know the world as experienced, to recognize the form anxiety is materializing, and to reform that experiential world by virtue of the interrelationship one has with that world.
Make it a tool.
That we’re feeling anxious does not mean this is the worst thing ever, or this always happens to me, or the misguided conclusions that they’re all going to laugh at me, I know I’m going to fail, or they think, “I’m stupid,” “I’m a loser,” or “I’m a fake.”
Faced with danger we seek safety, often by avoiding that which triggered anxiety. And when we can’t be wrong, when we don’t find out whether we can cope, our beliefs go disconfirmed, and we believe our thoughts.
Therapy for anxiety can enable us to overcome our alienation, our “I’ve dropped from the earth onto some alien planet” feeling, to assuage anxiety into directed and (more) manageable material, and to produce something entirely new.
To create. To change.
To make it a tool for learning, not only how to cope in less destructive ways, but also to learn what really matters, how we really feel, and what it's pointing to.
In that space, we may just find the information we need to guide us.
FIELD NOTES FROM GREENFIELD COUNSELLINGThis is where you’ll find reflections on the kinds of struggles that bring people to therapy — anxiety, burnout, grief, transitions, and the quiet disconnection that makes life feel less like your own.
