I’ve
just realized this is the last Wednesday of the month, the deadline date for
contributing articles to the Nimbin Good Times. To say I’m a bit stressed and
anxious, is an understatement. I’ve contributed to this fine paper every month
since March 2009 and really don’t want to miss an issue, if at all possible.
Anxiety is my topic, appropriately. What a better way of working than
working with material currently experienced.
At the moment I am participating in an online international conference
on the use of hypnosis in the treatment of anxiety. The tools we are adding to
our repertoire are extremely useful and are available to any client wishing to
work with me. So the matter of anxiety is close to me at other levels too.
Anxiety has a structure that is pretty well universal. There is an
internal voice that repeats messages of fear, danger, maybe lack of ability,
that manifest alongside the mental reiterations, a physical component of
tightness in the chest, perhaps some breathlessness, palpitations, dry mouth,
and the like. The internal voice is quite high pitched, strained, and rapid.
The message is not really rational and it repeats itself.
Anxiety distorts and intensifies normal interaction in the world and
with other people, so that our whole selves can feel overwhelmed with emotion
and a sense of being out of control. The art then is to change those
perceptions.
For me, at the moment, my stress at needing to get this article written
is being accompanied by fear of losing income. Ridiculous, isn’t it. These
articles are one of my sources of income, so I have to write them (or at least
so I think). At the forefront of my inner chatter are the words, “hurry, hurry,
hurry”. There is, though, another voice that is taking the micky out of this
and the “hurry, hurry, hurry” is acquiring a sort of sing song chant, “hari
rama, rama rama, hari krisna, hari krisna” – and thus the tension is lessened.
And here is a key to losing anxious feelings.
It is impossible to maintain anxiety when other processes are
introduced. There is a technique where the therapist suggests the client writes down the words of
stress in very small script. Then the client reads what she/he has written in a
normal voice, and then re-reads the script in a very slow, bored voice. Such a
technique changes the non-verbal qualities of the inner talk, and even changes
how the body feels as the exercise is carried out.
Neurological research is showing how this is possible. Changing a
person’s experience of inner talk actually changes how the body-mind operates.
Inner talk is iterative, that is, it has a quality of rumination, where stuff
is thought of repeatedly. In terms of neural activity in the brain, the same
pathways become entrenched and sometimes pretty difficult to get out of. Worry that occupies us, occupies us
more and more, unless we can break the looping that occurs. Breaking the
pattern, as for instance, taking the micky out of the inner story (my “hurry”
changed to “hari rama”), or slowing the words of worry down, or singing the
story, or speaking the words in an ordinary voice, have the power to actually disempower the rumination
and the looping and thus forge new neural pathways. Breaking the pattern
changes the body’s response to what used to be plain old anxiety and increases
a relaxed state. The tightness goes, leaving a softness and a sense of being
more fluid and easy.
Other techniques are useful too. One technique is remembering the tools we used to use
to relax ourselves and learning to incorporate these tools when feeling
stressed. For me, writing has this power. As I write this article, I feel more
settled. Swimming is another means for me.
A year or two ago, I had a client with a particular form of anxiety. I
wont say what it was about, but I discovered she had a great love of running,
down by the sea. In the hypnosis sessions, I “ran” with her in the wind, for in
invoking such a scenario, she was able to enter into a deeply relaxed and yet
aware state (which is what hypnosis is anyway); a state she was able to evoke
whenever she needed to. The inner iterative voice lost its power and her whole
demeanour changed in an enduring way. From week one to week three, her face was
no longer pinched, her breathing was easy, and her skin glowed. Along with these changes was a shift in
how she worked with the people in her world and how she saw herself. She lost
her belief that she was a weak/bad/anxious person. She become confident and
looked it. Really fundamental changes occurred.
Anxiety has a lot of energy connected to it. Unlocking that energy in a
creative and helpful way can release and relieve a person very deeply so that
they can live more fully and more easily in the world.
