Habit 1:  Confidence of Experience:

I always wish I could supplant my own experience as an anxiety overcomer into my patient’s lives.  Take a needle, extract these hard-earned experiences from my head and inject them into the brains and hearts of my suffering clients...viola!  There are two problems with this I can think of:  

1.  As I’m sure you might be thinking, is that my experience of anxiety/life and how it's been rewritten is and will be very different from their (your) story.  Different plots, characters, places, thoughts, hopes, dreams, motivations, ambitions, failures, successes...everything’s different. 

2.  If I did this, I would be robbing them (you) of the journey.  If you'll put your ear to the ground, and pay close attention as you're overcoming anxiety, you'll discover nuggets that simply can't be mined any other way.  (More on this later). 

As different as my life is from yours, there are a couple of things we share on this journey:  

• we both are stuck in time and space

• we both are moving forward, time is heading in one direction

• we both have the space (ability to live, move, learn, become, to change)

How I change(d) may look similar to your change or it may not.  But, the principle I want to convey here is that we’ve both been given the gifts of time and space to be able to heal from toxic anxiety.   And one of the tools that gets us through the tough spots of the journey is confidence.  When anxiety gets tough, I can't think of anything better to hit it with than confidence…that's been earned from past experiences. 

You may feel stuck right now, like you're in a retired water well full of mud with no ladder.  This is where you have to trust me (someone who’s more than likely walked further than you on the anxiety recovery journey).  It may look dark and bleak now, but if you follow my suggestions and a few others in books I’ve recmmended, you will find your way out of that deserted well.  It‘s going to be tough, to be sure.          But, confidence, like a fireman ripping through debris to get to a tornado victim, will provide a hand for you to grab hold of.

What Does Confidence Have To Do With Anxiety?: 

There’s only one way:  face that which you fear over and over again, until that which you fear becomes that which doesn’t faze you. (We won’t go into detail about real life exposures in this book.  Just know that there are plenty of books that will lead and guide you down that journey.  For now, I just want to encourage you to do this and stick to it as each experience builds and multiplies on the previous one(s).  

Sticking With The Facts: New knowledge (Plato effect)

Thoughts turned on their head:

The first example that comes to my mind concerning this was when I died several times two years ago.  You heard me right.  I died.

In my twenties, I used to be soooooo afraid of having a heart attack.  I’ve always had heart disease (aortic stenosis), but for some reason my fears of having a heart attack seemed to have more to do with an enemy occupying my mind than they ever did with the reality of my heart causing one.  For years, I would be rushed to the hospital thinking that “this is it, I’m dying for sure,” just to be told that everything was fine.  “It’s anxiety...again Jeff.”  I can’t help but laugh at how life, with a little new perspective, makes yesterday's fears today's nothings.  

Two years ago, I kept falling down and then waking up in different places.  At least this is how I experienced it.  I just thought I was passing out because of all the diet Mountain Dew I drank, or something.  Turns out, as my brilliant heart doc/friend says, “you were dying Jeff!  Cardiac arrest my friend!  Tell your wife to not let you fall asleep on your drive down here or... you will die, permanently.”

(The information included on this site/article is not an attempt to provide counseling/therapy or any other form of professional treatment, not even a bit.  In no way is it intended or implied to substitute counseling/therapy or any other professional services.  Also, while the content of these articles could be based on real-life circumstances, people (clients), names and situations have been changed to protect the identity/confidentiality of the person.  Each client has also signed a release to allow the therapist to write about their situation for educational [not therapy] purposes only.  If you need professional help, and/or have mental health questions, by golly, seek out a professional counselor...you and your family deserve it! )