True story.
Recovery is NOT about changing your anxiety, your symptoms, or your thoughts. Those will generally stay as they are. Recovery is really about changing YOU.
Before you get all worked up thinking that you have to become totally new version of you, don’t worry about that. Recovery is not about totally reinventing yourself. Recovery is about changing how you react to your anxious thoughts and sensations. Recovery is about changing you, but only insofar as how you relate to anxiety and fear.
This might seem like a “WTF?” moment for you when I say this. Most people would assume that the recovery process is about making anxiety go away, or at least quiet down. They would hope that the process of recovery means finding ways to make all those nasty symptoms and thoughts disappear. That is the result that we’re all after, but that is a happy side effect of engaging in this process. That is not the primary goal.
When we spend our time trying to make the anxiety itself change or go away, things get frustrating. If you’re just starting out on this journey, reading this now is going to give you a head start. Now you can point your efforts at the proper target. If you’ve been working the recovery process for some time now and feel like you’re not making real progress or that you continually slide backward, this might explain why this is happening.
When I tell people that I am fully recovered from my anxiety disorders, they usually ask if I ever “get anxiety” or if I still have panic attacks. The answer is yes. I can experience anxious days. I may even experience a panic attack or two in a given year or so.
How can I call myself recovered if this is the case?
Because I simply don’t care.
I experience anxiety like a “normal” person does now. When I get anxious, I recognize it for what it is. I do not see it as cause to sound an alarm and take special evasive action to get rid of it. Even panic is mostly a non-issue for me as a recovered person. A panic attack starts, peaks, subsides, then ends. When it’s over, it’s over. The event does not ruin the rest of my day or cause me to retreat and declare “SETBACK!”.
Did I get this way by wrestling my anxiety into some new, smaller form? No. I did not change my anxiety at all. My heart still races. I still feed edgy and agitated. I still experience that short of breath feeling. I can still experience depersonalization and/or derealization. Those things did not change.
I CHANGED. The anxiety just kept on rolling like biology will do. I formed new habits and reactions. I practiced them. I accepted the exposures and challenges as lessons. I took the lessons in, and adjusted accordingly. Over time, I built a new relationship with all the nasty stuff.
It’s the same as it always has been, but it’s not so nasty any more.
This is the process of recovery. Take a few minutes and let this sink in. When we accept that WE are the variable that must be changed in the equation, we find tremendous power in the process. You can control you. You can make choices. When you stop trying to change the anxiety and start trying to change you, good things happen.
Tomorrow, we’ll look at what a “Bad Day Playbook” should look like and what you can do when you find yourself struggling.
18. We're Not Changing Anxiety. We're Changing Ourselves