We’ve spent the last two days talking about the difference between HAVING anxiety - making it part of who you are - and EXPERIENCING anxiety - making that experiencing something you do.
Anxiety is who you are, or anxiety is an experience that you have?
Which should you choose?
If we return to the idea that getting better - the process of recovery - is about building and sustaining recovery-focused habits, when which choice supports this activity?
I’ll tell you. Pick the experiencing option. It’s the one that will move you down the road. Why? Why should you invest your energy in removing anxiety from your sense of who are, and shift it to something that you simply experience?
Yesterday we saw that making this shift removes incongruence as an obstacle. You can’t do non-anxious things or act like a non-disordered person if anxiety is who you are. Not reliably. So really, you have no choice but to make this effort to shift. It’s worth it. I promise.
When you start experiencing anxiety without gluing it to who you judge yourself to be, it becomes possible to get positive feedback from your experiences. They may be negative in a given moment, but you can start to see that negative experience as instructional and required as part of the process.
“I was anxious again!” leaves no room for that.
“I experienced anxiety again and worked on changing the way I reacted to it.” speaks directly to the process. You can take that experience and learn something from it. You can begin to appreciate why all this is happening and why you are doing these scary and difficult things all the time.
When you see the purpose, and when you become open to the value and lesson of the experiences, you start to construct a self-sustaining positive feedback loop in your recovery. Ask anyone that starts to string recovery wins together what that feels like. It feels like momentum. When you win, you want to win more. Small victories - EXPERIENCES - drive the desire to have more experiences and ultimately more small victories.
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The more identity-independent experiences you have in recovery, the more you can start to build a sense of competency. Feeling competent means you need less courage as you go forward. It leads to consistency and persistence. It can even lead to feelings of pride and excitement. If you are in my Facebook group, you see this every day. Driving over a bridge, completing a visit to the dentist, or taking a weekend trip with the family become HUGE sources of pride. They light a fire that drives even more forward progress. And with each step forward, anxiety becomes less who our friends in the group are, and more something they are experiencing in new and even exciting ways.
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I’ll wrap up this three day mini-series by asking you how long you’ve seen anxiety as something you have, and part of who you are? Is this a mental groove that you’re trapped in? Take some time to imagine what it would look like if anxiety did not define you as a person? What would happen if you allowed it to just be another life experience? What becomes possible?
This is always hard work. There are not many easy days in recovery. But struggling does not define you who are. How you experience that struggle defines what you DO, and what you DO ultimately determines who you are.
So, what’s your next move? ☕️
45. Experiences Drive Good Recovery Habits