Emotional anxiety.

By The Mind - Body Guide

Emotional anxiety is a specific type of anxiety that can make you feel unsafe and vulnerable. Because it is often difficult to explain these intense emotions to family and friends, they can leave you feeling isolated. This sense of being alone with your emotions then feeds the anxiety even more and you end up in what I call the ‘cycle of suffering.’ In therapy with me, we’ll explore these feelings of vulnerability, the anxiety itself, what triggers it and the underlying cause. Emotional anxiety makes itself felt in the mind and the body in various ways. For example, you might be overly sensitive with friends and family, which makes relationships difficult. People won’t always understand the ways your anxiety shows itself and they may think you have a problem with them, rather than realising it is your anxiety triggering your reactions. It takes someone to stop, ask, and listen to how you are feeling to understand what you’re going through. But explaining things to someone can be daunting, especially if you don’t understand what is going on inside yourself. Sometimes anxiety can leave you feeling emotionally numb. This doesn’t mean you are incapable of feeling emotion. This numbness might be a reaction to something traumatic from your past. Perhaps a situation where there were so many feelings inside you, coping with them was impossible. When in danger of being overwhelmed like this, the body’s natural protective response is to shut down. In therapy, we would explore this and navigate a way back at a pace that suits you, so we can explore those buried feelings. In contrast to the absence of emotion, some people absorb everyone else’s. The difficulty being that sometimes you are so full of everyone else’s feelings, you lose sight of your own. This is typical of people who are naturally empathetic. An empath is a sensitive person who has an ability to sense what people around them are thinking and feeling. There are some techniques I use in therapy that are more suitable for managing emotional anxiety. Finding the emotions within the body and using movement, breathing and body scanning to explore the way your body stores emotion are a few examples of things we can do. As it is important to face these feelings of anxiety in your own time and when you’re ready, we’d allow time and space to process them. Together, we will decide which tools best suit you and then use them to increase your understanding of the intricate mind-body connection created by anxiety. This will then help you regulate your emotional anxiety in the future. As The Mind & Body Guide, my aim is to explore these connections to help you gain insight and awareness. This could look at present problems or those that are more deeply seated: events that have affected you in the past. Things that you have been told and experienced which have shaped who you are now. My approach to therapy is to help you understand yourself mentally and physically. Then you can start moving forward at a pace which respects the whole of you. The Mind & Body Guide Therapy for the whole of you

Ready to talk