 This week on the anxious truth. We're talking about the fact that anxiety and the recovery process do not exist in a vacuum. So let's go Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the anxious truth. This is episode number 276 of the podcast, I believe we are recording in October of 2023 for those that are listening in the future. Welcome. I am Drew Linsolata creator and host of the anxious truth This is the podcast that covers all things anxiety anxiety disorders and anxiety recovery So if you're struggling with chronic anxiety or an anxiety disorder of some kind, this is the place for you I'm happy that you're here, especially if you are new here today If you've just stumbled upon the podcast or the YouTube channel, maybe even accidentally welcome I hope you find what we're doing here to be helpful or Applicable or useful to you in some way and of course if you are a returning listener or viewer welcome back Always glad that you're here. So this week on the podcast We're gonna talk about the idea that anxiety and the recovery process are not things that exist in a vacuum You might be tempted to say well all of the things that this crazy dude on the podcast talks about Really paint a very like mechanical picture of this is the mechanics of an anxiety disorder And this is the mechanics of acceptance and exposure and facing and Surrendering and all of those things and this is how you fix that problem And I know it kind of sounds that way, but often we forget That your anxiety or chronic anxiety and anxiety disorder the process that you go through to recover do not exist in a vacuum Yeah, there are specific ways that we address those things and these that's what we talk about here in this podcast and in the Content surrounding the podcast and social media and whatnot, but you have to remember that you're a whole person, right? So when you are involved with a chronic in a chronic anxiety situation or you're working the recovery process Other things are going to enter that process You have a personality you have beliefs you have experiences all of those things come in So we need to talk about that today because it's one of the it's almost like an advanced recovery topic If you will it's a little bit nuanced. It starts to sound a little bit of woo-woo, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that It might not be something you expect me to talk about But we do have to talk about it because I think sometimes we we miss that or we gloss over it now before we do again You guys are used to this by now if you're a regular listeners Just a quick reminder that the anxious truth is more than just this podcast episode There are three books that I've written on the topic of anxiety and anxiety recovery. There are courses There are workshops. There's a ton of free podcast episodes that came before this one There's all kinds of free social media content. All of that stuff can be found on my website at the anxious truth calm So if you want to know more about any of this or you want to look for other topics So you want to value yourself of the other resources hop on over there the anxious truth calm check it all out Hopefully you find it helpful So what do I mean when I say that anxiety and recovery don't exist in a vacuum? I mean that if we take a look at you as a whole person It it means that you are more than just your anxiety now that sounds like one of those like yeah I'm more than anxiety and true. I'm all about that right We're all about cheerleading and standing up and finding our strength and and not defining ourselves just by our problems That's true But it also means that you are an entire person you have a family maybe you have our in relationships You have a career a job. Maybe you go to school. You have hobbies You have things you like and don't like you have tastes you have opinions you have beliefs Experiences you have a culture that you come from there's a ton of things that come along with you into the recovery process So sometimes people can be tempted to think okay. Well, I'm just gonna solve my panic disorder I'm just gonna fix my gorophobia or I'm here to just fix my OCD and Listen if you've been around these parts long enough and have listened to this podcast or read my books or watch these YouTube videos You know what my orientation is to this Yes, I believe in ways to deal with these things that have been empirically validated and appear to be the most effective ways to deal with them Generally speaking in a large population and it does start to sound very mechanical very dry It's kind of engineer like you know some folks that specialize in anxiety disorders are sort of looked at as the engineers of mental health If you will and often People will hear me say things like well, we don't really dig for root causes and we don't try to manage triggers and they'll say Oh, yeah, this is just that cut and dry behavioral acceptance exposure clear weeks. This is what you do You don't dig for your emotions. It doesn't matter how you feel like you'll hear things like that and it might lead you to believe that The recovery process or your anxiety can exist can be carved out of your life and treated by itself and nothing else matters You only just do the techniques, you know that you hear on this podcast or disordered that I do with Josh Fletcher Or in the books that I write and that is you have a little bit, you know, like from a basic standpoint. Yeah, you can look at it that way However, remember that since you are a whole person Excuse me and you have Experiences and beliefs and an understanding of the world in a worldview and the way you see yourself Those things cannot help but to enter the process Am I saying that you can't get better unless you dig deep into your psyche to find hidden pain or Hidden trauma or you know things that you don't understand about yourself or don't even know about yourself I have to do that sort of work in order to know what triggers me and why I feel the way I feel No, it's not saying that at all. That's not part of this equation necessarily but it is true that as you begin to confront these things and As you begin to go toward what you fear and as you begin to start to change the way you behave and do your Exposures and meet challenges and default to yes instead of no and hiding You cannot help but to have those other parts of you and those other parts of your life come along for the ride So let me give you an example of that Somebody who comes into this process Whose maybe cultural background or life experiences or maybe there was some trauma or neglect or abuse in your life Or just particular experiences that you bring with you that may have contributed to you seeing yourself as inherently weak or not brave or incapable or I'm easily overwhelmed I can't possibly handle hard things that certainly is going to have an impact on you as You go through the recovery process Why wouldn't it if you're the type of person that comes in from the opposite point of view? Maybe for whatever reason your personality includes being much more confident or assertive or even aggressive if you will I don't like that term, but okay Or maybe you just feel you have a very high sense of self-efficacy. You believe you can do things You believe yourself to be brave or strong that will also impact how you go about the process of recovery, right? So just look at those two things that means that this the problem isn't carved out How who you are how you are how you see the world how you see yourself and your beliefs Will sort of inform the way you act to a certain extent and may have an impact on the process So you will find emotional trigger points like how well do we handle frustration help for me? I'll share some my own experience for me the process of recovery really really exposed some things in my Personality like being very impatient being hard on myself in terms of thinking that I should be able to do things faster Or better or if I just go at this harder, I'll recover faster So it made me confront those type of issues about me Those issues were outside of my panic disorder my gorophobia my I know we say maybe I would have been diagnosed with OCD my depression They existed sort of outside of the technical definition of those things But if I look at myself as a whole person, of course Those things did factor in as I was going through this journey Initially as it may impact how you view anxiety your your anxiety problem to begin with Some people view their anxiety issue as punishment of some kind because of maybe their cultural background or their Their beliefs their spiritual beliefs or their faith beliefs Some people view anxiety as weakness Just the fact that you are struggling with anxiety is Failure that comes from your background from your lived experiences from the cultural norms you come from from your family and friends It comes from a lot of different things your view of yourself Other people view this as an actual illness. This is a mental illness I have a mental illness and that's just because Their worldview wants them to look at it that way whereas other people might resonate a little bit more with the way I talk about it, which is maybe it's not an illness Maybe it's a learning problem and maybe you're not healing as much as you are learning Cool, but as you can see What you bring into this process You as a whole person is going to impact how you conceptualize your anxiety How you view it how you judge it, right? We're trying to get away from harshly judging ourselves in recovery But that's gonna matter and how you view the process of recovery Somebody who's maybe a little bit more timid or feels that they get easily overwhelmed or can't handle things Is a little bit more resistant to the idea that like wait I'm supposed to stop fighting it or I'm supposed to So all right, let's take that for an example Let's use the idea of the idea that to get better. One of the things we learned to do is to stop fighting So if you take two different people one person who identifies as Maybe a little bit more frail or fragile or sensitive, which is fine. There's nothing wrong with that That's just the way they see themselves for a variety of reasons They may hear stop fighting it and think I can't do that because then that means I'll be overwhelmed by it Whereas if you take the same concept stop fighting it and you apply it to somebody who sees themselves In the opposite direction, which is I am a warrior. I run things over. I am unbreakable I am a you know, I am that guy or that person. I know typically masculine type presentation But whatever I'm that person when you say stop fighting they hear I don't give up I'm not giving up. Of course. I fight. It's what I do So you see the same recovery concept gets interpreted quite differently because Two different people will hear that two different ways and that's a good illustration of the fact that this does not exist in a vacuum And then those two people may take a longer time to come to grips With this theoretical orientation to recovery the accepting surrender tolerating facing fear doing exposures The person who sees themselves as maybe easily overwhelmed is going to take a much longer time to come to grips with this and sort of ease into that process Which is totally okay Whereas the person that sees themselves as an unbreakable war machine I'm being really extreme here But to get the point across that person may go directly into it But maybe they're going to develop some recovery habits because of that view of themselves in the world That isn't that helpful. So they may find they go into it and stumble a bit So maybe they didn't wait as long or they didn't avoid as much as the person who identifies as Maybe more easily overwhelmed or timid But they go directly into it and you would think well, that's a benefit, right? But they can develop recovery habits that they have to then adjust that was me like oh, wait a minute I gotta back up. I can't do it that way. So again Who we are how we see ourselves our view of the world our view of ourselves our experiences our personalities our beliefs Will enter into this. It's a thing There are other times when the process of recovery itself Makes you confront other things some emotions might come up I'm not I'm not I'm not automatically asserting that you will be traumatized or retraumatized That's a whole different topic You can go listen to the episode that josh and I did on disordered about you know We talked about this how the intersection of trauma and anxiety disorders. I've talked about it in this podcast But you will be confronted with with emotions. You will be disappointed sometimes you will be impatient sometimes You will be sad you might feel a sense of despondent or hopelessness you may feel lost And that's not specifically an anxiety problem That will Make you look at and sort of deal with how you deal with your own emotions How you deal with adversity how you deal with challenges how resilient are you are you learning to be more resilient? So you see all of these things factor in and so I think the most important thing to consider When we look at this anxiety and recovery don't exist in a vacuum is that This is one reason why comparing one person to another is kind of a fruitless exercise We don't want to do that because we are Very different So while the mechanics of an anxiety disorder and in my orientation the mechanics of the recovery process Might look somewhat universal and people will say well, you know different things for different people cool But we can rely on some basic almost universal principles based on you know pretty pretty well supported theories How that gets executed may vary widely because that's where the difference is from one person to the other comes in So instead of thinking well, my anxiety is different or I resonate I need to do it this way because my anxiety is different It might sometimes be more helpful, especially if you're struggling or you feel why am I not getting this? How come it's not working? This is another thing that doesn't work for me. You might consider wait a minute So it's not that my anxiety is different Is that there are other issues based on who I am in my worldview and my view of myself? That present these particular set of challenges that I didn't expect but here they are And then when you look at them and say, oh, I see what's going on here Not every challenge in recovery Most of recovery is an anxiety focus challenge a discomfort focus challenge An uncertainty focus challenge a distress intolerance challenge But other challenges are going to pop up that will be unique to you Based on your past experiences or your beliefs or your culture or your view of yourself I know I keep repeating myself with those concepts, but they're important and sometimes That's a little bit more of a kind way to envision your struggle Oh, I get it this guy on the podcast says that you know, he went out every day and did exposures without failing He didn't stop and you know, okay. That's the way he did it. Am I the same as him? No, nobody's the same as me. Just like no one's the same as you So if I can't do it exactly the way the podcast guy did it Am I wrong? Am I broken? Am I weak? Is something wrong with me? Is that is that incorrect? No It just means you're not me and I'm not you and the same thing would hold true for another friend that you might be Going through this with or a member of your internet support group or a member of the facebook group You're in or whatever it is just be careful about winding up in a situation where you Are feeling maybe frustrated or lost or a little bit hopeless, which is normal Everybody's gonna feel those things But then you wind up camping there because you you almost judge it as flaws weaknesses I'm doing it wrong. It doesn't work for me. It doesn't apply for me or Well, these are my specific challenges in recovery because I'm a unique person So these are my unique specific challenges in my process And the way I look at my anxiety problem in the way I look at the recovery process In the things that resonate with me and in the way I execute my recovery plan I'm a unique person with unique experiences unique views my own unique view of myself and the world My own internal experiences that no one will ever be able to share because they're mine And this means that my recovery path has a set of unique challenges That are special to me and I have to acknowledge some of those work on certain things and maybe I have to work on being patient That's not an anxiety problem That's a different problem, but it will present itself. Excuse me as part of this process. I hit the mic Um, and sometimes people miss that So they'll totally miss that completely if you have it in like I had an impatience problem I have to address that like I wouldn't have thought that that was part of the recovery thing But as it turns out it was and I was forced to confront that and deal with that One of the things I've talked about before again, I'll use my own experience as an illustration because I can't use yours I don't know you but uh and your experience is yours But another thing that I talked about sometimes is having a recovery plan. I didn't want to I still don't want to plan anything I'm super defiant when it comes to calendars and structure and like I got to do this thing at a specific time It's just not me But in the recovery process I had to confront that and say Well being so resistant to a plan is hurting me because it means that I'm making up my recovery as I go along I'm waiting every morning to decide if I should do my exposures or not I got to make a plan. I got to schedule some stuff in the morning. I get out and I go and drive This is what I do. That's what I had to do Was that a is that an anxiety problem? Well, there was a little bit of avoidance in that It was more of a oh, I'm confronting other parts of me here That are informing my progress and informing the way I execute this plan the way I approach my recovery And I had to deal with that so that depending on what your particular issues might be You know, I I immediately feel that big emotions are a nightmare are disaster If I feel a particular way if my mood isn't correct, I declare disaster and I retreat for two weeks Okay, is that an anxiety problem a little bit or is it just oh, yeah, that's kind of what I do in life for whatever reason And I guess I got to work on that a little bit too. That's all right So I think it's kind of important that we we have this conversation Your anxiety your chronic anxiety or anxiety disorder and your anxiety recovery process Do not exist as like a thing that got bolted on to you and then we just unbolted like You are part of a whole person and these any mental health issue any life issue if you will It comes as part of that the wholeness of you The I can't believe I'm actually saying stuff like this, but it's true Like the wholeness of you the wholeness of your life people talk about holistic approaches Doesn't necessarily mean just herbs and and things that grow on trees holistic meaning a view of the whole thing Right so that that expresses in so many different ways And it's important because if you don't if you forget that part you can fall into that trap where it's like this isn't working I'm special. I'm unique. My anxiety is special or unique. I am uniquely broken That's not that's not fair Right, that's not fair to you So a kinder more compassionate and probably accurate way to conceptualize that would be I'm just this is the way my recovery journey Looks uniquely because of who I am uniquely and what else do I have to deal with here her work on Again, it's really important for me to clarify this I'm not saying that you recover by you know digging for other issues Sometimes they just come up. Sometimes you already know that they're there and you have to work on those too And those can vary widely from just maybe you're not good at conflict in your relationships Maybe you have had an abusive or a traumatic past like it can really vary Maybe you're aware. Maybe you're not but when things do come up like, okay, I have to work on that. That's that's okay That's not a crime We all have things to work on and they're all part of what makes us who we are like holistically as as entire people And we don't get to just carve that part out of like Panic attack recovery it would be great if we could but invariably as you go down this road you will confront those other parts of you at times They just might be personality quirks. They might be lessons you learned in the past that yeah, you know what? I don't like that. I want to change that They may be cultural or spiritual beliefs It doesn't matter and I have to incorporate that now into my process into my recovery process The best way I can sometimes it's trial and error Sometimes you didn't even know that was going to be a problem until it's a problem But but the fact that it's a problem is not a problem It just means you're a normal person trying to like unravel some stuff And all those parts of you get are part of the unraveling. That's all So, you know, again, this is going to vary widely from person to person The other things you that you confront or have to work on as part of your recovery Sometimes it's just a bunch of little stuff Sometimes it's smoother than others for some people Some people come with a lot of other things that they have to work on They may be aware of some not so aware of others. It's all okay You're allowed to be a whole person in this process Keep that in mind as you go and be careful about judging your anxiety or you as worse Just view it as I'm a unique person and my process is going to unfold in a unique way With its own set of challenges based on who I am There you go. I haven't said there you go in a podcast episode. I think in a while So we're 21 minutes into it. I don't have that annoying habit of like saying the time But that's about as much as I want to say about that today I wanted to throw it out there I've been meaning to talk about this for quite a while and I haven't had a chance So I'm glad we got to address it today. Hopefully that's been helpful something that you can use You know the episode is over because Music As always, I will leave you with a couple of things if you're listening to this podcast on apple podcast or spotify Some platform that lets you rate a review leave a five star rating Take a second and maybe write a review it helps other people find the podcast and then more people get help Which is why I do this to begin with of course if you're watching on youtube leave a comment Like the video subscribe to the channel hit the notification bell so you know when I upload new videos I don't think that's it I won't be back next week because we're in every other week mode right now But I will be back in two weeks with another episode of this podcast I'm not necessarily sure what I'm going to talk about then because sometimes I don't know until I turn on the microphone That's true But I will be here for something and of course next Monday if you're on the off week Check out the live recovery Monday live stream on the youtube channel It's always a different topic every other Monday and that's it Remember what I said today be nice to yourself and no matter how small your step is In the right direction today in the direction that you think is right for you that helps you that moves you toward the life You want take it because even if it's a tiny step it will add up with a bunch other tiny steps over time They all count hang in there. Thanks for listening. Keep going. See you next time