Free Yourself from Anxiety (15 page)

Each sub-personality has its own brand of twisted thinking (or cognitive distortion). There are other thought habits that Anxiety creates, so the trial continues.

If you think back to the time before you had Anxiety, you’ll see that your thinking has changed considerably. Even if you were always a worrier, you didn’t worry as much as you do now, and your thoughts didn’t escalate like they do now. Extreme thinking is one of Anxiety’s favourite tricks, and it comes in four forms.

When you look into the future, you assume that there will always be a negative result to anything you do. Maybe you feel like that about exposure work, and you expect to fail at every goal. Even when you succeed, you think it was a fluke, or a one-off. Typical thoughts are:
‘I’ll panic and make a fool of myself.’
‘I’ll be the only one in the class to fail the exam.’
‘If I don’t get this job I won’t get another chance.’

As you would expect, this means seeing a catastrophe around every corner. The bad outcome from category 1 is, in your mind, always going to be the absolute worst outcome possible – even if you’re not sure what.
Typical catastrophic thoughts are:
‘If I panic it’ll be the end of everything.’
‘If anything goes wrong I’ll never live it down.’
‘They’ll never speak to me again.’

Even though Anxiety is keeping you chained to your restricted life, you may still have unrealistic expectations of yourself. For instance someone who is housebound, and who contemplates their first trip outside, will set themselves an impossibly difficult challenge, often on the basis that anything less is hardly worth bothering with. Typical unrealistic thoughts are:
‘I should be able to do this.’
‘I can’t be bothered with little steps.’

This means seeing the world in black and white terms – things are either right or wrong, good or bad, with no shades of grey in between. Typical all-or-nothing thoughts are:
‘I must be 100% right or I’m a failure.’
‘I got one thing wrong and that ruined everything.’

As you can see there is quite a lot of overlap between these four categories, and it’s likely that you’ll identify yourself as doing more than one type of extreme thinking. Make a list of your own particular extreme thoughts, and then work out ways of countering them. Here are some examples:

‘I’ll be the only one in the class to fail the exam.’
So what? The important thing is to sit the exam and do the best I can
.

‘If anything goes wrong I’ll never live it down.’
Yes I will. It’s only embarrassment, and I can cope with that
.

‘I should be able to do this.’
I need to try, that’s all
.

‘I got one thing wrong and that ruined everything.’
Everything else was OK, so I did pretty well
.

You may recognise this mindset if you have ever been a parent, or worked with children. Anxiety does, in some ways, take us back to childhood, where the world is big and scary and there are bogeymen in dark places. Don’t dismiss this, or feel ashamed of it – but do use countering statements to help the frightened child in you let go of its extreme thinking.

The world is a complicated place, and we lead complicated lives, and there is always a tendency for our world view to change, almost minute by minute. If you get home from work tired, with no food in the fridge, you’re likely to feel fairly miserable and negative about the evening ahead – when the phone rings and it’s a friend on their way round with a pizza to share you’re likely to change your mind in an instant. In both cases your attention is selective – either focusing on the negative, or the positive. Someone with Anxiety is likely to be stuck with one or more of the following types of negative selective attention.

This means that you assume that one bad experience will always lead to others – this is how a phobia develops, when after one bad time in a certain situation you assume that the same thing will always happen every time in the future. Over-generalising usually includes words like ‘never’, ‘always’ and ‘every’, so typical examples are:
‘I’ll never manage this goal.’
‘I’m always the one who struggles.’

Filtering means selecting one aspect of an experience and focusing on that – and of course for an Anxiety sufferer this is going to mean filtering out the positive and focusing on the negative. This can be very like all-
or-nothing
thinking, where you focus entirely on one bad thing and ignore all the good things. Typical filtering thoughts are:
‘I made a mess of that driving lesson, I’ll never pass my test.’
‘I had a bad day yesterday, I’ll never get better.’

This is a companion to filtering, and the dominant word in this thought process is ‘but’. It doesn’t matter how many good things have come your way, there will always be a ‘but’ as you knock back the good and focus on the bad. Typical thoughts are:
‘I cut down my checking yesterday morning, but I was as bad as ever in the afternoon.’
‘Lots of people recover from Anxiety, but I’ll be the exception.’

This kind of selective attention makes bad things big and good things small, so it’s really a combination of filtering and discounting the positive. Typical thoughts are:
‘I had the most horrendous panic attack on Tuesday, and even though Wednesday and Thursday were okay I can’t forget it.’
‘I’m the worst case of anxiety ever, and the progress I’ve made so far just doesn’t count.’

Selective attention on the negative means that you downplay your successes and play up your failures. You ignore the evidence, or choose to misinterpret it – but Anxiety is on trial here, and you need to be objective about the evidence.

Finding counters for these kinds of thoughts is a question of persuading yourself to accept the evidence at face value, for example:

I’m always the one who struggles.
If I look around me I’ll see that other people have difficulties too
.

I had a bad day yesterday, I’ll never get better.
I will look through my notebook and see how many good days I had, because they are just as important
.

I cut down my checking yesterday morning, but I was as bad as ever in the afternoon.
It felt great yesterday morning, and it proves that I can do it
.

I’m the worst case of Anxiety ever, and the progress I’ve made so far just doesn’t count.
Even the smallest progress counts, even the fact of having a go at recovery counts, and even the worst case of Anxiety ever can get better
.

Nobody is quite sure how intuition works, and intuitive thoughts seem to come from nowhere and to be very powerful. Your brain has been busy at such a deep level that you aren’t consciously aware of the thought processes, but nevertheless there are thought processes, and Anxiety can bring its influence to bear on them just the same as any others.

There are two main types of distorted intuition:

This means using your feelings to make a judgement or decision. Sometimes it’s entirely appropriate to do this, for instance in the area of personal relationships. However many people with Anxiety use emotional reasoning inappropriately, and rely on their feelings to guide them. Typical thoughts are:
‘I won’t do my exposure today because I don’t feel like it.’
‘I feel useless, so that means I am useless.’

This means making decisions about other people – what they meant when they said a certain thing, why they did a certain thing, what they were thinking when they glanced across at you and so on. Anxiety makes sure that you always assume the worst, and yet you are just as likely to be wrong as right. Typical thoughts are:
‘She ignored me, she must hate me.’
‘He’s staring at me, I must be doing something odd.’

If someone you know passes you without speaking, your intuition, coloured by Anxiety, might well lead you to assume they were angry with you for some reason. And yet they might well have simply not seen you, or been sunk into their own thoughts and worries. And you cannot possibly know what a stranger is thinking when they glance at you – it could be ‘what a weirdo’(in which case it’s their problem, not yours) but equally it could be ‘I wonder where they got their jacket?’

This is the last item on the charge sheet. Anxiety says that everything is your fault, and makes sure you feel badly about it too.

A middle-aged woman took her elderly father to the dentist. The receptionist said to him ‘isn’t it kind of your sister to give you a lift?’ The woman was mortified, and cried bitter tears when she got home. But why didn’t it occur to her that maybe it was that her father looked young, not that she looked old? In fact what she didn’t know was that the receptionist had broken her glasses, and was struggling through the day without them. This is ‘taking it personally’ – like ‘jumping to conclusions’, you are just as likely to be wrong as right.

Do you feel responsible for everything that happens to your nearest and dearest? Do you try to cover every eventuality, and make sure they are okay at all times? And do you blame yourself when things go wrong, or they aren’t happy? And do you think that having Anxiety is all your own fault?

We all beat ourselves up from time to time, using words like ‘fool’, ‘idiot’ and maybe a few unprintable ones too, but Anxiety can persuade you to be far too hard on yourself, so that you constantly think things like ‘I’m
so clumsy, so lazy, so forgetful’ and so on. Clearly this links in with perfectionism, and criticism.

This means you constantly compare yourself with other people and think that if only you were more like them you’d be able to throw off your Anxiety. Whether you wish to be better looking, cleverer, younger, fitter or thinner it all comes down to dissatisfaction with yourself.

Distorted intuition and self-reproach are all about how you see yourself in relation to the world, and other people. Your own reactions are of overwhelming importance to you but by focusing on them so much you can lose sight of other ways of viewing a situation. Here are some ways of countering this tendency:

Ask yourself ‘Are my feelings appropriate here? Are they relevant?’

Consider if there could be another explanation for the situation. Accept that you might be wrong about other people’s reasons for behaving as they do.

Again, look at the situation and see if there could be another explanation, one that doesn’t involve you.

Feeling responsible is one of the hardest things to let go of, and for some people it goes to the very core of their being. It might help to look at it
from the other person’s point of view – maybe they don’t want you to make everything okay for them. Maybe they’d be happier if they could take responsibility for their own life.

Make a list of your favourite name calling words and resolve to take them out of your vocabulary. Tell yourself you’re banned from ever using them again.

By whose standards are you judging yourself? Learn to love and respect yourself. Contradict your ‘if only…’ thoughts with ‘I’m fine the way I am’.