When Understanding Anxiety Isn't Enough

You can understand why you're anxious and still feel anxious.

You may know where it comes from. You may recognize the pattern as it’s happening. You may even know what you’re supposed to tell yourself ~ and find that your body doesn’t seem particularly interested in the explanation.

That doesn’t mean understanding isn’t valuable. It is.

But sometimes, understanding is only part of how change happens.

Understanding is one way of knowing

We often expect insight to create change. If we can understand where a feeling comes from, recognize the pattern, or think about it differently, it seems reasonable that we should be able to move beyond it.

Sometimes we can.

But we are shaped by more than what we consciously understand. Experience can become woven into how we anticipate, relate, respond, protect ourselves and make sense of what is happening around us.

So the question may not always be, “Why am I still anxious when I know better?”

A more interesting question might be:

What does some part of my experience still expect?

When the past is present without feeling like the past

Sometimes anxiety makes complete sense in the context of what we have lived through.

Perhaps being prepared once mattered. Maybe watching other people carefully helped you know what was coming. Perhaps uncertainty became associated with danger, disappointing others once had consequences, or staying busy meant you didn’t have to feel something more difficult.

None of this needs to involve one dramatic event.

Human beings learn through thousands of experiences ~ relationships, environments, expectations, sensations, successes, disappointments and the meanings we make from them.

Something that once made perfect sense can continue long after the circumstances around it have changed.

That can leave us in the peculiar position of knowing one thing while experiencing another.

Anxiety may be doing something

It is tempting to think of anxiety simply as something to get rid of.

And of course, when anxiety is making life smaller, relief matters.

But curiosity gives us another place to begin.

Instead of immediately asking, “How do I stop this?” we can sometimes ask:

What happens just before it?

What does it seem to be anticipating?

What changes when I feel safer, more connected or more able to choose?

What might this response have learned somewhere along the way?

The goal isn’t to endlessly analyze anxiety or uncover a perfect explanation.

It is to understand enough of the pattern that something different becomes possible.

Change can involve more than insight

This is where therapy can become more than talking about what is happening.

Conversation may be part of the work. So might noticing what happens in the body, recognizing a familiar relational pattern, experimenting with a different response, using imagery or creativity, or simply having an experience unfold differently than expected?

Sometimes something shifts because we understand it differently.

Sometimes it shifts because we experience something different.

Often, both matter.

You don’t always need a better explanation. Sometimes you need a new experience.

Knowing yourself more fully

I don’t think the aim of therapy is to become endlessly self-aware.

It is to have more room.

More room to notice what is happening without immediately being carried away by it. More room to recognize an old response without assuming it is the only response available. More room to discover what you need now rather than automatically responding to what was needed before.

Understanding can be an important part of that.

But understanding doesn’t have to carry the whole burden of change.

If you’ve spent a long time trying to think your way out of anxiety and wondering why you still feel the way you do, perhaps the problem isn’t that you haven’t understood yourself well enough.

There may simply be more of your experience worth listening to.

~

Robby Shearer, RSW, SEP

Blue Swan Counselling