What Is My Anxiety Talking About?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

What is anxiety? This is an emotional reaction to danger, which is accompanied by various physiological symptoms - palpitations, perspiration, diarrhea, and rapid breathing. These physical phenomena can manifest themselves in both conscious and unconscious anxiety.

Mental conditions when anxiety occurs

1. Anxiety, like fear, is an emotional response to danger. Unlike fear, anxiety is characterized by uncertainty and vagueness. Anxiety is associated with the dread of the unknown.
2. Anxiety is caused by a danger that threatens the core of the personality. The vital values are different for different individuals. People experience different things as a mortal threat. The most significant and ubiquitous: life, freedom, children. However, it depends on the person himself what is the highest value for him: body, property, reputation, beliefs, work. Love relationship. Awareness of the conditions of anxiety makes it possible to better understand anxiety in neuroses.
3. Anxiety, unlike fear, is characterized by a feeling of helplessness in the face of danger. Helplessness can be associated with external factors: hurricane, earthquake. Or internal: weakness, cowardice, lack of initiative. Therefore, the same situation in different people can cause different reactions: either fear or anxiety. It depends on the willingness of the person to meet and overcome the danger.

There are three questions that help research anxiety:

1. What is at risk?
2. What is the source of the anxiety?
3. What is the reason for helplessness in the face of danger?

It is necessary to distinguish between "objective" anxiety and neurotic. "Objective" anxiety is caused by a really real danger. The neurotic anxiety is caused by imagination or its intensity is not commensurate with the actual danger.

Anxiety is a response to a threat to vital values. Therefore, it is important to investigate what is in danger, what values.

For different people, the answer is different. If a person is dominated by masochistic inclinations, then in therapy, he will experience dependence on the therapist as well as on the mother, boss or wife. He attributes to these people the magical power to destroy him, or to fulfill all his expectations. Those. his sense of security depends on dependence on significant people. Maintaining such a relationship is a matter of life and death for him. Any aggression on his part towards these people is frightening, he is afraid that this will cause a threat to be abandoned. Therefore, any manifestation of hostile impulses is alarming.

Another variant: if a person has a predominant need to seem perfect, i.e. its safety is based on compliance with certain standards, then the threat of violation of these standards and expectations is alarming. If a person has a standard to be meek, rational, serene, then even the prospect of an emotional outburst of hostility will cause anxiety in him. this deviation leads to judgment, and this is a deadly threat to the perfectionist. As a danger of being abandoned for a masochist.

For the narcissist, safety is based on being appreciated and admired. For him, the mortal threat is the loss of a privileged position. He may develop anxiety if he finds himself in an environment that does not recognize him. If the safety for a person is in fusion, then anxiety arises when he remains alone. If safety is in modesty, then anxiety arises when a person is in sight.

With neurotic anxiety - the inclinations of the neurotic are threatened, on the adherence of which his safety is based. If we understand the basic means for a given person to achieve security, then we understand what causes him anxiety.

For example: If a woman depends on her man, who provides her material and psychological security, then the threat of his loss (illness, another woman, departure to another country) may cause alarm.

The most common intrinsic factor in neurosis is hostility

What is the reason for this?

1. Any neurosis makes a person weak and vulnerable. A neurotic more often than a healthy person feels rejected, insulted, offended and therefore more often reacts to this with anger and hostility.
2. The neurotic is afraid of people and does not dare to confront them.

Therefore, it is important to ask what exactly is threatened by the emergence of hostility. There is always some value behind it. For example, the pursuit of independence can create anxiety if the addicted relationship provides security.

Sometimes one tendency can hold back another. For example, an obsessive tendency to modesty will curb obsessive ambition. And it keeps balance and anxiety will arise only when the balance is disturbed.

Human anxiety, according to Karen Horney, is a consequence of an unconscious dilemma within him. And overcoming anxiety pushes to search for the nature of this dilemma. A correct analysis of a situation that causes anxiety is one of the important conditions for understanding a person's inner conflict and overcoming his anxiety.

(based on the theory of neuroses by Karen Horney)