What Anxiety "Is Like"

In my previous blog I focused on the Roots of Anxiety. These Roots must be taken seriously and be dealt with if you wish to overcome your dilapidating anxiety.

These Roots are:

1  The fear of dying or Death itself.

2  The fear of dark Fate (or the Loss of Control)

3  The fear of the loss of Meaning or Significance.

4  The fear of Condemnation and Rejection

Dealing with these Roots presents a major threat for the patient, escalating their levels of anxiety. This mere fact makes it extremely difficult for the patient experiencing anxiety to reach a point of healing.

Dealing with your Root of Anxiety means that you must “face” the Root, acknowledge it (and not belittling it) and take the Root of Anxiety “upon” yourself.

This requires large quantities of Courage.

Where do one find the Courage to deal with the Roots of your Anxiety?

“Is Like” Therapy

To help patients experiencing disruptive anxiety, I have developed my “Onto-Hermeneutical Pastoral Therapy”.

What on earth does this mean?

“Onto” is the Greek word for “existence”, the fact that every human being “is” there on earth.

“Hermeneutical” means “explaining”, “give meaning to”. To understand our world and to make sense out of it, we must assign meaning to everything that’s part of our life.

When we are faced with something we don’t understand, we use “is like” statements to make the meaning of something clear to others.

When we struggle to describe a particular scent, we may try to explain: “It smells like a rose”. Now we can “place” the smell and give a meaningful explanation to others.

In fact, everything we encounter in our daily lives makes sense to us because everything “is like”. We “know” a table is a table because this table “is like” other tables we have encountered. And therefor we name this table, well yes, a table. And we will “place” a table in a room where a table belongs and where it should be.

We “place” things within the scope of other “things” that belongs to the same “is like” category.

Accordingly, we “name” things according to the “is like” category it belongs.

When we cannot “name” something, it becomes a something, and consequently we cannot understand what it is and what the meaning of this something is. We cannot tell what it “is like”.

The Greek word “ontho” means “is”, “to exist”.

The Greek word hermeneua means “give meaning”, “is like”.

An “Is Like” therapy helps patients to assign meaning to their world and experiences, helps them to find their “place” in their world and to exist with purpose.

Courage

Where do one find the Courage to deal with your anxiety?

In order to deal with our anxiety, we must understand what our anxiety “is like”.

Watch this video to see what Anxiety Is Like.

Anxiety is like entering a dark room.

You cannot see what is going on in the room.

The dark figure you see against the window is like, looks like, a hunchback thief. And something is very wrong for a hunchback thief to be in my room!

How do I deal with the hunchback thief?

By lighting a small flame like a candle.

Looking at the threat after lighting a candle, I discover that the thief in truth is my coat hanging over the coat hanger.

I immediately rename, re-assign the meaning of the threat from a thief to a coat.

Where do one find the Courage to deal with your anxiety? You light a candle.

It is like lighting a candle in the dark. Now you rename things that seems like a threat, but in truth is like those things we aptly call a coat.

Now you have the Courage to enter the room and “take on” the things in the dark.

And “the things” in the dark are:

1. The fear of dying or Death itself.

2. The fear of dark Fate (or the Loss of Control)

3. The fear of the loss of Meaning or Significance.

4. The fear of Condemnation and Rejection

Next time we will discus how one “light your candle”.