Anxiety as a Negative Trance

(The following is based on a print article that originally appeared in the April/May/June issue of "Open Exchange Magazine", 2009.)

There are many different kinds of anxiety, ranging from mild, free-floating feelings of unease to terrifying panic attacks. Some people experience anxiety in response to understandable triggers (deadlines, illness, arguments), others in response to factors that can be harder to pinpoint, like a change in the weather, decisions, or general overwhelm. For some, anxiety is a kind of background noise, continually present. People who are chronically anxious have often been so since childhood, when they may have experienced dysfunctional parenting, life disruptions, physical or sexual abuse, poverty, or even political trauma.

When there is a history of negative experiences, the mind expects something similar to happen again.  A negative projection about the future is made based on past negative experience.  This is another way of saying that anxiety is a bad habit in which the imagination, put to poor use, infects our more rational minds with fear.

Working on Your Own

Three Exercises to Interrupt the Anxiety Trance

Because anxiety largely originates from the imagination moving destructively between past and future, we can interrupt it by bringing the self firmly into the present moment.

Here are some ways to do that:

1. Breathe and Count:  The first step in reducing anxiety is to short-circuit the physical processes that go with it.  Whether you experience tightening of the chest, rapid heartbeat or a more elusive “hyper” or “suspended” feeling, you can reduce symptoms by breathing and counting from 1 to 3 on the in-breath, then 1 to 3 on the out-breath.  Keep breathing and counting till you feel a change. Keep bringing your focus back to the numbers until your mind begins to settle and clear.  One client tried this at home and said, “I did it for a couple of minutes and it didn’t work.”  So I said, “Try it for ten minutes.”  Be persistent.  It’s impossible to be highly anxious and to breathe deeply and regularly at the same time!

2. Do the “Five Senses Exercises”:  Make contact with each of your senses one at a time, noticing what each sense is registering outside the self and supply some detail for each sensory perception. Ask yourself, What am I seeing? What color or colors?  Oh, there’s the desk, a honey brown, there’s the tree outside, dark green. What am I feeling when I touch an object? I touch the arm of the chair, it’s fuzzy and warm.  I touch the table, it’s cool and smooth. Go through all the senses in this fashion, then begin again if necessary.  This aim of the exercise is to pull you out of the past and bring you firmly into the present moment.

3. Question Your Negative Forecasts: If you are aware of the thoughts or beliefs triggering the anxiety, you can question their validity by repeating the opposite message to yourself.  For example, if you have the thought, “I’m going to flub my presentation and my boss will fire me,”  you would try the opposite: “I’ll do fine and my job security doesn’t depend on one presentation anyway.” Here’s another example. Right now many people are worried about their financial future. If you have the thought, “The economy is going to continue to tank and I’m going to lose my job / never be able to retire,” try the opposite, “The economy will eventually improve / I have or can acquire the skills I need to survive.”

Of course, positive affirmations by themselves won’t change the future, but they draw your attention to the imaginary basis of your fear.   After all, why believe a pessimistic story more than a positive one? Since you’re the story-teller, why not take charge and rewrite the script? By trying on more hopeful variations of the original thought, you can begin to see the made-up nature of all the tales you tell yourself.

When You Need Help: If your anxiety is long-standing or the result of trauma, you will probably need someone to help you.

Working with a Hypnotherapist

Sometimes working on your own to “correct” anxious self-talk simply doesn’t work, even though you may be rational and persistent. You may feel on a gut level that your pessimistic projection is more “likely” because of your experience in a certain area of life. Returning to the example of weathering an economic downturn, someone whose parents experienced unemployment or poverty will suffer more anxiety than someone whose childhood was financially secure. An early researcher into stress, hypnotherapist David Cheek, M.D., theorized that severe stress causes an altered, hypnotic state of consciousness which encodes related problems and symptoms. (See summary in E. L. Rossi, Psychobiology, 39-40). In other words, stress and trauma cause us to go into a hypnotic state that preserves the feelings, thoughts and conclusions that occurred at that time.  This negative hypnosis can then be reactivated by subsequent stressful events.

Because stress and trauma cause the mind to go into spontaneous trance, it makes sense to address chronic anxiety by going back into hypnosis to unravel and rewrite the code.

Combining Affirmations with Hypnosis.
So you’ve done the breathing and repeated positive messages to yourself and are still suffering. When the deeper mind resists the light of logic, another approach is warranted.  Many people find that they achieve greater clarity and are more open to rational argument when in a hypnotic state. Here again, persistence and repetition are key. Remember, anxiety developed over time as a coping strategy, and it may take time to break the habit. A good hypnotherapist will make you a personalized CD or audio file leading you into a trance and repeating the affirmations you need to hear.

Regressing to the Origin of the Anxiety: Emotional Clearing. 
One client of mine was experiencing general anxiety around work. In a regression, she went back to some painful high school experiences, in which she’d been socially ostracized. Assuming a punk persona, she had found herself repeatedly threatened with violence.  In hypnosis, she had the opportunity to rewrite these memories. Using an imaginary pencil like the one in the child’s story, “Harold’s Purple Crayon,” she drew herself a whole new world. In her alternate reality, she went to an art school in Paris and spent time relaxing and painting by the Seine. She experienced a feeling of release around work, which I was then able to reinforce with positive hypnotic suggestions. This kind of work is accessible to everyone. People who have grown up with abusive or neglectful parents, without any positive relationships or experiences to draw upon, may find themselves creating alternate realities based on movies or even video games. These fantasies, however playful or fantastic, do serious work: they enable clients to contact some part of the self that is, in spite of everything, still healthy and capable of healing. Once accessed, that part can then be cultivated as a safe inner sancturary, the starting point of journey toward a more joy-oriented life.

Using Guided Imagery.
Occasionally I work with someone who cannot uncover the cause of an anxiety pattern or phobia, even in hypnosis. I had a client with a fear of traveling more than a few miles away from home. Crossing a bridge and taking an airplane were out of the question. She had a sense that her phobia had begun in high school but our attempts to understand it yielded no results. Sticking to a more straightforward approach, we used hypnosis to practice imagery of her moving a couple miles from home, then a few more, and so on, interspersing that imagery with affirmations, memories, and fantasies of a positive nature. Thus we gradually increased her tolerance of moving farther from home and were able to free her of her phobia.