- How can we help clients
when they're overcome with anxiety?
Well, Linda Graham believes
that to manage anxiety, clients need to feel it first
in their body.
Once they do that,
Linda has several useful methods
that she uses to help her clients work
through their anxious feelings.
- When people are experiencing anxiety,
which is a revving up of their nervous system,
too much spikes of the sympathetic nervous system,
we can feed that anxiety by worry and rumination
that comes from the default network mode
of processing in the brain.
What if, what if?
And we can pull out of that worry
and rumination if we focus our attention
on something specific.
Something physical in the body.
The breath.
The touch of the hand on the heart.
The feelings in the feet.
And we can also dissipate the anxiety
by taking action by moving the body
in a purposeful way, by taking action in a purposeful way.
Getting anxiety under control
really means regulating the nervous system
to come back into the baseline physiological equilibrium
that's known in trauma therapy
as the window of tolerance.
If the somatic tools, that we've using about, aren't enough
to regulate the client's nervous system,
then we use the social engagement system,
me interacting with the client
so that the calm that I feel
in my body can entrain the client
to feel the calm in their body.
Light eye contact if they can tolerate that.
My tone of voice and my prosody of voice,
my facial expressions, my body language
and my body gestures.
That communicates to them,
and of course, it's all communicated non-verbally,
unconsciously, that they're safe with me.
So this is all from the work of Stephen Porges
and his Polyvagal theory
about the social engagement system
that regulates the nervous system.
My ventral vagus is regulating me
but it's entraining the client to regulate them.
Now, when the client begins to experience
that their nervous system
can be regulated, then they can learn
to do that for themselves.
And perhaps even by thinking of people
who know them who are calm
and then they can feel that calm as well simply
by remembering those people.
And the client may have a story
about what's causing that anxiety
and what they need to do to fix it
so that they'll feel better.
But anxiety is really the body's response
to danger, to uncertainty,
even to something that's unknown or unfamiliar.
So I used body base somatic tools
like hand on the heart, like affective breathing.
So when people experience anxiety,
the feeling in the body
can be so difficult to manage
and it feels so real,
it feels like an emergency right now
and so people wanna do things
to fix that emergency right now
and very often, people will focus
on something outside of themselves
to fix that emergency.
And really what helps people overcome anxiety
is to be able to become calmer
in their own body.
And that's counterintuitive.
When people are experiencing anxiety,
they're arg, but to go back into the body
with breath, with touch, with movement
and to begin to experience,
sure, I'm having anxiety right now
but I have the tools I need to manage that.
But mindful self-compassion is one
of the fastest ways people can break the automaticity
of that anxiety.
If they simply put their hand on their heart
and say may I be kind to myself in this moment,
it changes their nervous system to do that.
They don't even have to think about having the answer.
It just simply begins to calm down their nervous system.
The same with hand on the heart.
If they put a hand on their heart
and remember feeling safe and loved and cherished
with someone, that calms down the anxiety.
It can even keep the anxiety from arising
in the first place maybe.
Part of what keeps people from overcoming
their own anxiety
is that they don't know that they can.
And they don't know how to.
And once clients learn how to
and they learn that they can,
then they can begin to remember some
of the tools they have
to actually begin to calm down that anxiety.
So they can stop believing the anxiety
and they can start believing themselves.
- What tools do you use
to help clients work through anxiety?
I'd like to hear about it from you.
Please leave a comment below.
And thanks for watching.
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