EP 128 - Is Anxiety Your Enemy Or Your Teacher?

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Ask yourself a question.  Is your anxiety your enemy, or is it your teacher?  Most of you are going to immediately tell me that you see anxiety as an enemy.  It lurks in the shadows, stalking you day and and day out, always ready to attack.  Your anxiety drives you to do things you do not want to do.  It drives you to eliminate and avoid parts of your life that desperately want back.  Anxiety is clearly your enemy, right?

(For full show notes on this episode visit theanxioustruth.com/128)

It is not.  Anxiety  - when dealing with the anxiety disorders I am always addressing - has never been your enemy regardless of how much you may hate and fear it.

How do we learn once and for all to “believe” that we are safe even when afraid?  By allowing the fear and the anxiety themselves to be your teachers.  That’s right.  Anxiety and fear MUST be your teachers if you are to achieve true and lasting recovery.  We must be willing to face our anxiety and the associated fear, building a new relationship with it based on dropping all the old fight or flight responses.  When we face it fully and allow it to do the worst we can imagine, we learn through real experience that it cannot.  When we do this, anxiety becomes our teacher.  It teaches us clearly that he has no teeth.  The lesson we must learn is that the dragon breathes no fire and cannot kill us.  We can only learn this lesson by letting the dragon show us.  The dragon - your anxiety - must teach you how to recover.  You must embrace it as your teacher and stop declaring it your enemy.

Takeaways:

1. You’ve positioned fear as a threat that you need to run from or fight, but there is a third option--embracing it and learning from it.
   
2. Your fear is real; the basis for it is not.  This is why anxiety is NOT your enemy and never has been.
   
3. Do not try to erase your fears. It is human to fear, and you will never succeed in erasing fear from your life! Our goal here is not to become fearless, but to learn that the fear you’ve been hiding from and fighting has been baseless.
   

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Music Credit: "Afterglow" by Ben Drake (facebook.com/BenDrakeMusic) with permission

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