Confronting Anxiety

The term avoidance gets thrown around very often in the mental health field. A lot of people say we shouldn’t avoid, we should confront. Well that is not necessarily helpful and people with severe anxiety know this all too well.

     Take the example of Tom, a teenager in highschool. Tom has a class presentation coming up and he is afraid of messing it up. Tom becomes scared about presenting but “confronts his fear” and presents the topic to the class. During the presentation, Tom’s symptoms become more severe and uncomfortable and afterwards he has a good deal of self-criticism about his performance. So when Tom’s next class presentation comes around, wouldn’t he feel more confident since he already confronted his fear before? Not for many people like Tom. In fact, many people would have more fear of the presentation. The uncomfortable symptoms they experienced during the previous presentation are in their memory. Their criticism of their past performance is still vividly remembered. And add onto that the ongoing fear that Tom initially had–messing up the presentation. The fear for Tom is not the presentation–the fear is messing up, discomfort, criticism, etc. 

     A female client once talked about her experience in this way: “I throw myself into situations I’m afraid of all the time. I am constantly trying to confront my fear and get over it but it doesn’t work. It just makes me feel more afraid and hopeless. There’s people who won’t be brave enough to do the things I do but somehow they get better and I don’t, how is that possible?”

     Many people find that the frequently used phrase ‘confront your fears’ helps in a lot of situations and for various reasons. But for many people, this statements is misused and/or misunderstood. The fear is within us, not in some situation or event. A lot of people are led to believe–‘the more exposure, the less negative symptoms.’ Well if that were true across the board then trauma wouldn’t be possible. We all have a certain zone-a tolerance-where we can be exposed to the fear enough to grow but not too much to stop us.

Some will say “The fear is going out of the house.” So we listen to the bootstrap advice of confront your fears and leave the house several times. But our fear not only persists but increases. What then? Didn’t we confront our fear? No. You went out of the house. That’s outside of the house, not your fear.

Be curious about what you are truly afraid of and try to find your appropriate exposure gauge. Find what is too much and what is too little. Some discomfort is great, it means we’re growing. But at what point does it hinder your experience and stop the growth and learning? We all have a different zone or tolerance level and we need to start where we are.