Recovery from Anxiety

Recovery from anxiety and anxious suffering is everything you hope for, and more. As someone who suffered for decades with anxiety, dreaming of finding a way to recover from that state, I can say that full recovery has greatly exceeded my dreams and expectations.

Not that I needed any further validation; my own recovery experience was enough to convince me of the effectiveness and power of acceptance. But many other sufferers who I personally witnessed recovering the same way have experienced similar transformations in their quality of life.

When we are in the midst of suffering from anxiety, all we really want is relief – right now – any way we can get it. If we have suffered for a while, we just want to return to how we were before we slipped into the anxiety state. If we have suffered from anxiety most (or all) of our lives, we just want to find a way to finally be free from the prison of anxiety and suffering.

During our failed attempts to recover, we may have had a number of brief periods of peace (peaceful interludes), only for the symptoms to return in full force. But what we really want is full and permanent recovery, not just temporary relief. This is where the Acceptance Method comes in. It is not a quick fix for our anxiety. While it may provide us some relief in the early stages, its primary benefit is in building long term improvements in our well-being, and ultimately it is the path to full and permanent recovery from anxiety and panic attacks.

There is no quick fix for true recovery. It takes time.

It would be much easier for me to promote this approach as a quick fix, and make promises that would turn out to be untrue, because when we are in the depths of suffering, all we want to hear is how we can feel better NOW! We really don’t want to hear it, but recovering the right way (fully and permanently) takes time.

This may be an unwanted truth, but it remains a truth about the nature of anxiety. It is not something we can change or work around, so this may as well be the first thing that we accept. Recovery takes time. But Oh, is it ever worth it!

Real improvements in our anxiety state are not just about feeling a bit better, but they are where we begin to change our way of responding to our symptoms, and lose our fear of the anxiety. Practicing “feeling better” does not lead to recovery. In fact it may have the opposite effect, because when we begin to feel better there is a real temptation to stop practicing the method with the belief that we have fixed everything. This is a trap. How we feel in any given moment (good or bad) is not an indication of our progress. Changing our way of thinking about and reacting to anxiety and its symptoms is what leads to recovery, and this takes time.

We will have glimpses of the peace that awaits us at the final station.

Eventually, application of the Acceptance Methods to our anxiety will lead to permanent improvement in how we feel, and an end to our symptoms. However, on the journey there, as we learn and ingrain this new way of thinking, we will have periods of suffering as well as periods of feeling good. We will have glimpses of the peace that awaits us at the final station on our journey, but we will also have some setbacks along the way.

It is vitally important that we recognize this, and that we do not judge our progress by how we feel at any given moment. We can have very early glimpses or even extended periods of peace, long before we are close to recovering. We will have many setbacks too where we go back to feeling like we have learned nothing and made no progress (even though we have). We can also have a severe setback when we are right on the verge of recovery.

It is essential that we learn to give up analyzing our progress, and to not keep assessing how we feel and making judgments based on that. Feeling good means nothing, feeling bad means nothing. We make progress whenever we practice the method. Practice = Progress, regardless of whether it makes us feel better or not in that moment.

Continued practice means continued progress, and ultimately leads us to recovery from anxiety, regardless of how we felt at any time along the way. In fact, we will realize it is the times we felt terrible, or had the most intense symptoms, that we learned the most. This is when we really learned how to face and accept everything.

Recovery is worth so much more than the time or effort it takes.

Recovery is worth waiting for. But be encouraged that you will experience lots of improvements along the way, long before you have fully recovered. In fact you will probably reach a point where your quality of life has improved so much that you no longer care how long full recovery is going to take.

So what does recovery feel like? I could write an entire book just on the ways in which my recovery has changed my life for the better. But to sum it up, it is really about anxiety completely losing its intensity, importance and control over my life. It used to dominate my thinking, affecting everything I thought about and everything I did. It swamped any good feelings or emotions that I had. It distorted my outlook on life and everything in it. That has all changed. While, as everyone does, I experience stress and occasional anxious moments caused by events in life, I understand myself so much better, and make decisions with ease and great clarity. Most of the time, I am completely at peace and content.

Here are some of things you can expect to achieve if you recover the right way: