The originator of the acceptance-based approach to recovery from anxiety and panic attacks was Dr. Claire Weekes, an Australian physician. Dr. Weekes developed the approach based on her own experience as an anxiety sufferer and her subsequent recovery. She wrote a number of popular books on anxiety, and for the final 30 years of her life dedicated herself to helping others recover from this condition.
Many doctors and health practitioners have utilized her methods or variations of them, but many others to this day are unaware of her ground-breaking work. Considering the success that Dr. Weekes had in helping anxiety sufferers recover, and those that have followed in her path, it is surprising to me that acceptance-based treatment for anxiety is not more widely known and used. After more than 30 years trying just about everything I could find, this is the approach that finally worked for me. I firmly believe this is the only way to properly recover from the anxiety state.
Any attempt to change our anxiety simply makes it worse.
Other approaches such as Cognitive Behavior Therapy, affirmations, positive thinking etc. share some similarities, but I believe they have one fundamental difference – they try to change “negative” thoughts into “positive” ones. They attempt to “overcome our anxiety” or replace it with something “nicer”. Acceptance-based approaches do not seek to change things; changes happen organically, as a result of accepting everything we are experiencing.
Methods that attempt to get rid of anxiety through changes to our thoughts or moods, changes to our breathing, our posture etc. may help with mild forms of anxiety, but they encourage fighting, and fighting is what got us deep in the anxiety state in the first place, and is what keeps us there. When we are highly sensitized, our reactions are so strong, so ingrained and automatic, that any improvements from trying to change or suppress our anxious thoughts and feelings tend to be short-lived. It does not lead to recovery because we have not addressed the underlying habit of reacting to anxiety and its symptoms with fear (adding second fear).
Fighting against our anxiety makes it worse.
The act of fighting against (trying to stop, change, suppress or avoid) the anxiety actually adds energy to it, tending to ramp up our sensitization even further, and we may find that our anxiety returns with a vengeance. Acceptance on the other hand is very honoring and allows everything to dissipate naturally. It allows our minds and bodies to gradually and naturally heal themselves and return to normal. The healing process happens when we step out of the way, and no longer try to control everything.
I personally tried many different approaches over the years without success. I can say that all of them sought to change my mood or my thoughts one way or another. The problem was that my anxiety was so powerful that I could not make any significant or lasting changes in my level of anxiety.
One of these methods was exposure therapy where I deliberately exposed myself to situations with high levels of stress, sitting through them, and even attempting to provoke as much anxiety as possible. As I understand it, the idea was that the contrast would make me less sensitive to everyday situations when returning to “normal life”. Personally, I found this approach to be ineffective and actually traumatic. It left me shaken and more sensitized than before.
Pretending we don’t have anxiety when we do, makes it worse.
Affirmations and positive thinking didn’t work for me either. I believe now that’s because when I told myself I felt relaxed when I was anxious, my brain wouldn’t buy into the deception I was trying to pull on it, and my inner voice rebelled and said: “I am not calm! I’m anxious!” Telling myself to relax when I was genuinely anxious was trying to forcibly change things (fighting), and telling myself I was relaxed when I was feeling anxious was totally dishonest, and my brain knew this, and reacted by dismissively thinking “Yeah, right…“.
After many weeks and a lot of money, a course in hypnosis that promised complete recovery left me feeling lighter only in my bank account. A vast number of self-help books and courses were of little benefit to me either, and medication at best helped me cope by providing partial or temporary relief from my symptoms, but it was not a cure. The one thing that finally clicked and led me to complete recovery was acceptance.
Accepting our anxiety ultimately leads to complete recovery.
Right away, the difference I noticed with an approach based on acceptance was that it honored how I actually felt. It wasn’t making me wrong for the way I felt or the way I reacted to things; it wasn’t asking me to change in any way. It was simply asking me to learn how to accept who I was, and how I felt. Of course this wasn’t easy at first because I was conditioned to think that I had to change something in order to recover, and that accepting my anxiety and symptoms would mean they would never leave. Nonsense! I soon learned that when we accept our anxiety, we stop fighting it and feeding it energy, it expends the energy it has, and then it fades away naturally.
Now this is not a one-shot deal, or an instant cure. Our habits are deeply ingrained, so as we learn to accept things the anxiety may return many times. But each of these is an opportunity to further strengthen our ability to accept – which is the key to recovery. We keep practicing acceptance until our underlying sensitization reduces, and until we change our ingrained habits of avoiding and fighting the anxiety, to ones of facing and accepting it. Although this takes time, we will notice big improvements long before we recover.
Developing our good inner voices is the key to staying recovered.
To recover permanently, we must build our inner voices of truth and acceptance until they are invincible, while we establish a completely new relationship to anxiety. As we emerge from the anxiety state, suffering is replaced with peace, and with our unshakable inner strength we know we will never return into the depths of anxious suffering again.
