Here is a piece I wrote a few years ago during my recovery journey on “facing” the anxiety. It was a situation where I gained a deep, deep insight into what the act of facing was all about. Hopefully, it helps to illustrate what “facing” looks like from the inside.
A few nights ago, I woke up experiencing some extremely intense feelings – fear, anxiety, alone-ness and depression. I got a sudden reminder of how incredibly powerful and convincing these thoughts and emotions can be. How they can make you believe there is absolutely no hope.
Though I am not sure how, my Voices of Truth & Acceptance kicked in. Even as I felt those powerful emotions, the inner voices reminded me what I had to do, and that they would pass. I admit I didn’t believe it 100% in that moment, but I set about facing the feelings. As I did this, I studied what I actually do. I’ve never actually been able to watch it in the middle of the moment before. I would just think about it afterwards. This time I really paid attention to the process of facing the feelings, and I gained a fresh and powerful understanding of it.
I am not sure how well it translates into words, but here goes…
First, I focused my attention directly on the feeling, the emotion. Not on any thoughts, just on the feeling in my gut. When I did this, it became more intense, or at least I felt it more intensely. I then noticed the intensity drop as my thoughts went to how awful it was, and how hopeless things seemed. Automatically I thought “What if this doesn’t go away”, or “What if this keeps coming back every night” and about how unbearable that would be.
I then had the realization that my mind was using these thoughts to avoid facing the feeling. So, difficult as it was, I kind of changed my focus to searching for that emotion, that feeling. As I did so, it became more intense again, and then even more intense until I felt I couldn’t take any more. At this point, I sort of pulled away again into my thoughts. Realizing this, I kept deliberately going back to it, trying as hard as I could to get more and more into the heart of the feeling. I made the goal to experience it as fully as I could and feel everything about it. As though I was trying to examine it, scrutinize it. But I did so with a sort of detachment. Interested, but not reacting to it.
I noticed how I searched for and approached the fear (going into the storm). The best way I can describe it is rather like the game “Hot or cold”. It’s a game of hide-and-seek with clues of “warmer” or “colder”. I felt like I was steering my focus to the heart of the feelings. Whenever the feeling got more intense, that meant I was “getting warmer”. When they started to fade it meant I was “getting colder”. As scary as it felt, I just kept trying to get closer to the center of the fear.
I am not sure how long I did this, – probably for about 10 or 15 minutes I would guess. At which time I drifted out of it naturally. I am not sure if the feeling faded or that I just stopped facing it. At some point, I went back to sleep.
On reflection, I understood (for the first time I think) how I used my thoughts to avoid facing. But also, early on when I was facing, I realized I was tensing against the intensity of the feeling (resisting/fighting). I could feel my struggle and remembered then that I should probably also sag. I added that to what I was doing, relaxing my shoulders, jaw and stomach muscles (the places I hold my tension) while I kept my focus on the fear and moved towards it. Sagging made a tremendous difference and made it much less difficult to move towards the fear. Previously, I had only sagged in between these intense experiences when the fear was much less. I had never considered doing so while in the act of facing something so intense. It seems rather obvious now, but it was a big “aha” moment for me.
I guess it may sound like I breezed through this experience. But I had to get past how utterly convincing these thoughts of doom were. It took some courage and a lot of determination to face and keep pushing myself back towards the fear.
This way of facing the powerful emotions was so different and felt so “right” that I knew I had taken another big stride forward on my journey to recovery.
