Individual Counseling

Some things we can work on:

 

1. Start focusing on yourself. If you want to lower anxiety, you have to understand how you currently manage it. But anxiety wants us to stay focused on everyone else and what they’re doing wrong. It wants us to ask questions like “Why?” so we can have someone or something to blame. The challenge is to start treating yourself like a research project and notice what you do to manage anxiety in yourself and in relationships.

 

2. Practice separating your thinking from your feeling. Anxiety is very good at distorting reality and making you sense imagined threats. Your level of differentiation is your ability to separate your thinking from your feeling, what’s real from what’s imaginary.

 

3. Practice differentiating your thoughts and emotions from those of others. Your level of differentiation is also your ability to separate how you feel and think from how others feel and think. People with lower levels of differentiation are less emotionally separated from their families, and they have a harder time thinking for themselves.

 

4. Observe how you borrow functioning from others. The pseudo-self is the part of your functioning that is changeable based on relationships with others. Our pseudo-self can[…]” “of strength, importance, or calmness; this puts our functioning and our mood in the hands of others, which keeps us vulnerable to stress.

 

5. Begin to define your beliefs and principles. People who are working on their level of differentiation will begin to more fully develop their beliefs and guiding principles. They are willing to refrain from doing what they automatically do to manage their anxiety and direct themselves by their own thinking.

 

6. Practice defining yourself in significant relationships. This practice of defining self happens through contact with significant people in your life. Defining oneself may temporarily increase anxiety, but over time it will lower chronic anxiety in yourself and the relationship.”