Almost everything we do in life involves relationships of one kind or another. Whether it is dealing with the local supermarket checkout assistant, bringing up children, interacting with colleagues in the workplace or talking to your child’s teacher at Parents’ Evening.
Work with some of my clients has involved exploring such normally routine exchanges which for them, have been laden with anxiety, dread and fear. I’m sure some of us are able to identify other certain situations which raise stress levels such as a job interview or meeting a new group of people.
Sometimes a feeling of anxiety can be a normal, appropriate, healthy response. Where things become more difficult is when stress and anxiety reach such a level as to stop us doing the things we want to. At times like this the feeling of insecurity that it can bring is so overwhelming that it is almost impossible to focus on anything but being scared.
For others, however, anxiety is a constant where it affects almost every aspect of their lives. Anxiety seems ever present, always there in the background, inexplicable and perhaps inducing a real sense of dread in anticipating the next stressful situation. It is common for one’s thinking to be dominated by trying to avoid that social encounter or by planning how to get away.
The curious thing about how we handle relationships of any kind now, in the present, is the effect on us of relationships in our earlier life. Most of us were influenced by significant people in our earlier lives and it is how we experienced, or interpreted our relationships back then that can drive our feelings and behaviour now.
Simply put, we ‘learned’ how to behave in response to our unique emotional experience of relationships with parents, family members, teachers and other ‘important’ people as we were growing up.
Of course many relationships are remembered as warm, nurturing and helpful. Unfortunately for some however, relationships or aspects of them with certain people were less than healthy, or at least perceived as such. Here, perhaps the response to experience of trauma, discomfort, humiliation, abuse, loneliness contributed to feelings such as helplessness, resentment, low self worth. Often protective or defending behaviour of self was developed in order to survive emotionally as a child.
As we grow into adulthood aspects of this earlier ‘survival’ behaviour can remain as well as those feelings of fright, humiliation, anxiety that we so acutely experienced earlier on. These feelings may be ever present now or lay dormant until a certain situation arises. Seemingly routine things like queuing alone in the post office, waiting in the school playground to collect the kids, fear of being shouted at by the husband, fear of social settings or parties.
The thought of these kinds of scenarios can trigger echoes from the past and the ‘learned’ and by now, instinctive behaviour kick in. This means that feelings and behaviour th....................