Anxiety

Anxiety

Anxiety and depression are highly correlated. Some 60% of patients with depression occasionally have an anxiety disorder and vice versa. Are these then different manifestations of the same condition rather than different conditions?

Fear does not exist in the outside world. It only exists in the mind. Children learn to be afraid of things mainly by watching their parents or other role models react in a frightened manner to the object of anxiety (after which this object of anxiety may become generalized or specialized). An anxiety, or even a phobia, then becomes the externalization of a subconscious pattern of anxiety/phobia. One cannot consciously decide to be anxious and so be anxious without subconscious involvement. Equally, one cannot consciously get rid of an anxiety/phobia. However, one can consciously set the goal to get rid of it. When properly communicated to the subconscious, this goal becomes the goal of the whole person and the anxiety/phobia disappears.

It is clear that anti-anxiety medication gives only a symptomatic relief. But the same can be said of behavioral therapy. It is a fight against the symptom (the phobia) and thereby ‘cures’ the symptom by knocking it down. What further happens with it under the surface is a big unknown.

Anxiety sprouts from the subconscious when it is seen as the enemy, amorphous and hostile. Therefore autosuggestion has to be used carefully, but is in fact -as in the case of a depression- the very thing that the anxious person needs: to stand in closer contact with the self/subconscious and by this to learn to appreciate it as something that can be the source of much health. Autosuggestion provides communication and the means for cooperation. An anxious person who cures himself becomes much more powerful as an individual.

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