You're listening to Take Out Therapy with your host, Rebecca Hunter. If you're into personal growth and fascinated by the human condition like I am, stick with me. In the next few minutes, I'll break down a common personal growth topic and give you some straightforward ideas for change.
I'm a private practice therapist and online mental health educator, so I see a lot of popular topics both in and out of the therapy office that we all struggle with. I'm here to help with that. This podcast is not a substitute for therapy, but rather the musings of a therapist and an opportunity for information and a little bit of help.
Okay, let's get to work. Hello, friends. I'm so glad that you're here with me as we finish up this conversation about anxiety, but are we finishing it up? That's the question.
My goal for today's episode is to help you start to understand what is required for healing from anxiety. The context in which I'm going to talk to you about that is like, what's the difference between healing and coping? Because it's confusing and a lot of people don't really understand the difference, but when it comes to anxiety, there's a big difference between coping with anxiety, coping with, and healing from. Hopefully, you've listened to the past two episodes where I talked with you about and helped you get some ideas about why you have anxiety, where that comes from, what the history is there, past, present, and future is kind of how we talked about it, right? What you've been through, what you're sitting in, and also anxiety's tendency to keep us stuck in the future, future tripping, as one of my clients calls it.
And then the second episode in the series was the reality of anxiety, which is just talking with you about what is life with anxiety look like and how does it impact the different areas of our life? So as we move forward today into the last part of this discussion, although for me, my friend, I'm an anxiety expert. I love talking about anxiety. So it's not the last part of the discussion for me because I'm always talking about it online, on my social media.
I have a private group on Facebook. It's called the Anxiety Recovery Club. And if you have any interest in kind of digging in further with me, that's a great place to do it.
I post every day and I'm just helping people to understand what we're going to talk about today, which is basically the difference between coping and healing. So what is recovery from anxiety? What am I even talking about? Well, as a person who has not only spent, well, thousands of hours face-to-face with people who are trying to recover from anxiety and helping them get there, as well as probably hundreds of hours sitting in learning environments around anxiety, like everything between, well, reading books, I guess would count, online courses, in-person seminars, whole weekends. I've had fun learning about anxiety, but most importantly for me, it's because I used to be really anxious.
And when I started to recover, I became really aware of like how different that was than coping. And I think the biggest signifier of healing that I can see in all the work that I've done and in my own experience is that when you've healed from anxiety, anxiety doesn't run your life anymore. Meaning it gets to take its place in life with the rest of the emotions, right? Like yeah, maybe we don't like being anxious, but it's just an emotion.
It's not basically like you wake up and you're really anxious and that determines what you do that day. Forget that, my friend. Healing from anxiety, it basically brings us from a life where we feel really victimized, frankly, and taken advantage of by anxiety and slapped around a bit by it, which I do not like to this more empowered state of like, okay, what's going on right now? And getting right to the heart of the matter so that an emotion doesn't continue to run our lives and turn into a state of being.
So that's kind of what I mean by recovery. So let's talk about coping versus healing. You know, when I get new clients in the office, one of the things that I always notice is that they are very identified with their anxiety.
They say, I'm anxious. My family was really anxious. Like a very common thing is like all the women in my family were very anxious.
Yes, my friend, we do come from, many of us come from families in which there was a lot of quote unquote anxiety. You know what was at the root of that? Some of us know, and some of us don't know, right? And we can say, well, my whole family's anxious. So it like runs in my family.
And that's true to a certain extent, because yes, when you're raised in an anxious environment, it tends to produce anxious adults, anxious kids, anxious people, right? But there's also a piece in there about, you know, the fact that we are really changeable in terms of the human experience, right? So healing helps you move from this kind of helpless place where you identify as an anxious person, like I am so anxious, my anxiety, right? To this more empowered place to be, which is like, I'm me, and I get to decide how my life is going to be. And yes, like, frankly, all the women in my family were anxious too. But I decided that I didn't want to be anxious.
I decided that I wanted to live differently than what I was taught and what I was cultured within my family to have going on. And so part of healing is that we have to sort of individuate a little bit. We have to pull ourselves out of the collective of anxiety and understand that like, we're a unique human being, we're our own person.
And we can actually change our beliefs about ourselves, frankly. And that will help us heal. Once we can understand that we don't actually have to be a certain way.
And we don't have to identify in this very narrow way of being in order to heal. So let me give you a little analogy to help you seal the deal on this difference between coping and healing. Say somebody called you up and invited you to go for a hike.
And you thought to yourself, well, I haven't done a lot of hikes. I don't have the right kind of shoes. I don't have the right kind of clothes.
I don't have that fancy pack that has the water spout coming out of it. But I want to hike. And so you kind of have two choices, right? Your answer can be, I'm not a hiker.
Right? And we do this so much of the time. Your answer can be, I'm not this way. Because you don't know how to be that way.
Does that make sense? Or your answer can be, like, can I borrow one of those fancy backpacks? What can I wear? Right? Like, I'm not a big hiker, but I'm totally willing to do it. Meaning you can either identify as having never done that before. Or you can start to open your mind a little bit and be willing to look at all the different ways that a person can grow.
So that's kind of the difference, right? It's like you either identify as, like, I'm anxious. I'm an anxious person. Like, I have anxiety.
This is what I have to do because of my anxiety, and this is how my life is. Or you can kind of step out of that and go, okay, let me think about a different way of living that doesn't include me identifying as this particular thing. Hopefully that makes sense for you.
You know, the other thing that I see a lot of the time that really differentiates for people what's coping and what is, like, healing from anxiety is that to cope, we are taught left and right, don't get me going on mental health treatment and stigma, but we're taught left and right about all these tools. All these tools. You should be using the tools and the skills.
You've got to learn the tools and the skills, and if you had the right tools, you'd use them at the right time in the right way, and then you wouldn't be anxious, right? And so you just start trying stuff, and I'm laughing because I've been there, right? It's like if anybody would have told me at a certain point in my life to just breathe through it, oh, it makes me feel a little bit violent, and it's super funny because, yes, of course, I do teach people to breathe in my practice, but I have to kind of go about it in this savvy way because we've been told so much, like, oh, it's just that you're not using the tools or the skills appropriately, but, you know, the tools and the skills and, like, in any moment, you and I both know if our kids are driving us crazy, a couple deep breaths is definitely going to help, but will it help us heal from anxiety? That's the difference. Like, we keep hearing, like, meditation, it's, you know, it will totally change your life, and if you have anxiety, it'll really help you, and you're right. It will really help, right? But is that healing? And I'm going to say, like, some of these tools and skills, it's kind of like throwing darts.
Well, let's go back to the hiking analogy, right? Throwing random tools and skills at anxiety in random times is like finding a trailhead and just going on it without having a map or a compass or anything else, right? And when the trail intersects another trail, just, like, picking away and going, like, it's fine. You'll have a nice hike, my friend, but you might get lost, and I'm worried about you. Because the thing is, is that we need a map.
We need, basically, in order to heal from anxiety and get it out of the driver's seat of our lives, we need to create brain-based change, which means you have to really learn about the brain-body connection in order to know, like, what tools and skills to use when, in what context whatsoever, right? Because without knowing that, it's like hiking without a map. I mean, you can hike, and you might feel better for a short time, but you're not going to get lasting change. When you heal from anxiety, you literally change your brain.
You change your brain. That's what we're talking about by neuroplasticity. You can actually structurally change the way things work within you, in your brain and your body, to be honest, so that you can have a different kind of life.
That's healing. That's not coping. That's healing, right? Coping will become something that you do when you have the emotion of anxiety, when something's flipping you out, when you made a mistake that you have to deal with, or I'm going into a difficult conversation, or you are worried about a kid and whatever their situation might be.
You'll be able to not let that run your life, but rather cope with it. Does that make sense? You'll have that map, and you're not just willy-nilly walking in the woods, because have I mentioned that's not a good idea, especially if you don't have one of those backpacks with the little squirty water thing? You want to be able to use the right skills at the right time in the right context in order to heal. That's kind of the fun thing about the work that I'm able to do with people, because I take them through a process that's really designed to help them heal, not just cope.
I teach them a couple coping things on the front end, and then we really get going with that process where we're learning about that brain-body connection, how exactly the brain can get changed, and working on that individuation and all those things all in a very refined order so that we're working with the brain in order to heal anxiety. The other thing is, and I always talk with my new clients about this, and it's my surfer analogy. The difference between coping and healing, we can kind of create this visual representation of a surfer on a surfboard in the waves.
If you're standing out there, and you're on your surfboard, and you're like, I hope a big wave doesn't come, and your stance is really, really tight, and you're worried, and you're resistant to the activity that you're actually involving yourself in, what's going to happen, friend? Well, what's going to happen is the wave's going to come, and you're going in the drink. You're getting wet, right? I use this analogy to sort of describe the difference between this stance that we take with anxiety, which is like we're on the struggle bus. We wake up every day hoping, like, oh, I hope I'm not anxious today, and well, what are we? Well, we're anxious today, right, and we're anxious about not wanting to be anxious.
Our anxiety about our anxiety causes us anxiety, and we don't have any faith or competence in ourselves to manage to deal with it. Basically, we're out on this surfboard, and we're just hating it, right? Even though we're in the water, we're basically resistant to where we are. The difference between that experience and being in the water on the surfboard and understanding that riding the waves is the whole flipping point, my friend.
Riding the waves is how we learn to heal. So when we're so tight like that, then we're just trying to get out of our reality rather than like, okay, I got anxiety. I'm really anxious today, right, and what can I do to understand my own ability to heal, for one thing, to be more open to curiosity and understanding of like, well, what is this anxiety, right, and you can go back to that past episodes, right, the roots, what is going on here, and be less resistant to what you're in will literally help you to begin to heal, but as long as you're resistant to it, you're standing on that surfboard so tight and so resistant that you're just, it's going to be too hard.
No healing can happen from there. So let me tell you three ways that you can start to get some traction if you want to heal from anxiety. So, you know, a part of my work and the reason I do this podcast and the reason I'm on social media, I could just have my private practice and things would be pretty simple, but one of the things I decided is that I want to help a lot of people and I've studied anxiety so much and I've had my own healing process from it and so part of the way that I wanted to do that was to make help more available and so that's kind of what I'm doing here.
So that's what I do kind of online and that's what I do within my online course. I have this online course that I'm getting ready to rebrand it, but right now it's called The Anxiety Course and it's basically like teaching people how to heal anxiety while coping with anxiety and the first thing that we really get at in this course is that we try to help people and you can kind of do this on your own if you want to, it's like change your concept around yourself and your anxiety. So are you one of these people that is very identified within anxiety? Like what's the impact of that, right? The impact of kind of working to change that concept of yourself because listen, you and I both know you're a lot more than anxiety.
Come on now. You have all the potential that any other person has, right? And you have as much worth and as much right to live a really rich life. So if this anxiety is getting in your way and you think that maybe you've identified with it, try monkeying around with that, right? Because as we know, if you're anxious, you'll raise anxious people and we don't want to do that.
We don't want to keep perpetuating it, but as long as we're identifying with it, that's what happens, right? And so once you change your concept about yourself and your ideas around this anxiety and kind of separate yourself out from it a little bit, that has an impact. And the impact is that you'll become more willing to heal, right? You'll raise your level of education about anxiety and you'll change your kind of belief system around this anxiety and the amount of space, frankly, that it gets to take up in your life. In my anxiety course, I teach people all about what the heck anxiety is.
We put it over to the side. We depersonalize it. Does that make sense? Like we just unhook it from ourselves so that we can like look at it objectively and start to deal with it.
The second thing that I would say will be really, really helpful as you get started on a healing journey is work with your brain, my friend. And if you don't know what that means, it's time for you to learn because when you start to understand how the brain works, how it changes and what's needed to impact that, it makes, it's a total game changer, okay? So working with the brain will impact what exactly you do in order to deal with your anxiety in any given moment. It will take into consideration context, meaning once you understand what's going on with your brain and your body, you can develop like a really individual plan of action for yourself, which will be way more effective long-term.
One of the things that I would say of like just off the bat, when you start learning about the brain, you'll learn that trying to make big changes, it, the brain doesn't like big changes, my friend. No, you can't do that. You can't be like every day I'm going to meditate for an hour, like no, your, your brain's not going to allow that.
And so you working with the brain would be like, okay, well I'm going to try to practice mindfulness for three minutes a few times a week. That's your brain will never even notice that's happening. So sometimes in working with the brain, you got to slip under the radar, right? From the safety monitor.
So you'll like what we do in the anxiety courses, we, we try these skills and these tools that we know about in the context of brain science, not in a complicated way, but just in a very like the brain likes this. The brain will do this. It won't do this.
This is how to change it. This is how not to change it, right? The other thing we do is we track progress. We track anxiety because we're generally people are very bad at tracking their own progress.
Like we always think we didn't make any progress, myself included, right? And so in order to gain insight about what's working and what's not working, there has to be a process for that. So that's kind of what I do in my online course. I really help people to come up with their individualized plan for healing their anxiety within the context of their own life and their own brain.
Does that make sense? And that's really fun to watch. You know, the last thing that I will say about this healing anxiety thing is that it ain't going to happen until you trust yourself, until you come into relationship with yourself and understand that you're completely capable of healing. Anxiety is not bigger than you, my friend.
Become in a relationship with yourself in which you are practicing some self-compassion and kindness in which you're playing around with some mindfulness. Those things have proven to be incredibly important in healing anxiety. And I teach them to my clients all the time.
I work with people around this in my online course. We do a lot of mindfulness and a lot of self-compassion. And I will say, in my own healing journey, being able to, first of all, understand my belief system, one of the things that became very apparent to me was that I was passing my anxiety forward, meaning I was like my kids were looking like they were kind of anxious and I'm like, oh gosh, I don't want that.
And so going back to my value system of like, no, no, no, no, that's not what I'm going for. I want to raise my kids to be really empowered. And so me getting empowered was what was needed in order to help them be empowered.
And the other thing is like just being willing to get educated about something that you don't know about. And that helped me a lot, too, is just really digging into anxiety and learning all about the mind-body connection. It's a little more complicated than we're led to believe.
I mean, if 30 minutes a day could solve the problem of anxiety, I would have signed up for that a long time ago. And then the last part is just like, you know, my own ability to rely on myself as my best source of healing. I hope that for you, too.
You know, part of why I do this work is because I want to help as many people as I possibly can with anxiety, with understanding themselves, with improving their mental health. So if you know anybody who would benefit from this content, send it on along. Because I'm teaching about mental health in order to teach people to get empowered over these things.
We can heal. And if we're willing, we are able. I promise you that.
There's not enough therapy to go around. But not everybody needs therapy. And so that's why I'm out here doing this work and creating things like my anxiety course, which is basically an online course for helping people to heal their own anxiety outside of the therapy office, maybe even without medication.
Can you imagine? One by one, I'm just going to keep plugging away on y'all and hoping that you see your own capacity for healing. I'll be here with you, providing you support and education, and most importantly, helping to reduce mental health stigma. Thanks for being here.
Before you go, I just wanted to let you know that if you like this episode on anxiety, head to my website because I've developed a custom made for you online class to help you ditch anxiety for good. Yeah, a therapist designed program for healing anxiety. It's called the anxiety course.
And it's been really fun for me to do this project and watch people heal, frankly, without having to go to therapy. It's possible, people, to heal without going to therapy. Examine your options before you pick one.
For more information on the anxiety course and some of the other things that I offer, head to my website at rebeccahuntermsw.com. If you like the podcast, it really helps this project if you subscribe, send it along to a couple of friends, and keep listening. We need more mental health education, people. That's what I'm doing here.
I have a lot of unpaid content that I put out, like this podcast, but I also have two paid programs, one for people who want to stop overthinking everything to death, and I also have an in-depth program for anxiety recovery. So if you want to dig into some work with me, get in touch. You can find me at rebeccahuntermsw.com. That's an MSW because I have a master's in social work.
A lot of people ask about that. And yes, I am a therapist, but this show is not meant as therapy, but rather education. Thanks for listening.
