Taking the power back means changing the way we perceive the attacks and the anxiety. We see them as being life threatening, or a threat to our sanity, or as causing us severe embarrassment. There is no doubt the anxiety can cause extreme discomfort and the attacks can feel quite violent, but they are not life threatening, nor a sign of impending insanity. We may feel as though we will be significantly embarrassed, but what is embarrassment? It is a state of mind, produced by the way we think and a point I will return to shortly. We compound the disorder by continually thinking about ‘worst case scenarios’. We need to see the anxiety and the attacks for what they really are: anxiety and attacks. Nothing more.
Our thinking is so much a part of us, we don’t pay any attention to the process. Without realising it our thoughts create, dictate and control our life. All of us know the endless silent conversations, the chattering thoughts and the continual negative cycles of thinking. They roll along, carrying us with them. Yet it need not be like this. We can step in and take the power back by learning to control them. We don’t have to be dictated by them. We can dictate to them. The ‘what ifs’ and the self absorption are part of the control we all use. Although we need to let go of them, we can also learn from them. We are creating the fear by the way we think. The ‘what ifs’ and the continual monitoring of our symptoms don’t protect us or provide us with an ‘early warning system’, because they create the very symptoms we are trying to protect ourselves from.
We never take time to examine our thoughts. We don’t even realise we can. We never watch the internal world of our thoughts as it spins this way and that. We react to our thoughts without realising they are actually separate fleeting moments in time. We don’t see this separateness. Instead, we believe we have no power over the continual progression of these thoughts, and the feelings caused by them. We don’t see how our feelings can change within seconds of a change in our thought pattern. We can be calm one minute and anxious the next. Not seeing the progression from one thought to another and thus not seeing the progression from one feeling to another, makes it appear our anxiety and attacks are beyond our control. They aren’t.
Our thoughts create the fear, which creates its own symptoms. The symptoms create the ‘what ifs’, which creates further symptoms. It is not so much the original stress which perpetuates the disorder, as the stress of the disorder itself. We need to be able to see how we create this stress by the fear of what we are thinking.
We need to be in control of ourselves and our environment, yet the only thing we do not control is our thinking. We need to change this by letting go of the overall need to be in control, and control our thinking.
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