The only reason you would pay someone to help you manage your anxiety is because of the promise that it works. The idea is that you pay someone, they do their magic, and after some time you are able to get your life back to normal because anxiety is not the driving force in your life. But as with all things, it will take time.
But how much time should it take?
It’s so interesting when I get a new client, and at the back of their mind, usually, is the idea that because they’re paying me to help them, that somehow it’s like magic and I will be able to ‘cure’ all their ills, quickly, quickly being in a few weeks.
Sorry to burst your bubble but any credible therapy/coaching takes time. And why? Because your thinking is like a telephone network where each thought can trigger another thought, and another and another, and finding the thought that sets of the chain of events, takes some investigating into.
And where does that investigation logically start? It all starts with your goals, your wishes, wants or desires. Remember back to a time when you wanted to go out and relax, have a good time without the voices in your head harping on the same points that it’s been harping on about and not seemingly to let go off, and that voice spoiling your event because now you aren’t present, all you are feeling is anguish because of your thinking.
In this scenario, your wish might be simple, to spend some time out with friends and not have that inner demon do its work and spoil things for you. With this in mind you go along to your therapist, counsellor, coach, mental health professional and you convey that you want to feel relaxed and at ease in a social setting.
Your therapist duly notes this and starts to take you through the process. But after a few weeks you’re not relaxed in that social situation, but you’ve been assured that it will just take time until the therapy kicks in, until then things will stay basically the same.
This is when you should start to worry.
You should start to question the validity of any process that doesn’t yield results in both the short term and long term. Now of course it also depends on the outcome you want, but there should be some traction towards that goal in real life, because if there isn’t then something is amiss.
How To Tell If You’re Making Progress
I frequently get my clients to draw a T chart of two columns. On one side is progress and the other, no progress or ‘stuckness’, and depending on whether we are talking about inner thoughts or outward behaviours, depends what I ask them to write in each side.
So let’s say for arguments sake that we are talking about rumination, and how the thoughts won’t let us go and makes us stall, give up or move slowly towards what we want. These ruminations can often be accompanied by such words as – ought, ought to; got to; need; must; should; shouldn’t. So if you find yourself doing something with any of these words in that sentence then you know that this isn’t progress because these words indicate negative aspects to taking action.
For instance think of the difference with ‘ I should speak to them because it would be rude of me if I didn’t’ versus ‘I’d like to speak to them because it might be pleasant’
On the face of it, that small self talk can seem inconsequential but the ‘I should…’ can and often does put pressure on you which can aggravate your anxiety whereas I’d like to… is neutral or even positive.
So you know which words indicate a trigger for anxiety and which ones don’t and you go about your day to day business. You’ve seen your therapist and they know your goal is to be comfortable in such situations. But you’ve just given them a vague goal of wanting to feel better, feel more confident or feel more at ease and they seem to know what you want. Only weeks later you still feel uncomfortable and you think it’s because your case of anxiety must be a particularly deep and difficult one to shift and that’s why you aren’t making progress.
Small Steps, Big Rewards
Though anxiety is a complex thing to shift, progress can been seen after the first hour of therapy or coaching if you are clear on your goal, and you have clear success criteria. And this is where things might be going awry because if you don’t have
- clear goal
- clear progress criteria
then how can you know if you are making progress? The answer is you can’t. And in some cases you might not be and that’s why if after weeks of wanting a thing to change and it’s not, then you need to look at the goal, and ask yourself these two questions.
- Is my goal/outcome clear and specific ( and does my therapist have the same picture of what this is as I do)?
- Do I have a clear and specific progress criteria ( and does my therapist give this to me or help me formulate one)?
Answering these questions helps you to know and be able to track your progress, if your therapist doesn’t do this for you.
Let’s Just Talk
And that’s the other thing to mention here, if your goal is just to talk with no particular outcome but to just get things off your chest, then you don’t necessarily need a progress criteria, but if you are one of my clients, then we work solely on progress not just talk and so there will always be a success/progress criteria to measure yourself against.
What this all means is that even though anxiety is not always straightforward to shift, progress can be seen as early as the first session if you have the right goal and measurement of success, without it you are whistling in the dark, as they say.
Progress in Action
So to get back to our previous scenario, if you know that you feel anxious but don’t always understand why, then now you have a tracking system. So you go out, mingle, talk, laugh, but then you start to feel anxious, worried, distracted, and because of your tracking system, you note that your inner voice is saying – I shouldn’t have said that…. I wish they wouldn’t look at me like that…. I need to relax and just enjoy this but I feel uncomfortable….
This is your progress system in real life, because now you can see that you aren’t actually making progress and this is why. So after noting this and with your therapist working specifically on such events, the next time you socialise, you note that the ‘shouldn’t’ and ‘musts’ are not present or they are there less of the time, – this is progress and you’ve noticed it. And because you’ve noticed it you can be assured that whatever it is you are doing with your therapist, is working.
Hope this helps clarify things
Speak soon
Elaine
