Unmasking Anxiety: Clues From A Maryland Anxiety Therapist
How Do We outsmart anxiety?
Maybe THIS time it’s a real ghost? Become an anxiety detective with a Maryland therapist, specializing in anxiety treatment in Maryland.
One of the things that can be so maddening about anxiety is how it just keeps popping up in so many different ways. We finally get a handle on how it shows up in one area of our life, and then it sneaks up on us somewhere else. I’m a Maryland therapist that specialized in anxiety treatment and have learned to find clues about how anxiety works. Let’s figure out how we can outsmart it a bit.
take a ride in the mystery machine
I’m going to just go ahead and show my Gen X age here and let you know that I watched A LOT of episodes of the Scooby Doo cartoon as a kid. If you aren’t familiar with Scooby Doo, every episode involved a group of teenagers with wildly different personalities (plus the dog, Scooby Doo) setting out in their groovy van (The Mystery Machine) to solve spooky mysteries about ghosts, mummies, and monsters of all sorts that were running around and causing trouble. In every episode, this gang escaped danger, solved the mystery and order was restored.
Spoiler alert: there were never any monsters
How about THIS time? Will we be fooled again?
Now, I’m not saying I was a crime solving genius as a child, but I did find it odd that the characters in the show were always falling for the idea that it was some supernatural monster that was the problem. All of us kids at home, in our pjs, with our bowls of cereal, knew that it was never really a monster—it was always some old dude dressed up in a spooky costume, scaring everyone, usually for reasons of greed or gain. (So the real monster was capitalism, amirite? I digress...) But week after week, the mystery gang would get all freaked out and be running scared from the ghost/mummy/monster of the week. Eventually they’d figure out the mystery, trap the villain and unmask him before dispatching him off for justice.
We kids at home were often wondering why they didn’t figure it out quicker and just tackle that dressed up villain and pull the mask off from the get-go, knowing that it’s never been a real monster before and probably isn’t real this time either. Of course then we’d have a very short cartoon episode, and it wasn't the formula of the show. We baby detectives at home were always going to be smarter than those cartoon teens. Nice ego boost though!
wasn’t this a blog post about anxiety?
Oh, yes, anxiety. Ok, here’s my theory (definitely not peer reviewed, written in scientific journals, etc), after many years of working as an anxiety therapist in Maryland: Anxiety is a bit like a Scooby Doo monster. Hear me out. People can come into therapy with symptoms that look pretty different on the outside: perfectionism, procrastination, irritability, difficulty concentrating, or insomnia. Now, these can be symptoms of a variety of different things so a careful intake and evaluation helps sort out what’s what. But folks are often surprised to learn that these can all be manifestations of anxiety. Anxiety isn’t just being nervous or worried.
We might accept and understand that it has been anxiety that’s been making things tough in one area of our life, but are sometimes surprised when we turn our head to examine another area of our life that’s been challenging and find anxiety hiding in there too. It was buried just under the mask of the outer behaviors that fooled us into thinking the problem was something else! When we become better anxiety detectives, we unmask it quicker and find that we can adapt and use anxiety management skills and tools that we’ve successfully learned to use in other areas of life. Otherwise, we can spend a lot of time running around in circles, with a mistaken idea about what the real problem is to solve, like the Scooby gang.
When it’s anxiety, the call is coming from inside the house.
tell me you have anxiety, without telling me you have anxiety: Clues in Anxiety Treatment
Since we’ve established that anxiety isn’t just about being nervous and worried, we can get curious about the things that get under your skin, cause you to lose your cool, or just make life harder for you on the regular. On the outside, maybe it looks like irritability or distraction, but sometimes, when we get under the surface a bit, it turns out that anxiety is a factor. Get super bent out of shape when plans change? Spend three hours putting off a task that ends up taking 10 minutes to do? Find yourself constantly people-pleasing and avoiding setting boundaries with others, even when every single person is on your last nerve? Always busy but don’t feel like much gets done? Stomach often out of whack, despite a clean bill of health from your doctor? Again, there may be a bunch of things at play here and a careful evaluation is important, but I would not be surprised to find anxiety hanging out backstage from any of these kinds of behaviors and symptoms.
Anxiety therapy maryland, Online & in College Park, MD
I hope that this helps you become a better anxiety detective so you can unmask anxiety quicker and solve the mystery of what might be challenging for you. If you would like to partner with an experienced anxiety detective, I offer online anxiety therapy in Maryland and in-person therapy in College Park, MD. Please contact me to arrange for a free 15-minute phone consultation. In addition to anxiety treatment, I also offer hypnotherapy, mindfulness-based therapy and coaching. Wishing you a week full of fun adventures and snacks.
