Anxiety, a transpersonal message from the psyche

ANXIETY IN THE COLLECTIVE

Over the years of studying and practicing psychotherapy, I developed a genuine inquisitiveness about anxiety and how it manifests as the main collective symptom in our contemporary world. In my private practice, I noticed three different qualities regarding experiencing change: certain changes would come effortlessly, others would require strong will, and some others would be charged with a deep sense of anxiousness that would make us question our sense of identity. This third quality of change intrigued me the most because it seems that each time we come close to understanding why change is necessary in our personal and collective lives we tend to feel very anxious. This force of change doesn’t have a linear line we could follow; in a peculiar way, unrelated aspects of our lives are affected by it.

Change provokes fear because it throw us to unknown regions of our psyche; at times we feel that we have no control over the course of our lives, that something bigger than ourselves, which we can not communicate with directly, is in the ‘driver’s seat’. We may feel sad because certain people, places, or professional environments can no longer be part or lives; in some circumstances, there might be an unexpected, sudden disruption, which may give us no time for self-reflection or a conscious reaction to the situation.

Somehow, the underlying current of anxiety would give us a paradoxical sense of psychological tension. There is something we cannot bear any longer, which at the same time we don’t want to give it up. If we are resistant to change we feel irritable and unsettled within ourselves. And thus, change that is not understood makes us anxious.

Change is also reflected in the expression of the collective. The contemporary collective is infused with anxiety, and that is a good indication that our evolutionary needs for inner growth are not supported by our external shared reality (Wilkinson, 2001). There are mixes of feelings, which pervade the collective. For example, some of these are: a sense of dissatisfaction with materialism and religious sectarianism, guilt for allowing starvation and poverty, funding wars for no humanitarian reasons, polluting Earth with nuclear waste; having fear for terrorism, experiencing uncertainty of economic status. Not to mention, the human collective encounters the existential fear of aloneness, deteriorating health, aging and death.

All these conditions are seemingly haunting us as our personal concern. There are various spiritual and educational movements, which emphasize personal responsibility and thus helps us understand how our interior world affects our external conditions. Anxiety points out that we are caught in repetitive cycles of collective experiences which have accumulated an energy that is opposed to our mental equilibrium. The very fact that we are anxious indicates that the integrity of the Self pushes for its freedom and yearns to take a new direction of life experience.

RELEVANCE TO INNER GROWTH

I propose to understand anxiety from a transpersonal perspective. There is an innate force within our psyche that pushes for growth. Feeling anxious becomes a signal, an impulse that emerges from the authentic self for personal transformation. Change makes us anxious because it implies that in order to create something new (the unfamiliar) the old (the familiar) has to die. Yet, we have to pay attention to our symptoms. If you are in pain, if your life is not rewarding you with energy, if you are not happy, if you feel unsettled with your situation, then it is a good indication that something is missing. From the transpersonal point of view, your external life is not in synch with your internal process; your physical world is not in harmony with your spiritual aspiration, in other words, body-mind-spirit fall out of balance.

Perhaps, change is not an obvious need, but your symptoms are providing the message for change. By holding on to values and attitudes that do not serve the integrity of your Self and inner growth, at some point, the unconscious will start to communicate to consciousness an impulse of anxiousness. This sense of uneasiness will be present in different aspects of your life.

THE TRANSPERSONAL APPROACH

A transpersonal approach to counseling is the appropriate therapeutic model that can facilitate your self-development with the complexity of your deeper sense of anxiety because it promotes tending that which needs to be expressed by the authentic Self. In my work, I offer a larger framework because I pay attention to all dynamics within your individual and collective environment in order to understand the various symptoms that anxiety provokes during your process of self-development. The transpersonal approach is a wonderful therapeutic that can help you understand how your issues and worries are entwined with your inner struggle for personal growth.

For instance, I worked with a male client, whom I will call Peter. Peter was experiencing at the time a great degree of anxiety by putting a lot of effort into his survival in a highly competitive social environment. He complained of having frequent headaches, feeling tired and having less motivation to spent time with friends and his family. He would wake up often during the night. This client is a parent who commutes everyday to his stable job, who pays for health insurance, house mortgage and education for his children. Peter had a hard time exploring alternative ways that would offer him a sense of freedom and creativity. The possibility for change started to make him feel anxious. It is common, that feelings of anxiousness will be well guarded and suppressed, compensated with ephemeral or shallow satisfaction. Yet, there was something else that caused his frustration and uneasiness, which was the impulse to break free and the fear to follow a path-life that is in sync with his authentic Self. Therapy became the safe container for this exploration to take place.

The persistence of your anxiety becomes your emotional thermometer, so to speak, which can help you pay attention to your inner voice that needs to be expressed and understood. No doubt, we have a tendency to consume a lot of energy by attending our socially accepted responsibilities in exchange for harboring our internal responsibilities, which represent who we truly are. By avoiding and not addressing our own needs and aspirations, over a period of time we put ourselves into an inner struggle.

From the transpersonal point of view in counseling, talking about the stresses of life could be a vehicle to getting in touch with a deeper sense of anxiety, which holds the tension between our fear of the unknown and our longing for a life that feels more whole. This work suggests that there is a place for anxiety in the process of self-growth. From that point of view, anxiety is not an illness that we need to cure in order to feel better. Rather, it is an intrinsic part of the process of getting to know our selves in a deeper way. This positive regard of anxiety as a symptom of resisting change is similar to Jung’s (1964/ 1918-58) therapeutic attitude working with neurosis: We should not try to get rid of a neurosis, but rather to experience what it means, what it has to teach, what its purpose is. We should even learn to be thankful for it, otherwise we pass it by and miss the opportunity of getting to know ourselves as we really are (CW 10, p. 170).