Read About A Simple Reason Why You Might Feel Anxious…
You may need anxiety treatment because of a hidden reason called “death anxiety.” By learning about it, you can get a closer look into the deeper levels of healing possible in therapy.
Read this to see more about how I’ll help you in session.
Many people experience intense anxiety attacks. Sometimes an anxiety attack is intense enough to make a person wonder if it’s serious or life-threatening. And all this is possible even if the person logically knows everything’s “OK.”
When an anxiety attack passes, have you ever noticed:
1) Maybe your “quick fix” strategies didn’t work, and you feel confused?
2) Maybe you’re anxious again all too soon, and you don’t know how you’ll recover?
What’s happening here? Especially if you experience more days like this than you’d like?
A Deeper Fear That Amplifies Anxiety
Existential therapy says “the fear of death is a primary source of anxiety.”
That quote is from page 42 of a book about therapy. (By the way, I’m going to put page numbers after I quote, I hope you don’t mind but I’m a nerd that way)
The book is called “Existential Psychotherapy” and it’s by a therapist named Irvin Yalom. When I read it, I learned therapists discovered death anxiety by treating terminally ill patients. Since many of these patients are scared of mortality, therapists study them to learn how people face death anxiety.
Now, maybe someone with anxiety will say in response, “Yeah, but those patients are literally going to die…”
And that’s true. But, and it’s a big one: “All individuals are confronted with death anxiety” (110). So maybe these patients can teach us about this primary source of anxiety. They might have words for what we probably want to push back down.
Are you with me on this? And, more importantly, how can you use this information to help your anxiety?
What I’m pulling out of this book is that most people are scared of death but we all cope with it differently… and sometimes the way we cope leads to anxiety and panic. Fortunately, if you think you might be feeling death anxiety, you can focus on it in anxiety treatment with me. So contact me right now and you’ll hear from me in one business day.
Onward…
How Death Anxiety Might Be Impacting Your Life
Here’s what I learned:
1) The fear of death is “part of the infant’s earliest life experience” (87).
2) For an adult, death anxiety is “deeply repressed” (189).
3) If you experience it, you feel death anxiety on “many different levels” (45).
4) Some levels may include: OCD, hyperventilation, and health anxiety (48 - 49).
5) Therapy can bring these fears to a “successful conclusion” (195).
OK, so what does help? And how do you do it in existential therapy?
Good questions...
But before I answer them, here’s a list of ways someone might be coping with severe anxiety symptoms that could really mask death anxiety:
· Workaholism (123)
· Reacting to “small deaths,” like signs of aging (57)
· Trying to calm down through “sexual activity” (145)
· Never quite finishing tasks (47)
· Choosing to be “frozen in adolescence” as a way of avoiding change (142)
· Alcoholism and obesity (199) —and, personally, I would add addiction
· Dreaming you or someone you love is dying (53)
· Self-sabotage, out of fear to live “as a separate isolated being” (128)
So, how can therapy help such intense anxiety?
Existential Therapy Is Soothing And Restorative
I can use existential therapy to help you in at least 3 ways. First, I want to mention an interesting explanation for why people feel death anxiety.
Early human beings joined together “out of the fear of death” bcause they didn’t want to be alone in the wild or get attacked by what’s in the dark (41). This means if you feel symptoms like pounding heart-rate it’s because a very ancient part of you got triggered and switched “on.”
Everything you were just experiencing works differently now. You could be overwhelmed. You might feel things that make no sense, like being pulled in many directions. For most people, getting a secure handle on anxiety takes time, self-compassion, and practice. But if you get the support you need from an anxiety therapist, you could use the methods of therapy for anxiety to make things easier for you.
As impossible as it may feel while you’re in distress, there’s something very helpful about getting an objective, trained and professional opinion about what you’re trying to overcome and how you can move forward with your goals. And if you combine this with the right therapy modality in your counseling, you get a powerful combination that can address challenges like death anxiety.
Here are 3 ways I can use existential therapy to help:
1) I’ll start by focusing on the anxiety as it’s showing up for you and what “defenses” you’ve been using. I’ll “use anxiety as a beacon or compass point” because your everyday anxiety can help reveal and “dismantle” the “sources” of your death anxiety (41).
2) As you go deeper into “the processing of the anxiety source,” I’ll help you “separate” your anxiety feelings so you “can think about death with only moderate discomfort” (51). As your anxiety therapist I’ve got “many structured exercises” to help you “recognize” and heal from “reminders of our existential situation” (165).
3) Moving into later sessions, we’ll practice how to use anxiety as your “guide as well as enemy” to make life decisions, which will “reduce anxiety to comfortable levels” (188). In my experience, this approach really kicks into high gear when we combine it with several other anxiety treatment approaches.
Let’s work on this together so you can achieve “certainty and mastery” (189) by the end of counseling. Anxiety can feel toxic to your health, but we can take apart how it bothers you so you can stop feeling this way. Please call or email me for your free 15-minute consultation.
Find out more about Anxiety Treatment.
About The Author
John Younes, JD, MA, LPCC, NCC is a trained counselor who owns a private practice in Denver, CO. In general, he specializes in depression treatment and anxiety treatment using existential and cognitive therapy practices.
As I go, if you’re thinking about suicide and are in immediate danger, please call your local emergency number… so for Denver, Colorado, call 1-844-493-8255 or text TALK to 38255. You can also call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.