Asking clients how they get on with themselves can be revealing. There is so much focus on the external world and other people. I find that a tool for helping anxiety is to check out what is going on inside.
I find the Adult Child model helpful to do this. Most people if not all have experienced some kind of trauma growing up. This can lead to frozen parts of ourselves or what is commonly referred to as stuckness in therapy. Therapy can be a way to move through this stuckness.
Meditation is a way is to check in with the inner landscape. The analogy can be developed much further. There is an idea about an inner drug store, offering 'cortisol' and 'adrenalin' to crank the system up.
To help rebalance the pendulum from the external focus spending time checking in with oneself and really getting a sense of what ones needs are can begin to relieve anxiety. If we are not listening to the body what option does it have? How else can the internal get our attention.
There is an idea and not completely helpful that illness can result from this. That is not to underplay the empiric nature of genes. But there does seem to be a link, I note the work of Louise Hay, for instance if I have a pain in my hand, what can't I handle. Equally could digestive ideas be linked to finding some ideas hard to stomach?
The interplay between our anxiety and our internal landscape keeps raising its attention in my client work.
