Category / Anxiety

by Therapy place uk

Walking with distress

Moving forward under our own steam on two legs is, in itself, an expressive thing. Look around as you move through the city or the country and you will see people doing it – using their bodies and expressing something about their actions, their direction – the stroller ambling along, the I’m late, I’m late followed by, or bumping into, the smart phone addict head down in a separate world, still checking social media on the way from one meeting to the next. But what’s happening with the inner voice? What past directions and journeys are being played in the inner self?

When I take people for a walk-and-talk session they are curious about how it might work. They are often stuck in life, distressed with it or perhaps bereaved. Inner symbols reveal as you walk: things we pass trigger memories, and the pace and openness of not being trapped within four walls help some very difficult thoughts to make their way out of the unconscious into the conscious realm. And, of course, nature and the environment makes itself very much part of the work. This might make sense as to why therapists so often use tree imagery on their websites. Sometimes a rabbit really is a symbol – vitality and rebirth are never far when you take therapy for a walk …

Read on for some of my free verse triggered by the walking therapy I offer.

Pace: on walking with distress

Walking, walking, walking. Pacing things through. We are in the world right now.

Talking, listening, watching. Right at the very edge of life. ‘I remember how my father laughed at me as we drove down the hill. I was about to shit my pants and he was laughing, crying with pleasure … at my distress.’

Concrete, gravel, turf, tarmac, the water at our side. ‘If you add the negative moments up and you add the neutral and the positive, you don’t get what you expect.’

Walking, marching, ambling, pausing, listening, watching. ‘The whole marriage is lost.’ Loving and losing, kissing and hating. Steps pass by as seconds rotate in time. [Again] ‘Were more of them good than bad?’

A courting couple in the back of a car cuts like a knife. Pace, control and then, then, there is just loss. ‘An intense toothache. Everyone knows toothache. Through the whole body, the mind, to quiddity.’

Walking, walking, walking, talking, talking, talking, listening, listening, listening. ‘We finally managed to break down the door but he was already dead, squashed against the back of it.’

If we looked over the bridge once, what would happen? Twice? Would a third time make the pain greater or lessen it? ‘Would you jump?’ How much would I remember of my story?

Moving, moving, now always moving. ‘It helps with the pain; it stops that claustrophobic tightness in my head.’ ‘Are these things in your head or are they in your body?’ The sensation of the cradle rocking, the soft, soft murmuring song before I fell asleep.

Pain, pain, pain, stabbing at the pith. Not needing to let go today, not quite rocked, not stepping away just yet. Step, mirror, step, mirror, step, walking, talking, listening, ‘expressing?’.

What does the body say? ‘A question? What does the body say?’ ‘Feel?’ ‘Say!’ ‘Oh look, a rabbit! Lots of them.’ ‘And the body?’ [Slowly] ‘L-o-o-k, t-h-e-r-e-’s a r-a-b-b-i-t-?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Yes.’

Walking, walking, walking, talking, talking, talking, listening, hearing, feeling, hearing?
‘Yes.’ Feeling? ‘Oh, look, another rabbit!’

***

I highly recommend taking therapy beyond the four walls of the consulting room out into the real world and seeing what happens for you. NB this idea makes many therapists anxious about controlling the situation and the space – but they can get help with that.

All rights reserved © Copyright Duncan E. Stafford 2022. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from the author of this post is strictly prohibited. (This article was originally published in 2019 at part of the Three Men with a Blog project.)

by Therapy place uk

There’s something about anxiety right now (2017)

stressBoth the West and the UK as a nation have had a difficult couple of years – from terror attacks in major European cities that many of us know well, to the Brexit vote and result, quickly followed by the political fall-out and Trump’s control of the USA. Just when we thought it couldn’t get worse, terror came back to the streets of the United Kingdom in the middle of yet more political uncertainty during the 2017 general election. Then, most recently, we witnessed the unprecedented loss of life in the Grenfell Tower horror.

For most of us, these events are stories we digest through the various forms of news and political and social media coverage – something happening in the outside world, well away from us. But these events have been quite triggering for people with worked-through and unworked-through trauma in their life stories.

At my own practice, contacts from people experiencing anxieties appear to have risen dramatically since the June 2016 Brexit vote; 2017’s events have done nothing to quell this near tide.*

Anxiety can be an extremely difficult and life-restricting thing to experience or have to live with. The professions of psychiatry, psychology and psychotherapy have created many working models of anxiety and many labels with which to subdivide or associate types of anxiety. Social Anxiety, Panic Disorders, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Acute Stress Disorder and Generalised Anxiety Disorder form the kaleidoscope of disorders humans feel when anxiety gets overplayed and out of hand. And yet, anxiety is a natural thing to experience. Indeed it is the body’s response to danger. You can think of it like a monitor or alarm that is set to be triggered if you are put in the position of feeling threatened, under pressure or when you are facing a stressful situation.

In small amounts, anxiety is often a very good thing and in some situations it can even be the thing that saves your life. However, get too much of it happening inside a human being for too long a duration, and it can cause problems with pretty much any area of your life. At that point, we start to think of it not as a friend that can help us to feel alert, motivated and push us into action, but as a disorder that can control and even ruin our life.

If you find that you have – in addition to the primary anxiety symptoms of irrational and excessive fear or worry – other common emotional symptoms such as feelings of dread or apprehension, vigilance for danger signs, expectation of the worst, difficulty with concentration, feeling irritable or tense and jumpy, or that you experience mind fade (where your thoughts just go blank), then it might be time to think about taking steps to talk through your anxiety issues with a professional or, at the least, take some positive actions which might include things like mindfulness practice or regular exercise. And, if you don’t feel like being confined to a room to work through your issues with a therapist, then you might want to consider taking your anxiety to an outside environment with some walk and talk therapy – such as the type I offer within my Cambridge or Bristol practice.**

* There has been a reported five-fold increase in traffic to the Mental Health Foundation’s online anxiety page since July last year (Therapy Today Magazine May 2017)

** Walk and talk therapy will be the subject of a future post on this blog site.