Personality and anxiety:
Where the roots are rooted
The Problem
Edmund Bourne's "Beyond Anxiety and Phobia" is a
wonderful manual for those of you whose suffering comes in the form of
anxiety. It talks about the core fears
that are embedded in the personality of anxiety-prone people, beliefs that in a
way precede experience.
One way to see the amazing success of humans as a species is
that we are able to extract patterns from our life experiences, and use those
patterns as templates for future action.
However, the dark side of that success is that we can be in
error about what we think we see. The
Buddhists simply group all these various errors into the category of
"ignorance," misperception. And we are
particularly prone to these "errors" as children, when we haven't developed the
capacity for rational thought, or you might say, error checking.
So with anxiety, we are acting from beliefs that were
(usually) formed very young, and that though they are very simple in
construction, the implications are profound.
Take, for instance, "I am not safe."
It is such a broad statement of reality, that virtually every situation
will be encompassed by it, and the organic response to such a fundamental
belief is vigilance, and fear.
But contrast it to something like, "I am not safe when I am
alone, have no access to phone, it is nighttime, and the weather is bad." Many factors need to be true for the body and
psyche to respond as if there were immanent danger; the trigger for activating vigilance and fear
is infrequently thrown, so if that's the extent of the person's beliefs about
danger, then they are going to experience very little anxiety.
The broader the definition of danger, the more situations
will trigger fear, and the more diffuse the possibility of "harm," (that is,
the less identifiable the actual danger-it's not, for instance, a lion or a
falling bridge), the more fear converts to anxiety.
Anxiety and personality traits
So, according to Bourne, there are six personality traits
that define what he calls the "anxiety-prone personality," each of which having
at its center a core fear:
1) Excessive
need for approval: Fear of rejection
2) Insecurity
and overdependency: Fear of abandonment
3) Overcontrol: Fear of losing control
4) Perfectionism: Fear of rejection and losing
control
5) Over-cautiousness: Fear of illness, injury, or death
6) "confinement
phobia": Fear of being stuck, confined
Do any of these sound familiar to you?
It's a nice schema that Bourne lays out, because it can help
you identify the core organizing belief when and where it arises, because,
basically, if you can't see it, you can't change it.
It's also important to be clear about these core beliefs,
because you come to realize that the fears are not you, just something you believe (you and the belief are different
things); and you can focus your work at
the level of personality, which is different than thoughts per se, or learning
to relax, or any cognitively focused therapy.
Personality is about who you think you are, and each of the
core fears has a core belief about your self.
"I will be rejected," is undergirded by the idea that you are not worthy,
that something is wrong with you. The
fear, "I will be abandoned," is supported by the belief that you are not strong
enough to support yourself. And so on.
The commonalities in these self-beliefs are a sense of lack, in one's own resources,
efficacy, and especially self-worth. If
you believe you are broken and weak, then the world and relationships will of
course look pretty scary.
So the solutions?
Bourne goes into wonderful detail, but they also boil down
into a few common efforts:
1) Build
self-esteem
2) Build
understanding of one's own patterns/fears
3) Practice
acceptance of oneself and the world
4) Befriend
uncertainty
5) Develop
spirituality (connection to some larger force/meaning)
Easy to write down, not as easy to do. But to work at the deep level of personality
is to, over time, actually change your basic, profound beliefs about what it is
to be a person and be in the world. And
when you have built a self which is strong, resilient, and self-validating,
then the basic roots of anxiety have nothing left to grow from. This is where anxiety as an experience is
uprooted and one's fundamental experience of the world shifts.
Many of my clients have struggled with making these changes,
but the gains, when they come, are so deep and such a relief, that all of the
folk have said (albeit, wiping sweat from their brows) that the effort has been
worth it.
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