I’m working with a client who is anxious pretty often. I’ve given him some breathing and meditation practices to help him with this. When we got together recently for a session, and I asked him what he has been doing lately, he responded like this…..I’ve been working on my anxiety.
When I asked him what he means by “working on it”, I helped him figure out that truthfully, he has been thinking about it a lot, going over it and over it in his mind. Kind of all day long. But that he is not actually doing anything about it. He has not been doing the practices.
I encouraged him to speak truthfully. His truth statement is really something like I’ve been thinking about my anxiety a lot.
The beginning of any personal transformation is to be truthful with ourselves. Call a spade a spade. This is much healthier than fooling ourselves.
This is a subtle and powerful practice. Over and over, we provide ourselves with a false sense of ease by papering over our difficulties with statements like “I’m working on our relationship, I’m watching what I eat, I’m looking for a job, etc,” when we are actually just thinking about our challenges over and over. The prescription offered here is to speak truthfully with yourself, and then effective action will come more easily.
