“… as I read what was being asked of people to do on their own, I noticed my mouth open and my body stiffen as I sat there frozen in shock and horror.”

An email dropped into my inbox, it was offering the latest breakthrough for decoding and managing anxiety and I was curious, of course I was, this is what I help people with and I am always interested in expanding my tool kit, both personally and professionally.

I was being invited to sign up for a free event to find out more and when I did, I was offered the free bonus of an intensive workbook. I am in the process of writing my own workbook for clients that could be a good match to work with me, so I thought this could have many benefits. I read the first few pages and the first activity and could see the outline of CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) of how to drill down into a core belief, I was both glad and sad in that moment, glad that I was ‘not’ missing some vital piece of knowledge or understanding and sad that this was not likely to be a ‘breakthrough’ as stated and hoped.

I left it there and found it again when I was doing my desktop clear up and this time I went down the rabbit hole and read further and was shocked and horrified by what I read.

If you are reading this, then you are likely to already know the work I do, but just in case you don’t, something that is important to me, is that you are accompanied with C.A.R.E when you revisit an old memory or face an old or repeating fear and this felt totally missing in this workbook. Instead I was reading about an invitation to do intense exposure work totally alone, with no CARE and no accompaniment, it felt brutal and I feared retraumatisation for anyone who worked through this alone. 

Even more horrifying was the instruction to not allow yourself to advocate or defend yourself in any way, naming this as resistance. The idea being that at some point you would run out of anxious energy whilst sitting in your worst fear and of course you would, this is called the ‘shutdown’ response, the process your body does to prepare for death. This is our body’s last ditch attempt at survival and this workbook was encouraging this to be done, totally alone. I can feel my heart racing as I write this, so fearful am I for the individuals that might be looking for help and being given this advice! I want to say, it does not have to be this way, our recovery from anxiety does not need to be so brutal, we can use C.A.R.E.

Often our feelings of anxiety are unnamed fears and these are created during so many different types of unaccompanied events in our life, most often in childhood when we are less resourced than we are in adulthood. In those moments our body’s are feeling some form of threat to us or to another, our imagination can go into overdrive as we both try to think of a solution and try to imagine how bad this situation could get. 

During those moments, our mind could also be creating beliefs about us, others and the world. These beliefs are rarely based on reality, instead they are based mainly on what was happening in our imagination at that time and yet they can form part of our rule book for living. 

Now I want to be clear, rule books are really helpful and can save our life in certain circumstances, however they tend to be rigid and not transferable to all circumstances and it is this element that can contribute to anxiety. The way I work with people is to try to create a bigger ‘guide’ book and a smaller ‘rule’ book.

Sometimes though, the original event is like an ‘open file’ in the body and mind, waiting for someone to let that part of us know this event is ‘over’, allowing our body to turn off the ‘anxiety alarm’ and then allowing our mind to calm and start the process of understanding what happened. The imagination is a great tool to use for this, however I prefer that a person is accompanied by a professional who knows how to use C.A.R.E until the individual has developed their own C.A.R.E accompaniment.

My childhood had left me with a belief that ‘I’ was ‘too much’, instead of the reality of the bigger picture, that the ‘stress of life’ is what was ‘too much’ for my parents and siblings during that time period and I was just the easy target for their stress relief.

It would take years before I discovered the world of self help, some of which was so helpful it was lifesaving and others that managed to deepen old wounds instead of heal them. Eventually I found the right combination of support for me and I now offer that to others and at the heart of it is the acronym I use, C.A.R.E.D:

Consented Compassionate Curiosity

Attuned Accompaniment

Resonant Relational Regulation

Encouragement to Explore and Experiment

Delight for the ‘healthier You’ you are becoming

Whomever you choose to work with, I wish this for you.