Kim Schneiderman
Psychotherapist, Author, Columnist, Writing Workshops

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Believe It or Not, Your Anxiety Loves You

Like an over-protective parent, it just wants you to be safe

Imagine you grew up in a castle. Maybe you felt relatively safe until, one day, the King and Queen left the drawbridge down and a hungry hooligan snuck into your room and stole your favorite lollipop. Or maybe you were constantly being over-run by starving hooligans, and nobody noticed or cared that you were scared and alone. Or perhaps the King and Queen were constantly perceiving threats, and their fear made you feel unsafe.

Sensing a threat to your survival, you created an imaginary gatekeeper to stand guard and signal to you when it spotted a hooligan advancing. But because this caring gatekeeper saw how devastated you were by the candy theft, it began to alert you every time any strangers approached, including the milkmaid, the jester, and the messengers. Even when you grew up and left the castle, the gatekeeper continued to do its job to protect you from harm.

Now imagine that this gatekeeper is your anxiety. You may not like it. In fact, you may consider it your enemy, but the problem isn’t its ability to detect danger. The problem is that it’s just not able to consistently distinguish a real threat from an imagined one. 

The truth is that we all need internal warning systems. The flight-fight-freeze response hard-wired into our reptilian brain is designed for survival. It tells us to run if we’re being chased by a tiger or not to venture into a cave in grizzly bear territory.

If 2020 has made one positive contribution to the field of mental health, it’s the normalization of anxiety. Many people feel it, even us therapists. Germaphobes feel vindicated, and politically paranoid types, prophetic. Distinguishing realistic fears from fantastical ones can be challenging in a time of plagues, pestilence, wildfires, and threats to democracy. We look in the sky and wonder, “Is that a cloud or a flying pig?”

Befriending Your Danger-Detector

Demonizing your anxiety only creates shame, which weighs you down even more. Reasoning with it, challenging its worst-case scenarios, might calm it somewhat. But chances are, if your gatekeeper has witnessed serious violations of your safety and trust in the past, it will only get louder, as it desperately tries to get your attention. This will leave you frustrated, defeated, and possibly paralyzed.

The key to managing anxiety is to get curious about it and develop a new, friendlier relationship with it. 

Such is the approach of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a model of psychotherapy that holds that each person is a complex mosaic of interconnected parts that conspire to help us survive. Developed by Richard Schwartz, Ph.D., IFS views consciousness as composed of a central self with three types of subpersonalities or parts: managers, exiles, and firefighters. 

It assumes that everyone is born with a core Self that is inherently calm, compassionate, confident, curious, creative, courageous, clear, and connected. In a balanced person’s system, the Self is the conductor of an orchestra of parts that help us survive and thrive—helping parts, striving parts, discerning parts, organizing parts, and, yes, danger-detecting parts. When we are Self-led, we respond to life with the aforementioned qualities, mindfully leveraging the appropriate parts to collaboratively play the called-for notes in various situations.

According to the IFS definition, the Self is always present. But often it gets overtaken by sub-personalities that take on extreme roles—for example, an overactive danger detector—to protect our most vulnerable, wounded parts, which become exiled in our bodies. These exiled parts develop in childhoodwhen the Self, in its natural state, experiences violations or interruptions to their emotional or physical safety, leaving the child to draw false conclusions about themselves; for example, “I am unworthy, insignificant, alone, weak, unloved, unwanted or unsafe.” When triggered, protective parts step in to protect the exile, either by trying to control or, by distracting us because they fear the person can’t handle the pain these entrenched beliefs create.

Reframing Anxiety as an Inner Over-Protective Parent

These well-intentioned protectors continue to do their jobs, even when the child grows up. Generally, they don’t like surprises, so they try to keep you vigilant to potential violations at all times. 

What they don’t know is that there’s an adult in the house now that can attune to their emotional and physical needs in ways they couldn’t when they were young and dependent on adults for safety. For this reason, our anxiousantennae tend to under-estimate our capacity to handle the curveballs life throws at us. 

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Feeling Seen and Connected:

An 8-Week Healing Journey for Enneagram 4’s and their Parts

  • Do you often feel misunderstood?
  • Do you envy other’s ease, lightheartedness, and vitality?
  • Do you consider bad artistic taste and lack of originality a capital crime?

If you answered “yes” to a few of these, then there’s a chance you are a “4” in the Enneagram personality system. And that’s a good thing. The Enneagram is a non-hierarchal model that recognizes nine, interconnected types, each with their own unique gifts, vulnerabilities, and paths to self actualization.

Often described as “Artists,” “Romantics” and “Individualists,” Type 4s tend to be creative, self-aware, emotionally honest, empathetic, and highly attuned to meaning and beauty. Yet, type Fours can at times feel like melancholy unicorns, believing that the world doesn’t value what they have to offer, and may therefore question their worth.

That’s why I’m offering an 8-week group for Type 4s that will explore the intersection between the enneagram with Internal Family Systems, a holistic therapeutic model that believes we all possess of core spiritual self and a constellation of parts that help us survive and thrive.

Through psycho-education, interactive sharing, meditations, and writing exercises, you will: deepen your understanding of your parts and how they align with the enneagram regard more entrenched parts of your personality with more compassion and humor feel seen, appreciated, supported, and connected to others recognize your gifts and place in the world; and tap into your innate source of vitality, peace, and inspiration

When: Thursdays, 7 – 9 p.m. EST

Where: Online Dates: 9/29, 10/6, 10/27, 11/3, 11/10, 11/17, 12/1, 12/8

Cost: $399 for 8 weeks

A brief free screening is required for group participation.

For more information, please email me at 914-393-6501.


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Tired of people pushing your buttons? For as little as $10 total, you can liberate yourself from self-defeating patterns around people who trigger you. Register here to receive 10 weekly insights, writing exercises, and guided meditations you can access whenever you want.

Lesson 1:  Soul Narrative vs. Self-Defeating Story
Lesson 2:  Exploring the Power of Choice and Voice
Lesson 3:  Your Adversary as Your Personal Trainer
Lesson 4:  Embracing Your Strengths and Superpowers
Lesson 5:  Getting to Know Your Inner Antagonist(s)
Lesson 6:  Dialoguing with the Parts that Get Triggered
Lesson 7:  The Yoga of Character Development
Lesson 8:  Supporting Characters, Tools and Resources
Lesson 9:  Giving Ourselves the Blessing We Seek
Lesson 10: The Golden Happy Ending

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About The Author: Kim Schneiderman

Psychotherapist and freelance journalist Kim Schneiderman utilizes research-based methods to help people who are stuck – in a dead-end job, relationship, of life stage – imagine themselves as the star of their own stories with the power to reclaim their personal narratives. Drawing on the elements of a story that many of us learned in high school (premise, scene, plot, conflict, climax, resolution), readers will assign titles to different chapters of their lives, observe recurring themes, identify supporting characters, and explore how conflict creates opportunities for personal growth that can lead to a meaningful resolution. They will also be asked to examine how the decisions we make, both big and small, affect our storyline – the relationships we choose, how we spend our day, and how we nourish ourselves, physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

Unlike most self-help writing workbooks, most of the exercises in Step Out of Your Story are framed in the third-person voice, freeing readers to see beyond their usual point of view. Psychological research suggests that people are more likely to view their lives favorably when they see themselves as characters in a story. In a 2005 Columbia University study reported in the Journal of Psychological Science, test subjects who spoke about difficult chapters in their lives in the third person narrative displayed more confidence and optimism than those who recalled bad memories in the first person. By retracing their steps from the perch of the third-person narrative, people were more likely to regard their problems as something outside themselves – challenges they had conquered or adversaries they had defeated - instead of character flaws. Additionally, the perception that they had overcome obstacles left them feeling more confident to face the future.

Step Out Of Your Story

STEP OUT OF YOUR STORY

Writing Exercises to Reframe and Transform Your Life

Every life is an unfolding story, and how individuals tell their story matters. Recent Stanford and Columbia University studies show that how we view the story of our life shapes the life itself. Who are the heroes and villains? Where does the plot twist? How are conflicts resolved? Learn more...

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