(Eric & Alex had this conversation somewhere and thought it would be good to share)



Question:

I was also trying to generalize what anxiety is, or rather when does it appear. I got: it comes when one has
unresolved traumas (what's the definition of trauma, I guess it can be quite "wide", ie. include even relatively
minor unresolved stresses) and one keeps overriding them. Do you find that to be at least in the right ballpark?
Reply:

That's pretty much spot on, but it's a circular problem...

Whenever we're anxious, we don't process stuff properly, and whenever we don't process the 'here and now' healthily, it causes more anxiety.

In other words we have to already be well and anxiety free, in order to process stuff properly and not cause trauma.

The co counseling people called it emotional distress, but trauma by any other name is what 95% of humanity is suffering from. Everyone's got f****** PTSD, but very few actually notice (because when everyone has only one leg, one-leggedness looks absolutely normal, right?)

Stuff like co counseling, psychotherapy, hypnotherapy, etc. are methods of recalling the originally wrongly-processed experiences as memories and re-weighting them so that people can stop panicking and relax enough to get on with their lives.

We only wrongly-process stuff when we're out of balance (because it makes everything 'out there' seem out of balance.) Learning the relaxation response etc. enables us to get back into balance (I mean physiological/neurochemical balance; not some woo-woo quantum nasal energy concept)  :  )

Learning stuff like the core conditions, relaxation response, emotional stability, helps prevent us wrongly-processing stuff in the first place, so anxiety stops and trauma does not build up.