JULY 1, 2023
There has been a national directive from the US Preventive Services Task Force that we screen all people between the ages of 8 and 65 for anxiety.
When I first read this directive, I thought: How silly!!! Look at our world! If we are not anxious then we are not behaving normally. I still hold with this view. And I also know when anxiety is a problem that must be dealt with.
Patients come to me all the time for therapy and they say they are anxious.
Let me tell you a story. When I worked as a young woman with my father who was a surgeon and gynecologist, patients would come to him and they would say, “I am so nervous, doctor.” It was at this time there was a national move to medicate women (the population with the most presentations of anxiety and depression) with Valium; today there are about a dozen medications. My father would not medicate them. He asked them to make a list of things that made them anxious, looked at their diets, and improved their exercise…and where we lived he encouraged prayer and participation in activities outside the family. His patients adored him. AND I learned from him. He died forty-five years ago.
Let’s look at this. There are situations where we are really being threatened and the NORMAL response to this is fear. This can be a response to what is going on in our world today, i.e., climate change, violence, drugs, crime, political atmosphere. Perfectly, normal to be stressed about these. And then there are the situations in which the stress and anxiety will not subside or go away. This is a state of hyperarousal and hypervigilance, this is not normal. It means we are on guard all the time.
Then there are situations where we learned we were endangered as children and we carry that into the present but we are still afraid. We call this lower-level fear, anxiety, partly because we are unaware of the sources of the fear. When they are not safe, children create protections that become the difficulties in adulthood. So, hiding under the table as a child to not hear the parents fighting, or to avoid being shamed by someone, turns into avoidance in the adult who cannot deal with face-to-face engagements and becomes anxious with engaging the others. There is a failure of regulating what is going on inside, what we think we are experiencing…really happening right now….and we feel as we did as children. And we call it anxiety. When we have become accustomed to the responses of childhood, and we use them, then we need to learn heathy responses and ways of being. This takes time and practice. We can do it and we can become healthy adults.
Some of the things we do are maladaptive. This means we are responding in ways that are not dealing with the real situation. Adults often will use alcohol, drugs, food, binge spending, eating disorders, develop physical illnesses, acting out, indiscriminate sex, multiple sequential relationships, or multiple concurrent relationships, divorcing and remarrying, difficulty with school or work relationships, including failures in these areas, then difficulty with life in general. When it is called to your attention it’s difficult to understand what is really going on and build a healthy relationship or lifestyle. We just call it being anxious. It is more than that. For children and adolescents some of the above happen and there can be issues with school failure, accidents, oppositional behavior, defiance, fighting with peers, shop lifting, nightmares, bed-wetting. Later in adulthood the adult versions become obvious symptoms. This is the reason for screening/treating as soon as possible in order to avoid the consequences in adulthood.
Like my father, at Discovery we look at diet, exercise, relationship behaviors, family history and we learn to become aware of the conscious and subconscious thoughts and actions. We learn to change and grow in what we are aware of, what we think, and do. We learn to heal and become whole through using proven effective forms of therapy. And we do it all naturally and without medication.
You can reach out to Dr. Quinn at kcquinn1203@gmail.com or Call 601-467-0041
