spiritual coping skills for managing anxiety

By Laura Thor, LCSW Thursday, September 25, 2008

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As a therapist and spiritual director (interfaith), I try to take a whole-person assessment of my clients. As a sufferer of Generalized Anxiety Disorder myself, I value caregivers who appreciate that some folks with anxiety are also interested in how their approach to their spiritual lives can affect anxiety.

Like discussions of sexuality and politics, we have to be respectful of how vastly different we humans are in our experience of this inner sense of self, whether it be religious, existential, or just "spiritual." I don't mean to start a soapbox for anyone's particular "brand" of religious worldview. I do, however, mean to take the discussion of treatment of anxiety out of only the realm of medicine and science, and into the broader realm of culture, where spiritual and religious issues reside. It is after all, the human condition that life has suffering AND anxiety--even people without anxiety disorders get anxious at times. And sometimes we feel a whole lot better when we can take a mindful approach to coping with our anxiety.

Even our best medications cannot "cure" anxiety, and even our greatest researchers and healers can't cure it. When we take a self-accepting approach to our anxiety, we feel less afraid and, well, less anxious. A very popular and well-researched therapy for the anxiety that goes with some personality disorders, Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, for example, borrows heavily from forms of Buddhist meditation to teach coping. Meditators and people who pray can often reduce their anxiety levels. Alcoholics Anonymous is another spiritual system, with its 12 Steps, that addresses taking a "it's not all about me" approach to letting ourselves be human and imperfect. And while some AA members re against meds of any kind because of the risk of abuse, others feel medications have their place in AA.

So I am simply putting out their that taking a whole-person approach is a way to explore with our patients and ourselves who have anxiety, how the way we look at the world, Life, and the "big questions" is going to shape our expectations of how anxious we get. And conversely, how anxious we are, by nature or by trauma, shapes our spiritual selves. Hmmm. Something to think about.

Comments (1) | Add comment

medanx

9/26/08 9:34am

I totally agree that you have to treat the whole person and not just the symptoms. For me most of my anxiety is induced by the way I perceive a situation. If I can take myself away for just a minute or two and get my mind wrapped around the situation in a different way then the anxiety and panic are much easier to deal with.

spiritual coping skills for managing anxiety

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