THE SELF-MANAGEMENT OF ANXIETY: DO NOT BE PUT OFF BY THE SIMPLICITY

April 29th, 2009 by admin

I have found that one of the greatest difficulties in helping people by this approach has been getting them to accept its simplicity. People always want the newest form of medical treatment. The modern trend in medicine is continually toward greater and greater complexity—more complicated instruments, more complicated tests, more potent drugs. We have come to associate complexity of therapy as an advance over more simple treatment. You can see my difficulty.

I am advocating a form of treatment that is simple in the extreme. But I will remind you that it is natural as well as simple, and that is why it is so successful.

A very aggressive young woman, a graduate in psychology, was openly contemptuous when I explained the way in which I proposed to help her. She gave me a superior smile, and said, “It will take more than that.”

I had great difficulty in persuading her to lie down on the couch so that I could show her what I meant. With a shrug of the shoulders, she said, “Oh well, just to please you!” I then spent sufficient time with her to be sure that she would capture a real feeling of relaxation. She did. This was the turning point. She learned to practise the exercises herself and did very well.

A writer of international fame consulted me because he was tense, disgruntled with himself, and had lost his creative ability. After considerable discussion of his difficulties, it seemed clear that the real problem was his inability to work caused by slowly mounting tension over the years. I explained how I could help him to be less tense and more at ease. However, he prided himself on his worldliness and his sophistication and from the outset was sceptical of my approach because of its inherent simplicity. He did the exercises, but he did them reluctantly, with a smirk on his face, as it were. He benefited to some extent, but I am sure his improvement would have been much more complete had he accepted the truth that we can often be helped most by basic methods which are themselves simple.