Do you struggle with anxiety symptoms that negatively affect your quality of life? Dr. Jane Rubin offers her thoughts on how early relationship patterns can contribute to the development of anxiety later in life.
How Are Early Relationships Important to the Development of Anxiety Symptoms?
When people seek out therapy, they’re often looking for immediate relief from their symptoms. That’s a valid goal, but focusing all of our attention on it can obscure the ways in which anxiety symptoms are often the result of emotional patterns that were established early in life. In the long run, understanding and changing those patterns can offer deeper and more long-lasting relief from anxiety symptoms than simply focusing on the symptoms themselves.
How Do You Identify These Patterns?
Usually, the ways people relate to their therapist are similar to the ways they relate to other people in their lives. One of the best tools for identifying emotional patterns is to see what kinds of anxieties people have about the therapy process itself. Are they afraid they’ll be criticized? Ignored? Dismissed? How similar are those feelings to the feelings they have in other relationships?Once we’ve identified some of a person’s basic anxieties, we can start to look at where those anxieties come from. The point of this isn’t to blame people’s parents or to find some event in the past that explains who they are in the present. It’s to make sense of their anxiety and give it a context. For example, some people had parents whom they experienced as emotionally fragile. These people are often very anxious about asserting themselves because they’re afraid that standing up for themselves will damage other people. Similarly, people whose parents were very critical of them expect everyone in the world to be critical. People who felt that they didn’t matter to their parents tend to feel that they can’t matter to anyone else, either.
How Does Identifying These Patterns Help Relieve Anxiety Symptoms?
In all of these situations, people generalize the experiences they had with their caregivers to their relationships with everyone else. The goal of therapy is to reverse that generalizing tendency and to see that, in fact, people’s parents had very specific limitations that aren’t shared by everyone else in the world. The more we can locate people’s anxieties in those very specific relationships, the more they’re able, over time, to experience other people in their life as unique individuals and not just as other versions of their parents. When they do, their anxieties decrease significantly.Of course, the major engine of change for people isn’t an intellectual understanding of the origins of their anxiety. It’s having a relationship with a therapist in which their anxieties are increasingly disconfirmed because their therapist doesn’t respond to them in the ways they expect her to. Patients are enormously relieved when they don’t feel that their anger will damage their therapist, for example. Or when the criticism they expect to come their way in therapy never does. Or when, contrary to their expectations, their therapist actually takes a deep interest in them.The anxieties that lead people to seek therapy are the very anxieties that make therapy seem like a frightening process. Since their anxieties developed in the context of difficult relationships, it’s hard for them to imagine that those anxieties can be relieved by having a different kind of relationship... or that different kinds of relationships are even possible. That’s why, in my experience, people often try to resolve their anxiety symptoms on their own and only come to therapy once they feel like they’ve hit a wall. Nonetheless, if people can overcome their initial anxieties enough to make that first appointment, they’ll often experience tremendous relief and find themselves on the road to a more satisfying life.Click to learn more about anxiety therapy and treatment with Dr. Jane Rubin.Jane Rubin, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist in Berkeley, California. She works with individuals in Berkeley, Oakland, the East Bay and the greater San Francisco Bay Area who are struggling with depression and anxiety. She also specializes in working with people who are trying to find meaning and direction in their lives.