Anxiety


Anxiety is an underlying symptom common to almost all psychiatric disorders. Dr Hazel Claire Weekes was an Australian research scientist and physician, considered by some as the pioneer of modern anxiety treatment.

We might benefit from listening and reading what she had to say about psychotherapy for many mental health problems— anxiety, panic attacks, reaction to stress and distress. She was ahead of her time in seeing the connection between trauma and its after-effects in the body.

Simply put, her approach to the treatment of anxiety is learning how to experience the oversensitive alarm system in the body, what I andothers often refer to as hyper-vigilance. It is the nervous energy that arises in response to current life stresses but remains tied to and triggered by previous traumatic stresses we have experienced.

Today, psychiatry increasingly is paying more attention to the body in relation to the psychiatric symptoms. Bessel van der Kolk in his bestseller The Body Keeps the Score (2014), recognized that there is a physiology of trauma.

It is refreshing to know that in the last century, we already had been given a much more lucid explanation than what we are now taught.

Today, you can google “Treatment of anxiety” and you are likely to get words such as cognitive behavioural therapy and references to medication. These are in some way missing the central issue. Weekes distilled her understanding of what was then termed “nervous illness” into a simple slogan for overcoming anxiety: Face, Accept, Float, Let Time Pass.

In short, it is a four step path. This treatment of anxiety encourages the patient to face their anxiety as the predicate to accepting it as simply an over-sensitized protective nervous mechanism in the body. We can escape the entrapment
of the anxiety cycle by learning to simply experience it and in that way float with it. It is a step by step process that, once we can float with it, we can watch it flow away. Paradoxically, anxiety is something that gets stronger if we run or fight with it but weakens and goes away if we accept and float with it. The formerly helpless individual learns that they have power over their anxiety when they truly learn to change the habitual response of running or fighting with it to being with it and letting go. In that way, patients can tame and harness their anxiety for healing, rather than wasting their energy fighting it and succumbing to it.

It is important to understand that many anxious patients have no memory or idea what it is like to feel peace and comfort in their body. With few exceptions, when I was practicing psychiatry, I considered the best use of medication to help them to regain the knowledge that peace and comfort in the body is possible. Using medication like that on a short term or intermittent basis can be a way to encourage patients to understand that their body actually does
know what it needs, and what it is searching to recover: the sensation of safety.

Dr. Weekes’ work is one potential way to seek to regain that critically important sensorial experience without medication.

https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/health-and-wellness/face-accept-float-let-time-pass-claire-weekes-anxiety-cure-holds-true-decades-on-20190917-p52s2w.html