Dear anxiety, I honestly don't like you. But I understand that, in your own way, you want to help me. We have changed a lot since our first dramatic meeting, and I need to give you a new seat.
Last update: October 07, 2020
With a letter to anxiety, we try to find out where our relationship with this symptom is. We have changed a lot, the time has come to redefine anxiety and place it in a new dimension that makes us feel more comfortable and more honest.
Our relationship with anxiety has always been complicated, sometimes tortuous. Sometimes it gave us that push that was missing. We write a letter to anxiety to understand how much it still hurts us and, above all, to rephrase questions that have not yet been answered.
Letter to anxiety
Letters usually start with "dear" or "my friend", but this is a letter to anxiety. It is difficult to regard anxiety as a friend or even to love it. As we repeat over and over, love doesn't have to hurt. In this case the anxiety has a very sharp blade, capable of penetrating deeply.
Then we can try with "dear companion". Companion because we find her promptly by our side, excellent because there is no doubt that her presence is at least particular and significant among the possible life experiences.
Dear comrade, I am writing you this letter to understand how to position yourself at this point, how much you can still hurt me and what path you have traveled with me. We have changed, a lot, and we need to review our spaces.
A first tragic meeting
In a letter to anxiety it is difficult not to refer to the first meeting. An encounter that has something in common with romantic film loves: it has left an indelible mark in the memory. The first time we were in his company it was a sudden and unexpected experience.
Without warning, it cruelly shook our body. The feeling of drowning, the nausea, the heart beating fast to escape a death that suddenly seems imminent. She has crept into our enjoyment of food, into our sleep, bringing pains throughout the body. To say that we have lost control over ourselves is little to describe this experience.
After a period that seemed endless, someone gave it a name. It wasn't the heart, it wasn't the deadly disease we feared we might have. It was she, the addressee of this letter. And the unanswered questions and the pain began. "Why right now, if I was fine?" "How can anxiety do this to me?" Or "What can I do to get rid of it?"
I stopped hating you when I realized who you were
As we try to write this letter, the memory of how much we hated anxiety comes back strong, as we tried to kick it away, shouting a thousand times "what do you want from me?". There is certainly no lack of reasons to hate it: suffering, fatigue, loneliness.
It is not difficult to nurture this feeling when we think that it has distanced us from the people we loved most, with the implicit vow of silence that forbids us to pronounce his name.
Hate, however, is not an emotion that we can keep for long. Her intensity wears off and we were already exhausted. That's right, consumed by so much anger. And then we began to accept, through gritted teeth, that she would be with us indefinitely. We decided to listen and ask ourselves those same unanswered questions, with all the patience we could muster.
And the anxiety, to respond like an echo: "Are you sure everything was fine?", "Why now?". This echo revealed something to us, we finally understood: it was there to amplify our long-stifled voice.
A voice interrupted too often that has decided to be heard once and for all, regardless of the kind ways. Even today we ask her resentfully: "but was all this really necessary, just to make you listen?".
My friend, listen ...
Even if we are not yet able to call this dramatic life partner "friend", we have certainly gained an ally in our difficult journey. This priceless friend is called listening and is versatile. Sometimes he asks us to stretch our ears outside, other times inside us.
Listening, yes, is a true friend. Of those that make you notice the beautiful things, which at the moment we fail to appreciate and the others in which we are messing everything up and we need to shake up. We have to respect this friendship, whether we like it or not.
We conclude this letter by describing our current perception of anxiety; one of the reasons that prompted us to write. Now we want to speak directly to anxiety.
Dear anxiety, I honestly don't like you. But I fully understand why you exist, and that you come to help me with your brusque ways. I know that when I ally myself with listening, you come to visit me less. But it doesn't matter, if you come back, I'll try not to get too angry, not to chase you away before I understand why you came knocking on my door. But you understand that it is difficult. I don't promise you anything.
Write a letter to anxiety
Writing a letter to anxiety means engaging in an inner dialogue with it, open new paths towards greater awareness. Symptoms, such as anxiety, are typically the tip of the iceberg submerged in the darkness of the unconscious.
Narrative psychotherapy, with techniques such as writing a letter, can facilitate the process of transforming feelings into words. We invite you to write your anxiety letter, trying to define the relationship you currently have with this symptom. What opening would she have?
