Anxiety For No Reason Repressed Feelings Psychotherapy

Diagnostic criteria of generalized anxiety disorder

1. Excessive anxiety and worry (fearful anticipation) occurring most days of a period of at least 6 months, about a range of events or activities (such as work and school performance)
2. The person feels that it is difficult to control their worry
3. Anxiety and worry are associated with three or more of the following symptoms

Άγχος Χωρίς Λόγο Καταπιεσμενα Αισθηματα Ψυχοθεραπεια

• Nervousness or feeling anxious or tense nerves

• Fatigue easily

• Difficulty concentrating or feeling like the mind is going blank

• Irritability

• Muscle tension

• Sleep disturbance (difficulty getting or staying asleep or restless unsatisfactory sleep.

4. Anxiety, worry, or physical symptoms cause clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning

5. The disorder is not due to the direct physiological effects of a substance (eg, substance of abuse, drugs) or a general physical condition (eg, hyperthyroidism) and does not occur exclusively during a pervasive developmental disorder.

See also: Stress And Stress

Anxiety For No Reason Repressed Feelings Psychotherapy: Anxiety never occurs without a reason

There is always a cause, even in those cases where the person experiencing it does not know the reasons why they are stressed. This is the case with neurotic anxiety. Below I explain what this means.

See also: Anorexia Nervosa – Causes

The real stress

But let us first make a basic distinction. There are two types of stress. One is the real stress that has nothing to do with our inner life. For example, when someone is a student and taking exams at university, they may have anxiety, or an unpaid bill that is due and creates anxiety about the power going out at home, or someone who is afraid of losing their job because they only rely on it and a bunch of other things are sources of stress. But these do not concern our inner mental life. These are outside of us. They may affect us, but they are faced with some mobilization. One is doing something. The student reads more, the bill goes into payment, and the stress of being laid off is dealt with as best one can, for example by looking for a second job or increasing one’s efficiency to avoid being on the front line in the event of a layoff.

Neurotic anxiety

However, there is also a second type of anxiety, neurotic.
– What is this;
Nervous, we call anxiety that, while it exists, has no apparent reason for its existence. We don’t understand where it comes from. It is usually permanent but hides and appears where you least expect it. It surfaces and troubles us but we cannot understand where it comes from. So why is this happening? Where is it due to? What are the reasons for its existence?

The role of the unconscious field of the psyche

The reasons are unconscious. I mean, we don’t know them. These reasons are within us, they are ours, but we do not know them. They belong to an unconscious field. On a level that we cannot easily approach even though it is revealed to us every night through dreams. Dreams are the road to the unconscious, as are the misdeeds and detours of language. When we want to do something and do something else, or when we want to say something and say something else, there an unconscious fact is revealed. A need or a desire that is deeply repressed and that we do not feel. But every need that we have repressed has energy. He wants to express himself. That is, he wants to be satisfied. So if you were jealous of your brother but everyone told you to love him and you thought it would be good to show him love because in the end everyone who hates him will hate you, then you push away the jealousy and hatred and replace them with love. Which of course is not love but inverted hate.

But this jealousy will not die because you pushed it away. This jealousy remains active within us. She retains all her impetuous energy and looks for ways to express herself. But that’s where the defenses step in, reversing it and making it take on a form of false love. You show fake love to your colleagues, your partner, your children, your friends. There is the unconscious element that determines your life. Indeed, our life is unconscious. It is an illusion that we think we are making conscious decisions in our lives. Few things are conscious of us. And when our repressed needs and wants are about very basic, structural things in our lives, like the real love we need to live or the need to share ourselves in order to communicate, then problems arise in our relationships with other people, in our narcissism, that is, in our self-esteem, and in the end more serious symptoms appear.

Trying to control the things around us betrays our inner conflicts

Our unconscious life defines us. And the more someone tries to control his life and those around him, the more conflicts he hides inside. To stop being defined by our unconscious, we must try to get to know it. In other words, to get to know our mental life. Ourselves. Let’s see what happens inside us. What emotional stuff are we made of? How the circumstances of our childhood affected us and how they continue to affect us. The hatreds, the angers, the rages, the frustrations, the losses, the various special circumstances that befell each one. Every emotional difficulty that arose within the circumstances that everyone experienced, did not remain conscious. It was pushed back so as not to cause discomfort. Most people think that because they can remember an event that affected them, they think they can deal with it. However, the real feelings associated with the events cannot easily be kept in one’s consciousness. It doesn’t matter if you remember or don’t remember something but with what emotion it is invested. How do you really feel inside about it? When I ask people how their relationship is with their parents, everyone at first answers me: “good, there is no problem”, which of course means that there are a lot of problems hidden underneath. Firstly because there is no relationship that is just good and secondly because all problems concern family relationships as well. I know they are lying to themselves at the time. I know they are defensive about their real feelings. When I insist on being explained in more detail, some answer angrily: “but I told you she’s good, what else can I say?” There I notice and tell them that they say it angrily. Since it’s all very nice and angelically made and laid “well” with red carpets and the philharmonic band playing, why are you angry? And there, of course, the first resistances begin to break.

Both good and bad together

There are no good or bad parents. Parents, like all people in this world are both good and bad together. And it’s just us projecting goodness and badness to people. If we need to see others as good, we unconsciously see them as good. Which means we turn the feeling of seeing them as bad, into good, because we can’t stand it. This is the so-called “opposite formation” or in English reaction formation. It is an unconscious mechanism that intervenes when we cannot bear to see the bad side of things.

The effort of awareness

So anxiety, like most things in this world, is unconscious. The attempt to make the unconscious conscious is called psychotherapy. It is the effort to bend the resistances and see what our real inner emotional life is. That is why treatment takes time and that is why it is based on the relationship that is created between the patient and the therapist. The therapeutic relationship is valuable because there unfolds the whole personality of the person who wants to learn about himself. At the beginning full of defenses and along the way with the gradual change from our false defensive self, to our true self that has hidden behind the traumas in some cases, behind the big frustrations in some other cases and behind the wreckage in the most difficult ones cases, concerning our childhood and the way we went through the psychosexual stages of development which we will talk about in another article.

So neurotic anxiety is related to this part of our mental life and is dealt with when one begins to learn about oneself, i.e. one’s unconscious life. It takes time, it takes effort, but it is a liberating process from the shame and guilt that come in as defenses in front of the feelings we developed in our infant, toddler and childhood lives.

*The article may not be reproduced without the written permission of the author

See also: Symptoms of Social Phobia

See Also: Specific Phobia Symptoms

The process of psychotherapy requires commitment, dedication and is addressed only to those who seriously see that they need to change their lives. If you are thinking of starting this journey, call me at 211 71 51 801 to make an appointment and see together how I can help you.

Mixalis Paterakis

Psychologist Psychotherapist

Karneadou 37, Kolonaki

I accept by appointment

Τηλ: 211 7151 801

www.mixalispaterakis.gr

www.psychotherapy.net.gr