As a therapist offering anxiety therapy in Duluth, MN, there’s a theme that shows up in the therapy room all the time. It usually starts with something really honest and vulnerable, like:
And of course, each one of those statements make sense. When something feels loud, painful and/or constant inside of you…it’s natural to want relief. Most people come into therapy hoping we can help them “fix” the thing that hurts. So we start there.
We get curious about the anxiety. We muster up the courage to look at the inner critic. We explore the overthinking together. We dig around in the roots a little bit and ask the big questions:
And this is usually the point where something subtle, but really important, happens. People get stuck in what I call the “fix it” mentality.
Once we understand the root of the anxiety (or critic, or hypervigilance, or enter in any other thing we’re struggling with here) the next instinct is often:
“Alrighty. So how do we make this thing go away?”
Or:
“So I just need to calm myself down more?”
“I need to stop letting my inner critic run wild then.”
“I’ll work harder on shutting that voice off.”
It’s almost like the person in front of me turns themselves into another self-improvement project. Another thing to optimize; another part to eliminate. Which breaks my heart for so many reasons, but the biggest one is that when someone lands here there’s a huge piece that is missed:
Working with the thing you want to change is only half of the work.
If therapy only focuses on reducing anxiety, what you’re left with is simply less anxiety. And while that might sound like we’ve achieved the goal we set out to accomplish, this outcome doesn’t automatically create the emotional life people are actually longing for. Because the absence of anxiety is not the same thing as the presence of happiness, peace, joy, or contentedness.
We’ll use anxiety as the example to walk this through. If someone has spent years (decades or lifetimes) living in a near-constant state of worry, tension, scanning and bracing, their nervous system has become very practice at anxiety. Like an overworked muscle, their body and mind and system all know that terrain extremely well.
But what their system hasn’t practiced nearly as much is:
Those emotions require the capacity to feel them. To be in them. To rest in them. And capacity isn’t built by removing anxiety alone. It’s built by actively strengthing your ability to experience and tolerate these lighter states of being. Because here’s something that surprises a lot of people:
Feeling good can be just as dysregulating as feeling bad, if you’re not used it it.
Something I see often is this: Someone starts doing solid therapy work. Their anxiety decreases and then their inner critic softens just a bit. And then something strange happens.
They feel a moment of calm… and immediately second-guess it. Or they feel happiness and it quickly disappears. Or they find themselves start to relax, and their system ramps right back up again.
And this isn’t because they’re broken, that therapy isn’t working, or they aren’t doing it right. It’s literally because their system has low capacity for those states of being. If you’ve lived in survival mode for a long time, peace can feel unfamiliar at best… and unsafe at worst. Your system might ask:
“Is this real?”
“Sure it’s here now, but how long will this last?”
“What happens when this leaves/changes?”
So instead of settling into joy, it leaves it. Not intentionally, but automatically because that’s what’s safest.
This is the reframe I talk about with clients a lot:
Healing is not about getting rid of parts of you. (We couldn’t do this even if we wanted to, anyways). Healing is about processing what you’ve gone through and also about building experiences that differ from what you’ve endured in your past.
Yes, we work with the anxiety. Double yes, we soften the inner critic. Triple yes, we work to understand the protective strategies. And we also:
Because if we don’t build those pathways, there’s literally nothing to fill the space once anxiety softens. Which is kind of like clearing a field but never planting anything new.
Capacity building isn’t flashy work. She’s subtle, & sometimes she feels silly because it looks a lot like:
For lots of folks these experiences are brand-spanking-new terrain. And new terrain takes practice to master. So if you’ve ever found yourself thinking: “Why the f*** don’t I feel happier even though I’ve worked on my anxiety?”. The answer might be less about you being a failure at therapy and more about only focusing on half of the equation.
The work in therapy is a happy balance between “I want to move away from this thing that I don’t like” and “What do I want to grow in its place?”.
What emotional states need strengthening? What experiences feel hard to hold onto? Where does goodness slip though too quickly? We ask these questions and give them nurturance because therapy that works doesn’t just work on symptoms reduction. Therapy that actually helps people move into sustainable change is also centered around expanding your capacity to be alive.
To feel more.
To hold more of your own experience.
To live with more range.
To live with not just less pain, anxiety, depression, [enter symptom set here], but instead to live with more presence. To live with a higher capacity to experience the things you do want to experience.
So if you notice yourself stuck in the “fix it” loop…
My goal here is to gently, but also firmly, widen the frame for you: What is healing isn’t just about removing the hurts… but also about building your ability to feel what heals? Because joy, peace, and content don’t automatically show up when anxiety leaves. They’re capacities.
And capacities can be practiced, strengthened, and expanded.
That’s the other half of the other half of the work. And it deserves just as much attention.
If you’ve been trying your hardest to eliminate anxiety but still feel like something’s missing, it might not be about working harder. It might be about building new emotional capacity. And that isn’t something that you have to do alone, friend.
At Northern Edge Counseling, we offer anxiety therapy in Duluth, MN that’s trauma-informed, relational, and focused on helping you expand your ability to experience calm, happiness, love, contentedness, peace, and all of the other feel-goods you could add to a list like this. If you’re ready, we’re here for you. Let’s help you find the clinician who fits you best and build something sustainable together.
