Anxiety comes in many shapes an sizes. Sometimes it is racing thoughts, tightness in the chest, nausea, jelly legs, and so on. It might morph into any number of phobias also as the fear factor increases. Usually people know when they are experiencing signs of anxiety because it is a sensory response to feeling overwhelmed, but sometimes people do not recognise it, especially if they are pushing through it, in order to cope.
Clients who have a strong survival instinct and who do not shy away from a challenge are usually the types to ‘push through’ anxiety, without recognising it. But they still suffer the same consequences of it. They find themselves in my clinic because they feel bad, they know something is wrong, and they need something to change.
Quite often they would have seen a doctor about their racing heartbeat only to find that there is nothing clinically wrong with them, yet. Perhaps they have noticed that they keep waking in the night and cannot get back to sleep. Maybe they are becoming more withdrawn because they no longer feel comfortable around others. They might even be experiencing hot and cold flushes, pins and needles, or headaches. For a person who is used to pushing through it, anxiety can be quite confusing.
Bec’s Signs of Anxiety
Bec was 30 years old and had already travelled a difficult road with abuse issues involving sexual abuse and violence in her teens. Preceding that were years of custody battles where she had to appear in court as her parents fought over her. Later on she became involved in two violent relationships. Although nothing catastrophic had occurred for her in the past five years, her feelings of being punished by life only deepened, so she came in to see if we could help her unconscious mind shift those old beliefs. Bec was experiencing disturbed sleep, social withdrawal, drinking as a form of self-soothing, uneasiness and a churning gut as her signs of anxiety.
We regressed the feeling of being worthless, which was the resounding message through all of her traumas, as she constantly expected another hit. As we travelled back, that feeling changed into a core belief of pure hopelessness, that nothing could ever work out for her. We went as far back as to a point in her history, before she even entered the womb. Yes, in Bec’s unconscious mind this belief that nothing would ever work out for was so engrained that it perceived the trouble as beginning before Bec was even conceived. I have experienced this several times with clients who have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, as did Bec.
In that space, I asked Bec’s spirit body why it chose to enter this lifetime, if it knew that life was going to be so difficult. This line of questioning which became more specific as we went on, encouraged Bec’s unconscious mind to take responsibility for her own happiness, and to move forwards now that she was, and had been, safe for the past five years. It allowed her to get unstuck from her past traumas and to see that she could now prosper.
There is a lot of work to do with PTSD in assisting a client to move forwards, but essentially a person needs to see where they are going, in order to get there. When they get stuck in a hurtful past, they no longer look to the future. Instead they often choose to hide, just in case it happens again. So helping a person to see the possibilities is a massively important step in the process of change.
If you need assistance in leaving the past behind, we can help. Horizons Clinical Hypnotherapy Sunshine Coast.