Unconsciously, people bury their feelings and subsequently avoid or "resist" feeling their feelings.  The unconscious strategies used to resist or avoid feelings are known as defenses.  They can range from intellectualizing/rationalizing to becoming deflated/helpless to angry outbursts, just to name a few.  When people habitually ignore their true feelings, they become stuck in anxiety or specific defenses.  This reliance on anxiety or defense causes people to engage in unhealthy and sometimes destructive habits that are designed to ensure that they remain partially or fully detached from their feelings. 

This is the model I use in my work: that anxiety and defenses are strategies employed to avoid feeling true, complex feelings. I believe learning this model can help you understand how intense feelings that cannot be processed (or metabolized) trigger anxiety, and how the unhealthy behaviors that follow are automatic responses that are designed to quiet down both the intense feelings and the anxiety they trigger.

By addressing the feelings underneath your anxiety, relief of your anxiety symptoms is possible. Most importantly, addressing your true feelings leads you to change the dysfunctional patterns of behavior that are keeping you stuck in your life, feeling bad, living beneath your potential, repeating self-destructive patterns, and generally feeling trapped in misery as opposed to being immersed in satisfaction and celebration of yourself, your loved ones, and your life. I use this model with, and teach it to, my patients because I believe it is essential in helping my patients achieve the results they desire.

The content on this site does not constitute medical advice, medical treatment or a patient-doctor (fiduciary) relationship.