Anxiety is not typically a state that attacks without warning nor is it some indefinable free-floating condition. Rather, anxiety is triggered in specific situations and, once you recognize and understand those specific situations, you can begin to manage and conquer your fear-based behaviors.
Unfortunately, too often, people simply avoid these trigger situations rather than confront them. Parents, in particular, frequently attempt to combat a child’s anxiety by telling themselves that they are “protecting” the child by removing the child from the troubling circumstances. However, avoidance is strongly discouraged. Avoiding the anxiety-producing situation may be an instinctive reaction but, not only is such a response counterproductive, it also reinforces the child’s fear. For instance, let us assume that a child fears dogs. Eliminating all contact with dogs will not cause the child to be less anxious—on the contrary. By circumventing any contact with dogs, the parent is sending a message to the child that there is, in fact, a reason to fear dogs. If parents choose not to enter a park because a dog is present, a child’s faulty belief system is supported: “Mom and Dad don’t think it’s safe to go near the dog.” This avoidance simply feeds the child’s fear, and the child remains fearful of dogs and perhaps even develops a new fear of parks, now associated with dogs.
However, not all trigger situations are as obvious as the example above. Sometimes we generalize by saying “Money makes me anxious,” yet “money” is a concept, not a trigger situation. It is easy to mislabel the causative circumstances, when the attention has always been on the fear response, instead of what exactly has been triggering the fear. So how does one accurately recognize trigger situations? Cognitive Behavioral Therapy employs a tool called monitoring to assist in the proper identification of these trigger situations, which will be explored in our next posting.