Anxiety Series - A Construct
Neuropsychologist Dr Lisa Barrett talks about anxiety as a construct; a label. “Anxiety” is a word, not a feeling. It is an abstraction of language. We have a feeling, or a set of feelings, and in an attempt to describe them, or make sense of them, we use language. Yet language is limited and up for interpretation. “Anxiety” doesn’t mean exactly the same thing to me as it does to you, and it certainly means something different in different countries and cultures. So how helpful is it to use such labels? The same can be said of many emotions or feelings – “low”, “exhausted”, “nervous”, “depressed” etc. If I said I was “clinically depressed”, that would be in relation to a specific abnormality in my brain (although, still not that specific and quite variable), but if I said I was depressed, that can mean so many things it would be impossible for you to try and empathise or understand.
In this way, also, we can obscure our own view of what we are feeling. If I use the label “anxious” to describe how I’m feeling. It may be too difficult, or uncomfortable, to analyse my feelings any further. The set of things I am feeling I call anxiety and leave it at that. But “anxiety” is too broad and too abstract to be something to work on. To work on mental health issues, specifics are helpful.
To a good therapist, labels like these mean nothing. They will ask you to describe your anxiety, to break it down into specifics. Perhaps you tell me, “I feel anxious all the time,” and I respond, “can you tell me more about that? What does anxiety feel like?” You may respond by telling me, “Whenever I am with other people, I constantly think how they may be judging me, and I can’t speak, I just smile at them.” Here, we have something to work with – a social element, a fear of judgement – something to dig deeper into and work through.
A therapist that works in such a way is embracing the phenomenological method. This very long (and fun) word relates to the idea that no two people experience the same phenomena in the same way. For a therapist, this means not making assumptions about how someone feels, based on the labels they use for those feelings. This is a method we should apply to ourselves. If you describe your feelings as “anxious” repeatedly, you may very well be making assumptions about yourself that are not true, in the same way someone else may make the same assumption if you told them you were anxious.
Deconstructing such labels into their subjective component parts, makes them more coherent to yourself. Doing so will also makes them easier to work on and manage. You will know specifically what the feelings are, underneath the label, and what they are specifically related to. Meaning, you can start to voluntarily confront your anxiety, in order to improve it and discover your own courage in doing so.