Bewildered: How Not Anxious?

[@heartfuldesigns4you]

My fav podcast ever of all time and I only had to wait 67 years while floating around in outer space. Needless to say I bought the book during the podcast.🙏💙🧘‍♀️❤️😘🦋

[@susanvcorbett]

This may be my favorite of your podcasts.

[@carlaminutelli5189]

If we try to use our right brain to make things better. What about all the people around us that choose not to?

[@evanwalgren9591]

🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂🙂

[@JohnMoseley]

I dislike football and I like to cook. I also much appreciate your little fact on the superiority of dancing to tennis. Dancing, for me, is the king of exercise. I didn't know I was warding off dementia by doing it, but here's to that. Also, hey, a Yamaha guitar! I've got one of those and I love it. I've done this before, but I want to make a little plug for the therapy called AEDP and it's approach to anxiety. Not supposed to contradict anything here. I've gained huge benefit from your ideas, Martha, but I find the best approaches add new angles and complement each other. Why does anxiety run on and on, impervious to logic? AEDP says, because it's a trick, a block on real emotion. It suggests you do a little negotiation with yourself when you feel it: can I set the anxiety aside and see what's really going on? Then you wait and see what comes up physically: a ripple in the belly, a tingling in the forearms, who knows. It's what some therapists, borrowing a term from chemistry, call titration: a little at a time to avoid an explosion, and you can always pull back if it feels too much. I think this can be in dialogue with your thoughts on socialising. Why do we unconsciously choose anxiety over real emotion? Because anxiety is hermetic, a relationship just with yourself: I must be better or I must go all out to wardoff danger etc. The simple version of the AEDP manoeuvre (but it's better, richer to go through the body) is, when you start beating yourself up, ask, 'Who might I really want to beat up?' In other words, real emotions, as distinct from anxiety, are social. They're about engagement with people and the environment, and, as much as we need that, we may be starting from a lot of learning that our emotional engagements were undesirable, or just a sense that they were if, for instance, we never learned that our early, inchoate violent impulses weren't really dangerous and could be treated with kindness. Anger's the obvious thing people can have a problem with, but the rest can feel pretty wild and unnerving to the right-brain dominated: joy, lust, disgust, grief, you name it.