Dear Therapist:

I am a girl that has been teaching for a few years now. Before I go into the classroom, I often feel symptoms of anxiety. It usually starts before I even leave for work and continues until I’m actually in the classroom. Once I’m there, the anxiety lessens, but it doesn’t go away completely.

Now that it’s summer break, I’m barely feeling any anxiety at all. But when I think about going back to work, I still feel that familiar nervousness—just not as strong. If I have to make a phone call to a boss or attend a meeting, the anxiety symptoms tend to come right back.

I don’t want to feel stuck in therapy just because of what some people call “normal anxiety,” but at the same time, I would really love to be free of it. Is there anything I can do to ease this anxiety so it doesn’t come back when the school year starts again?

Thank you!

Response:

For the sake of this response, I’ll define anxiety as feelings of fear that significantly exceed what would normally be expected given the circumstances. Think of anxiety as your fight-or-flight response being triggered unnecessarily.

There are a number of ways to understand—and therefore approach—anxiety. For simplicity, I’ll focus on a few straightforward concepts.

From a cognitive perspective, anxiety is your mind’s way of telling you that something is dangerous—even when it’s not. In your case, teaching (or perhaps the work environment more broadly) causes your unconscious mind to send a message to your conscious mind that there’s something to fear.

One common approach is to identify the unconscious fear and bring it into awareness. This is harder than it sounds. The unconscious mind is built on fears, insecurities, and emotional patterns developed in childhood. That’s why it can trigger strong emotions that don’t match what we consciously know about the situation.

Since the unconscious works in the background, our natural tendency is to deny “baseless” emotions or try to convince ourselves that we shouldn’t feel them. But this doesn’t reach the unconscious. As a result, the fear keeps resurfacing.

Sometimes, once we recognize that our fears are rooted in the unconscious, the childhood causes of those fears become obvious. We can then understand the origin and relegate it to the past. Other times, it takes more effort. We may need to free-associate or explore memories until something resonates. Even if we can’t fully identify the source, the more clarity we gain, the easier it becomes to resolve the anxiety.

Self-esteem also often plays a major role. Both in childhood and adulthood, our sense of self deeply affects how we respond to challenges. A common driver of anxiety (and depression) is the fear of feeling badly about ourselves.

Feeling good about ourselves is a basic human need. In situations where we expect judgment—whether from ourselves or from others (which is essentially a roundabout way of judging ourselves)—we can easily become anxious about that judgment.

I’ve written elsewhere about the importance of building intrinsic self-esteem. Without going into detail here, this means identifying and internalizing the parts of who we are on the inside—our thoughts, values, and feelings. If your anxiety is connected to self-esteem, strengthening it in this way can be truly life-changing.

-Yehuda Lieberman, LCSW

 psychotherapist in private practice

 Woodmere, NY

 adjunct professor at Touro University

 Graduate School of Social Work

 author of Self-Esteem: A Primer

 www.ylcsw.com / 516-218-4200