Where Do Chronic Anxiety & Depression Come from?
An Emotionally-Focused Therapist’s PErspective On these Mysterious Conditions.
I have always found it interesting the way people with their mental health issues tend to have one or two “flavours” to their struggles: anxiety or depression. Myself, I’ve always tended towards melancholy. If I’m having a hard time, I find that there are so many reasons to cry, so few reasons to hope.
Often, when I meet clients, they tell me they are depressed or anxious (and sometimes both). They rarely know why they feel this way; this is just the way they’ve always remembered feeling. They’re living under the weight of an incredibly frustrating mystery.
As an Emotionally-Focused therapist, I have a particular way of understanding anxiety and depression. I don’t see these conditions as simply occurring due to “chemical imbalances”, existing in and of themselves for no reason at all. I see anxiety and depression as clues leading to deeper places in a person’s psyche. Where do these clues lead?
To provide some answers, let’s take a look at how an Emotionally-Focused Therapist might work with you if you came to therapy with chronic anxiety. (By the way, this way of working with people originates with Dr. Les Greenberg, one of the pioneers of EFT.)
Identifying and Understanding Emotions
To begin with, a big part of working with an EFT therapist would involve identifying and understanding your emotions. Emotions are categorized into primary and secondary types. Primary emotions are raw and deeply rooted, often arising from unprocessed trauma or unmet needs. Secondary emotions, on the other hand, are reactions that stem from these primary emotions.
For example, what if your chronic anxiety was a secondary emotion resulting from unresolved trauma? What if you had a parent who simply didn’t give you enough positive attention or loving affection when you were growing up? This kind of experience is fertile soil for anxiety to grow in.
Unearthing and Processing Primary Emotions
One of the central tasks in EFT is to bring primary emotions to the forefront. These emotions tend to be fixed in place by negative self-concepts.
To continue our example, what if you tend to believe that when you ask other people for help you are “being annoying”? You go to a lot of effort to not be this annoying, clingy, needy person. In fact, a lot of your anxiety centers on how people see you and whether you’re doing a good enough job of not being “annoying”. This negative self-concept (i.e., “my needs are annoying”) and the behaviours it drives are like flowers growing from the root of your unmet craving for love. Isn’t it ironic that this way of seeing yourself keeps you from ever exploring how to meet this need with safe people? But by accessing and processing your grief over being neglected, you can begin to shift this pattern.
Transforming “Unhelpful” Emotions
Once primary emotions are unearthed and understood, EFT focuses on transforming unhelpful secondary emotions into adaptive emotions. In other words, instead of being mysterious afflictions with no purpose, your emotions—even your difficult emotions— help you to live your life the way you want to live it. They show you what you need to see about yourself from moment to moment and shine a light on the actions you might want to take.
For example, what if your chronic worry could evolve into self-compassion (i.e., “My needs make me a human deserving of love”) and the courage to be vulnerable with safe people? This transformation could help get you to actually feel deeply cared for, maybe for the first time.
Enhancing Emotional Regulation
A key benefit of EFT is the development of emotional regulation skills. In other words, you learn to recognize, understand, and manage your emotions in a way that supports growth and resilience.
For example, what if, instead of feeling chronic “pointless” anxiety, you had a more productive relationship with your fear? Then, when you felt a spike of anxiety in your system, you could say, “What is my fear showing me, and what can I do about it? What will help this fear to resolve, because the job it came here to do will be done?” Then, maybe you realize you feel this stab of fear because you need to communicate a boundary to a friend. Then, perhaps you have that hard conversation, and the fear dies down when it goes well. Your relationships—with both yourself and your friend—grow stronger as a result.
