The expression, "What's keeping you up at night?" and your answer is a good starting point to discovering what kind of anxiety you're dealing with currently. Anxiety is everywhere. We all have it. And it is part of life. Do we all have an anxiety disorder, no, but we all have the signaling system in the brain that cues us to pay attention. If we are not aware of how this system works and skilled at managing our anxiety when it shows up it can impact our relationships, our parenting, our sex life, our work, our drive around town.
Are you challenged with existential anxiety? It certainly would be understandable in these times. Are you contending with a chronic anxiety that comes with tangled-up relationships, emotional cutoffs from family? The kind of anxiety that you are not actively thinking about daily, but it's there all the time. When people have these types of anxiety, existential and chronic, it's like you are carrying around a half cup of anxiety everywhere you go. So then when life happens, you lock yourself out of the house, you got out to start the car and the battery is dead, your partner doesn't text back as is the pattern, it just doesn't take much for you to reach your anxiety tolerance. You find it harder to contend with life generally. You may become more irritable, less patient with the kids or pets, or just outright angry. This is all anxiety. And boy oh boy are we living in anxious times. Again, you may not have a diagnosable, clinically significant level of anxiety, but that hardly means it's not distressing and causing challenges during your day. The good news is learning more about yourself, how your anxiety presents, and processing some of the anxiety in that symbolic cup of anxiety (existential and chronic) and help you better deal with the daily anxieties that are part of life. Therapy is a great place to learn about this. It's some of my favorite work to help clients with their anxiety because it's life-changing. The larger your anxiety tolerance, the better. And just like any skill with knowledge and then practice, you will continue to improve bringing more calm and peace to your life.
As a couple's therapist, it's important to take a look at anxiety as well. As I mentioned, an individual's anxiety comes into the relationship. It can impact mood, energy, sociability, libido, among other things. Couples can co-regulate each other by being a place of comfort, but it is also necessary for each person to be aware of their anxiety and work to manage it, not solely looking to one's partner. Ideally, it's a both/and proposition. We can each identify our anxiety, self soothe, and self validate, and we can also reach for our partner or be there for our partner to soothe and manage anxiety. This is some of the work I do with couple's in marriage or relationship therapy.
About the therapist: Dr. Melissa Hudson, LMFT-S has been a Plano couple's counselor and licensed marriage and family therapist since 2012. She offices near the Shops of Legacy in West Plano conveniently located to serve the communities of The Colony, McKinney, Allen, Richardson, and Frisco as well as offering statewide services via Telehealth. She also specializes in working with those contending with depression and anxiety as well as a wide spectrum of other psychological concerns you can learn about here.