Announcing My New Course: Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems

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I am pleased to announce the launch of my second Premium Audio Course for Insight Timer – Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems. If you sign up to this six-day course today you will learn why you feel so anxious, starting with the evolutionary and neurological roots of anxiety, explaining why it’s a crucial emotion for us all to feel, because it alerts us to threats and helps us react to them, quickly if need be.

Understanding why you feel so anxious is a key step in learning to accept it, because anxiety is something we all feel and is an important alarm signal when things need our attention. And then helping you ease it over time – this course will help you start to feel calmer, safer, and more at peace, step by step.

Over the six days you will also learn about internal family systems therapy, which is one of the fastest growing and most popular models of therapy in the world right now. As an Internal Family Systems Therapist, I use this warm, compassionate, and highly effective treatment approach with my clients and in my teaching, because it offers a revolutionary way of understanding problems like chronic anxiety.

Meeting your young, anxious part

You will learn that this anxiety comes from an anxious young part of you, holding painful thoughts, feelings, and memories of difficult experiences in your childhood. To ease your anxiety, you need to learn how to connect with, understand and soothe this anxious little boy or girl inside.

I will also teach you that worry comes from another part of you, called the Worrier. Again, you will learn how to accept and even value this protective part, because it’s just trying to help, even if the way it does so can be stressful and exhausting at times.

I hope you join me on this transformative six-day journey, which includes theories and techniques drawn from my many years of helping clients better manage their anxiety. As well as trauma-informed teaching about the mind-body source of problematic anxiety, I will lead you through powerful calming techniques including breathwork and guided-imagery exercises, drawn from IFS and other trauma-informed therapy models.

The course is free if you become a Member Plus Supporter. This costs just $60 for 12 months of high-quality content like this on the Insight Timer app from me and thousands of other leading teachers. ⁠

Try it now by visiting my Insight Timer collection or clicking on the button below. ⁠

I hope you find it insightful and healing. ⁠

Love ❤️⁠

Dan

Why Do We Worry? And is it Always a Problem?

Would you call yourself a worrier? And if so, what kinds of things do you habitually worry about? Let me take a guess… My hunch is that your worries take the form of ‘what if…’ thoughts, like ‘What if I lost my job? How would I cope? Would we lose our home? Would my wife leave me?’

Or, ‘What if I make a fool of myself giving that speech at my daughter’s wedding? What if my mind just goes blank and I can’t remember what to say? Everyone would think I’m a pathetic loser. That would be horrendous – I would never live it down.’

Our worries commonly show up as these ‘what if…’ thoughts for a few reasons:

1. Worries are always future-focused. We never worry about things that have already happened. And that’s why worry (a cognitive process) is linked with anxiety (a feeling), which is also future/threat-focused. So we worry about bad stuff that could happen, imminently or further down the line.

2. Worries are often catastrophic. Not always, of course – worries range from mild to severe. But they often involve ‘catastrophising’, because that’s what worry is for – imagining worst-case scenarios and how we could cope with them. So in the above example, losing his job led to losing the house and potentially divorce, rather than simply having to downsize or rent for a while.

3. Worry involves ‘bridge-crossing’. This links to the future-focused idea, because when we worry we are crossing every potential bridge on the road ahead, seeing where they all lead and how best to cross them. Some of those bridges we may well have to cross, but probably 99% of them we won’t, which is one reason that worry can be stressful, exhausting and potentially very unhelpful. We live through a vast number of horrible imagined situations, most of which never actually happen.

Worry is not a bad thing, per se

I have had many clients who worry in an obsessional, relentless and exhausting way – so for them, worry is definitely unhelpful. But I tell even these people that worry is not a bad thing, per se – it’s the way we worry that’s tricky.

Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that a team of scientists could miraculously stop your brain from worrying, ever again. Pow! No more worry. Would that be helpful? Not so much.

Imagine you now have to plan your daughter’s wedding (and write that damned speech). But you can’t do any future-focused problem solving because you have lost the ability to worry. And remember that this is what worry is for – imagining challenges in your future so your brain can think and think (and think!) about them until it has come up with a solution.

Which part of you does the worrying?

Looking at this through an internal family systems lens, as I increasingly do, it’s helpful to understand that there’s a part of you who feels anxious (a young part, probably) and another, protector part, who starts worrying to try and help the little one feel calmer, safer and less stressed. This is what protectors do, inside your head – try to make sure that hurt parts of you never get hurt again.

We usually call this part, unsurprisingly, the Worrier. And Worrier parts are busy little bees. They are super-hard working, hypervigilant, relentless (when you ask them they will tell you they never switch off, 24/7, every day of your life). They work so hard to protect you – and especially those young, anxious parts of you – from being criticised, attacked, shamed, rejected, or hurt in any other way. They’re kind of heroic, in my opinion.

But of course all this worry is exhausting. It often leads to insomnia, as you lie there at 3am going over and over that tricky morning meeting. Excessive worry can lead to chronic stress, burnout, being constantly on edge and never able to switch off. It’s not much fun.

So if you worry in this unhelpful way, we clearly need to help you worry less, altogether, and worry in a less catastrophic, more helpful/problem-solving way. Luckily, internal family systems gives us a clear, concrete road map of how to make these internal changes – one of the many things I love about this incredibly creative, highly compassionate model.

If you would like to find out more, do come along to my next workshop – Overcoming Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace, on Saturday 10th December 2022. This is an online workshop, so you can join from anywhere in the world. As with all our Heal Your Trauma events, it offers a limited number of free places, as well as a Low-Income Ticket and Supporter Ticket, if you are able to support the project.

So money should be no barrier, if you need help, even if you are struggling financially right now.

I hope to see you there!

Warm wishes,

Dan

Can’t Stop Worrying? If So, This Simple Technique Will Help

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Why do we worry? It’s an important question and – if you struggle with worry and anxiety – one we need to answer before thinking about how to help you. One way to think about worry is anticipating stressful, threatening, upsetting or even dangerous events that might occur in the future. This is known as ‘bridge-crossing’. Your brain knows there is a challenge up ahead, so crosses every possible bridge that might lie in your path, to try and help you manage the challenge as best you can.

You could also say that worry is a wired-in, evolutionary response to threats and dangers. Let’s say you were a hunter-gatherer, walking through long grass on the savannah, 10,000 years ago. The threat system in your brain would have been (rightly) highly sensitive and hypervigilant, using all your senses to scan for predators lurking in the grass. You might even have imagined a lion leaping out and how you would try and fight them off, or make your escape. In doing so, you would have visualised the whole scenario, as if playing a video in your mind’s eye.

That would have required a uniquely human capacity: the ability to use a kind of virtual-reality simulator in your brain to imagine the future – sensing it, visualising it and even living through it – to help protect you from potential threats. When you worry, you are using these high-tech neural capacities to anticipate bad stuff on the horizon and how to protect yourself.

More simply, we can also say that worry is a kind of problem-solving thinking, helping you anticipate upcoming problems and then helping you find solutions by running through a whole host of possible options, until you find one that could work.

How anxiety leads to worry

Another key thing to understand about worry is that it’s the cognitive response to the emotion of anxiety. It’s important to emphasise this, because people often get the two mixed up. They say, ‘I feel worried,’ when what they mean is, ‘I feel anxious and am worrying to try and deal with that.’ (I’m sure my clients get fed up with me reminding them of this, but it’s important, so I brave their eye-rolling and say it anyway.)

If we add to this puzzle the fact that anxiety is a threat-focused emotion, triggered by your brain as an alarm call to let you know a person or situation is threatening and you should do something – right now! – to deal with it, you can see why anxiety is designed to feel so bad; and how it’s intended to provoke some kind of urgent, problem-solving action. And we’re back to worry – the urgent, problem-solving action that your brain takes when you feel uncomfortably anxious.

Getting to know the worrier

Yet another way of thinking about worry (last one, I promise) involves understanding that your personality is made up of a number of different parts. I have written about this extensively in previous posts and pages on my site, so if you need to know more I will just point you to either this page on ‘modes’ in schema therapy or this one on internal family systems.

One of the most effective ways of managing unhelpful worry is to speak to the part of you that does the worrying when you’re feeling anxious (usually named the Worrier, for obvious reasons). Here’s a step-by-step guide to doing just that…

The practice

Having a dialogue with your worrier

1. You can try this in two ways. One way is to use these guidelines just to have an internal dialogue with your Worrier part – this can happen many times throughout the day, whenever you find yourself worrying about something. But if you have time – and especially when you’re starting out with this talking-to-parts approach – I recommend trying this longer method first.

2. Start by switching your phone to silent and carving 10 minutes out of your busy day. If you are plagued by constant worry, which as you know can be very stressful and unpleasant, you should be highly motivated to find the time.

3. Now take two chairs and place them so they are facing each other. One chair is for the Worrier, the other your Healthy Adult. First sit on the Worrier chair and let rip about something you have been worrying about recently. It could be a problem at work, with your partner or kids, losing weight, health issues, or more global stuff like the cost of living crisis or climate change. Any subject will do, as long as it has been bothering you lately.

4. Now be the Worrier. Just act as if you are this part of yourself and (here’s the slightly weird bit) imagine that you are sitting on the other chair. So, if this was me, as the Worrier I would say: ‘Dan, I’m really worried about this post you’re writing. Honestly, it doesn’t seem that great. What if nobody reads it? What if they all think it’s crap and unsubscribe? And what if this whole Heal Your Trauma thing just crashes and burns? You’re not working hard enough on it, this is not your best work, so I think you should just scrap it and start again.’

5. Spend a couple of minutes being the Worrier, telling James or Jenny (you) in the other chair all the things he/she needs to worry about right now.

6. Then switch to the Healthy Adult chair. Plant your feet, roll your shoulders back and lengthen your spine. Close your eyes and breathe deeply, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Let your belly rise and fall with each breath. Keep breathing until you feel a little calmer, then open your eyes and respond to the Worrier from your (calm, strong, wise, compassionate) Healthy Adult.

7. Using myself as an example again, I would say, ‘Worrier, I know you mean well and you’re just freaking out right now. But I am working hard on this post – I always do. My writing is really important to me, so I try to make every post informative and interesting. And even if a couple of people unsubscribe, that’s OK, it’s not the end of the world.

   ‘It’s good to work hard but not helpful to have my whole self-worth riding on one post, that doesn’t make sense. So it’s all good – you can just relax and let me handle it. Thanks again for looking out for me.’

8. Notice that on the Worrier chair I say ‘you’ and on the Healthy Adult chair it’s ‘I’. This is important, because I want you to own what you’re saying on the HA chair more, for obvious reasons.

9. Try this, many times, until you feel the Worrier start to calm down. Make sure the way you speak to this poor, frazzled part of you is friendly and kind. It’s not a bad, or mean part – it is trying to help. But the way it’s helping is not very helpful! So you just need to learn how to empathise with, then reassure the Worrier. As ever, practice makes perfect so repeat, repeat, repeat until this is working for you…

I very much hope that’s useful for you. And if you would like some help with your worry and anxiety, do come along to my new one-day workshop: Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace. This powerful, highly experiential workshop takes place from 10.30am-4.30pm on Saturday 10th September 2022. It costs just £99 for the full day, including refreshments – there are also a limited number of reduced-fee places available.

Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace will be held at the Gestalt Centre, a short walk from King’s Cross Station in central London. Don’t miss this chance to learn from and spend a day with me – places are limited, so find out more and book using the button below:

I look forward to seeing you in September or at one of my upcoming workshops.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Would You Like Help With Your Worry and Anxiety?

Due to unforeseen circumstances, this event has been cancelled. If you were interested in attending, do book the online version of this workshop, which will run on 10th December 2022. Bookings for that workshop open in November. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

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Coping with Anxiety: How to Worry Less, Feel Calmer and More at Peace features teaching, powerful exercises that will help you feel calmer and more relaxed, and the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, a leading expert on trauma and mental health.

In this powerful, highly experiential webinar you will learn:

• Why high levels of anxiety are a common problem for people with a trauma history – and how that’s linked to a ‘dysregulated’ nervous system, as well as elevated levels of ‘stress hormones’ like adrenaline and cortisol in your bloodstream

• How anxiety is the brain’s ‘alarm’ emotion, warning you that something bad is about to happen and that you should do something, immediately, to keep yourself safe

• Why anxiety is linked to the fight-flight-freeze self-protection responses – useful for escaping from a hungry lion, but not if you’re sitting at your desk in a quiet, safe office

• Simple, evidence-based strategies to calm your anxious inner child, quickly and effectively

• Why anxiety (an emotion) and worry (a thinking process) are inextricably linked – and how to reduce both overwhelming emotions and unhelpful thinking

• Key experiential exercises – such as Compassionate Breathing and 4-7-8 Breathing, guided meditations and imagery – you will learn to help you cope with your anxiety, reduce unhelpful worry and feel calmer and more in control

• And throughout the day, you will get the chance to put your questions to Dan Roberts, Founder of Heal Your Trauma and an expert on trauma healing and managing anxiety

Don’t miss this chance to learn from a leading trauma therapist and expert on mental health and wellbeing – watch the video for more information and book your place now using the button below.

Warm wishes,

Dan

Is Worry Driving You to Distraction?

Image by Priscilla Du Preez

My clients often tell me that they feel worried. And, while I understand what they mean, I always tell them that worry is not a feeling – it’s a thinking process linked to the feeling of anxiety. So, really, what they are telling me is that they feel anxious about something and have gone into worry mode to try and think their way out of the anxiety.

In schema therapy, the part that feels anxious is your Vulnerable Child mode – Little Jane or James. This is the emotional part of you, which gets triggered whenever you feel sad, anxious, stressed, hurt, upset, down… It’s also the part of you that holds all your painful memories from childhood and can get triggered when you feel threatened by something – especially if that reminds you of a stressful event from childhood.

Worry is a symptom

Let me give you an example. *Helen comes to see me because she can’t stop worrying. It’s driving her crazy, because she worries about every little thing. ‘If I have a meeting at work, I worry beforehand, about what I’ll say, whether my boss is annoyed with me, whether my colleagues like me, what I’m wearing, what I say in the meeting… You name it, I’m worrying about it,’ she tells me.

And this worry is exhausting for Helen. It makes her feel stressed before, during and after the meeting. She just can’t stop thinking about these problems. It’s like her mind is a vice – it grips on to the problems and won’t let go. ‘The other problem is that it’s driving my husband crazy,’ she adds. ‘He tries to reassure me but it doesn’t work, so I go on and on about these petty things until we’re both ratty and exhausted.’

Of course I feel for Helen – her worry is causing huge problems in her life. It maintains her low self-esteem, because she doesn’t believe she will ever do anything well enough, and that people think she’s rubbish at her job, even that she will get fired because her boss doesn’t rate her. But in our first session, I tell her something surprising and counterintuitive – even though it’s driving her nuts, worry is not the problem. It’s a symptom. And the root cause of her worry is anxious Little Helen.

Anxiety warns us about threats

I ask her to tell me more about her boss, to see if he reminds her of anyone from her past. She thinks about it, then has one of those lightbulb moments. ‘Ohhh,’ she says, ‘He is just like my dad!’ Helen goes on to tell me that her dad was highly critical when she as a child, telling her that nothing was ever good enough. If she got a B on a test, he would ask impatiently why it wasn’t an A. If she came second in a cross-country race, he would berate her for not being first. And so on.

So when she goes for a meeting with her boss, Little Helen feels highly anxious – just like she did around her dad as a child. And that’s what anxiety is for – it’s an alarm-bell emotion that warns us about potential threats. Her Worrier part then kicks in, with lots of ‘what if…’ thoughts to try and problem-solve the threats. ‘What if you say the wrong thing?’ ‘What if your boss criticises you?’ ‘What if you get fired?’

Trying to help. Trying to protect her from this nit-picking, critical, perfectionistic boss who is just like her dad. Not mean, or horrible, but trying to help Helen deal with the anxiety-provoking situation.

Comforting your little self

In order to help Helen, in schema therapy we do a few things. First, we work with the Worrier, helping Helen see where it came from, what its function is, the pros and cons of worrying, and so on until we can help it calm down a bit. Second, we help Little Helen feel safe, comforted and genuinely, deep-down reassured (not the temporary fix of reassurance that worry provides). There are many ways to do this – plenty of which are provided in this blog – but a simple first step is to use this self-compassion practice to help your little self feel calmer and more at peace.

Third, we build up Helen’s Healthy Adult, so she feels stronger, more rational, having better perspective – seeing the big picture rather than obsessing about the details. If you are a worrier by nature, you need to do all three things, rather than just focusing on the worry. Otherwise, you’re treating the symptom, not the cause, so the worry will just keep coming back.

Warm wishes,

Dan

*All of the case studies on this blog are composites of actual people – I would never reveal any personal or identifying information about my clients.