We live in an age of anxiety, stress, tension, pressure, and burn-out. Anxiety has become a "normal" state of mind and daily a experience in this age of fast food and busy life styles. Road rage, panic attacks, post-traumatic stress disorders, and generalized anxiety are everyday parts of our story in the 21^st century. In fact, if we are not stimulated, excited and anxiety-motivated, we consider ourselves to be bored or depressed. We keep ourselves hyped up with the constant noise and busyness of radio, television, computers and cell phones. We pump ourselves up with all kinds of stimulants such as junk food, alcohol, drugs, coffee, soda, pornography, competitiveness, television dramas, rock music, war news, gossip, credit card mania, etc. In this hyper-stimulated addicted society we are tossing and turning even during sleep. The body and its immune system takes the beating and pays the cost of our anxious lifestyle.

Hyper-stimulation is both a contributor to anxiety, a consequence of anxiety and an attempted cure for anxiety. While we may daydream about a more peaceful and relaxed existence through vacations, retreats and retirement, we usually fall short of this dream. While we can point the finger of blame toward society for our hyper-stimulated addicted lifestyle, we need to take a deeper look at the real source of anxiety.

In this article I am proposing that anxiety is the key symptom of the identity story that we tell ourselves. Anxiety arises from our innermost conflict, and manifests in the outer world. This fact does not deny that anxiety is contagious from our social atmosphere and can be triggered by circumstances, other people, traumatic events and memories, and our general collective mindset. Many things that seem to be causes of anxiety are merely triggers.

An anxiety trigger is an outer event that stimulates or prompts an inner response. As Albert Ellis reminds us, A (stimulus) never causes C (behavior), but A (outer event) stimulates our inner belief (B) and B causes C (behavioral response). A is the outward trigger, B is our belief, and C is our anxiety reaction.

Some common anxiety triggers:

Someone criticizes you

You hear about a lay off

Your car won’t start

A family member gets sick or dies

You get in a wreck and get a ticket

Your teenager gets caught shoplifting

You discover that your spouse is attracted to someone else

You get a notice of a tax audit

Anxiety buttons are those weak points where we are most vulnerable to anxiety triggers. Anxiety buttons are our most common reactions patterns, such as our pet peeves, our insecurities, our temper, our irritability, our moodiness, our withdrawing quietness, our defensiveness, our procrastination, etc. "She pushed my button" means that I have a button that says "Push Me". A button is an automatic superficial reaction to an outer event. A person could have 20 "buttons" and expend a lot of energy reacting.

Our typical reaction patterns to anxiety are what I call Anxiety Rescue Plans. Anxiety automatically triggers any of several Reactive Rescue Plans that we may have in our repertoire. Get acquainted with your Anxiety Rescue Plans. Rescue Plans are automatic, habitual, reactionary, compulsive, impulsive, and self-deceptive strategies designed to fix our anxiety and its symptoms. Rescue Plans can be of many sorts and types. Eventually these automated rescue plans or self-medicating reactions crystalize into strategies, addictions, neuroses, and other personality patterns of avoidance and control.

Some typical self-rescue plans or strategies:

1. Addiction strategies. The most common self-rescue plans are the various addictions and compulsions. We try to comfort ourselves with various food, drink, drugs, and sexual compulsions, pornographic behaviors, workaholic, shopaholic, and other addictive behaviors
2. Avoidance, escape, procrastination, flight strategies
3. Manipulation, control, intimidation, threatening, violence, fight, passive-aggressive strategies
4. Good guy and bad ass strategies
5. Scapegoat, blame, projection strategies
6. Psychosomatic, sick, poor me, confused, crazy-making, attention-getting strategies

These crystalized rescue plans do not work well, but we tell ourselves that they should allay our anxiety, no matter how ineffectively. And we tend to keep using our Rescue Plans whether they work or not. Anxiety is such an unpleasant, painful, insecure and embarrassing experience that we try to get rid of it as soon as possible. Self-Rescue Strategies are the ineffective ways that we try to handle anxiety. These strategies are our magic bullets, our quick-fix solutions. When we go to therapy for various symptoms of anxiety, we often expect the doctor or therapist to come up with a new magic bullet when our own self-medicating strategies aren’t working.

There is a cost for these Rescue Plans. Since these Rescue Plans are false solutions to a false problem, they only work to a limited and expensive degree. Anxiety is a self-protective part of our story, which could point us to the existence of a false identity belief system, but which when misunderstood becomes a signal for self-protective cost-ineffective rescue reactions. Anxiety arises from our perception that we are in pain, that our ego is under threat, and that we are our ego. In other words, anxiety is a signal that I am perceiving myself to be a potential or actual victim of some threat. Anxiety Rescue Plans are our culturally conditioned and automated neurotic solutions for anxiety. Become a detective and find out what your rescue plans are.

Everyone has a repertoire of anxiety triggers, anxiety buttons, and anxiety rescue plans. Anxiety Triggers seem to lessen our need to feel responsible for our anxiety. Anxiety Buttons are our flash points of vulnerability, weakness and shadow issues, which we try to rationalize. Anxiety Rescue Plans and strategies seem to be an expression of our personal responsibility for curing our anxiety, but they are not.

Attributing anxiety to outward circumstances is not responsible behavior and leads to the experience of victimization. Hot B utton responses and Anxiety Rescue Plans and strategies are not expressions of responsible human behavior and they lead to more anxiety. Strategic Rescue Plans do not address the meaning of anxiety and therefore they do not cure it. Anxiety Rescue Plans are based upon improper diagnosis and self-medicating treatment. Many of our magic bullet rescue plans seem to work and they do lessen anxiety on a superficial basis, but they do not address the anxiety-producing mechanism itself, which continually grinds out more and more anxiety. This anxiety-generating mechanism is our unconscious identity story about ourselves, others and the universe.

Without addressing this ego story itself, we are merely adding fuel to the fire. And as we feel more and more inadequate and hopeless to effectively doctor our anxiety, anxiety is manufactured at an unconscious level and transfers itself to the body. Heart attacks, cancer, accidents, diabetes and other chronic conditions result from a lifetime of hyper-stimulation and anxiety-repression strategies. Poor solutions and over-reactivity to anxiety result in what we call failure, illness and death. Anxiety is reproduced by our story of ourselves as merely social, psychological and physical beings. Anxiety cannot be transformed without direct conscious awareness of our spirituality. As long as we perceive anxiety as an annoying nuisance, genetic necessity, or personal enemy, we shall not be able to hear its life-saving message.

My client has been crying all week. Her husband has left her and the kids for another woman. He no longer "wants to be married." She feels hurt, rejected, angry, grief-stricken and helpless. She cannot decide whether to just move on or keep trying to restore their relationship. If she moves on she feels anxious, if she holds on, she feels anxious. She cannot bear the anxiety either way. I suggest to her that she is seeking for a third position but that it is unknown to her at this time. In Stage One, they experienced marriage as they knew it; now they are in Stage Two, which is a dissolution of marriage as they knew it. Stage Three is unknown but holds the key to their individual and joint future. Due to this crisis, she has been seeing that she did not appreciate him or put him first. She didn't know of his dissatisfaction. She and her husband put the kids first. Neither of them did much for self, and now he is demanding a change of focus in himself. The marriage had some good points but was incomplete and imbalanced. There was pretense on both sides, a pretense in which they told themselves that they were doing okay. A pretense in which they ignored their anxiety signals. There is a fear now that this old pattern could recur, and that even the newly emerging pattern of self-interest might be a pretense.

We talked about whether her husband is discovering himself or is he just switching dependencies? The old pattern is still 90% and the new pattern is 10%, and so he is very defensive regarding that new 10%. It is not a contest between you and his girlfriend, but between the 90% and the l0%. She is a necessary trigger for his change, although there is no g guarantee that their relationship could work. The change that this affair has provoked is potentially good for the growth of each of you individually and for you as a couple. However, you and your husband seem to be polarized into a power struggle with each other. The unseen commonality is your anxiety. Your anxiety concerns the meaning of your past, present and future relationship and the involved identity story. He seems to be pushing you away and you seem to be clinging to him. Both of these movements are unconscious reactions to your anxiety. Both of these movements contain a hidden message about your awareness and growth.

Your differences scare you, but the commonalities are greater than the differences. You and your husband both had the same root problem although it appeared to be different because he blew the whistle and opted for a change of partners. Whether he will actually make a story-change remains to be seen. Will he just change partners or will he change his story? Your life issue is whether this crisis will be life-altering change for you or just the loss of a partner. He could gain a new partner and you could lose your partner and the purpose of your anxiety might not be realized in spite of this high cost. You were basically married to an illusory identity story and now that marriage has fallen apart. Be thankful to God! Understand the message of your pain and anxiety. An affair is usually a symptom of the story we survive by. What do you suppose your story is? "That people leave me." Is that a victim story? "Yes, and it stinks." You thought something was wrong with you, and it escaped your notice that there is merely something wrong with your story. That story was an illusion. You both were on guard against the pain of a false unconscious story.

Essentially the challenge to listen for the true meaning of our anxiety is to ask yourself this question: (1) am I an anxious, struggling, frustrated victim of an impossible dream? or (2) am I an infinite spiritual being with a flawed story?

Anxiety is the cue that you are entertaining a self-created story of insecurity, danger, rejection, failure, inadequacy, guilt, shame, loneliness, isolation, insufficiency, entrapment, and some form of mental or physical pain. . Anxiety is the signal that you are in a victim mentality. Every victim experience is accompanied by anxiety.

Anxiety means that you are in an unconscious struggle between your ego story and your Infinite Selfhood. Anxiety contains a valuable form of experience and knowledge. If you do not recognize, consider and contain your anxiety, you will react against it.

Analyze the cost-ineffectiveness of your various rescue plans. What is the pay-off for or advantage of your symptom, complaint, illness, problem, difficulty? If you don’t know, make a thorough list of all of the disadvantages of your way of coping, your problem, your symptom. Then, make a equally long list of all of the advantages and pay-offs for your problem. Both lists must be of equal length for this assignment to work.

As noted, the urge to self-rescue can take many fight-or-flight forms. Your mind flips through with split second speed all of your self-rescuing, self-medicating, self-protecting plans and strategies.when anxiety arises. None of these strategies work effectively; all of them have their price, their cost. I say without equivocation that they do not work to a satisfactory degree because the source of the anxiety is not consciously addressed. Anxiety cannot be avoided, manipulated, controlled, or self-medicated in an effective manner. Anxiety is a God-given gift, just like the symptoms and suffering that it produces, and it cannot be erased effectively until you address its purpose.

Therefore, bear your anxiety. Anxiety is not a problem to be solved. Anxiety attacks are just the increased victimization effects of ineffective self-rescue attempts.

Consciously bear your anxiety, but not with a "poor me" attitude. Consciously sustain it and hold your anxiety with an inquiring attitude and an open mind. Ask yourself what you are really wanting. Ask yourself where this anxiety is coming from. Do not rush into reactive self-rescue plans. Find out the source and purpose of your anxiety. The answer your mind gives you on the first attempts to do this is usually false. Your ego mind will tell you that your anxiety is due to this, that or the other. Your ego will mis-diagnose the cause of your anxiety. (1) The cause of your anxiety will generally be attributed to what someone else has done, said, or failed to do. (2) Or the cause of your anxiety may be attributed to some memory, trauma, or problem in your past or future which you consider to be real and unbearable. In any case, the cause of anxiety is attributed to the non-spiritual belief that I am or could be a victim of some other person or external circumstance.

Actually anxiety is a signal of spiritual unawareness. And once you launch into your Self-Rescue reactions, you have added another whole layer of consequences and costs. You sacrificed your body, your relationships, your finances, and your self-awareness upon the altar of ego-protection and ego-attachment. Your efforts to self-medicate your painful mis-diagnosed anxiety have not worked very well. Your self-rescue plans bring a partial degree of relief or you would not use them, but this relief is mediocre, cost-ineffective, and creates more anxiety.

Anxiety, then, is the valuable signal that you are into the victim-perpetrator-and-rescue cycle, into your ego story, trapped by your spiritual unawareness. Bear that anxiety with an inquiring, curious, open mind. Use that anxiety for the transformation of your story into awareness. Use that anxiety to move from your ego to your Self, from your sense of limitation to your Infinite Potential. Use the understanding of the meaning of that anxiety to get off the victim-perpetrator-rescue merry-go-round. Awake!

I am learning that when I feel the urge to avoid my anxiety and to self-rescue, I relax. I accept anxiety as valuable information. I relax into it. I do not resist it, fight it or try to escape from it. It is just a signal. I relax into the urge for "fight or flight" rescue plans. When I relax into my anxiety, and breathe easy, I begin the transition into peace. Peace is the lost reservoir of power which I have labeled with many other names such as emptiness, the void, boredom, nothingness, the vacuum, loneliness, isolation. Beneath these labels is peace. This peace is the presence of Infinity. This peace is the goal of all of my externalized self-rescue plans. Peace is what I had previously hoped to achieve when all of my so-called needs and wants were fulfilled in the outside world. But there is many a slip between the cup and the lip. Peace does not come through the war-like methods of the ego’s self-rescue plans. The ego is a system of inner division and conflict and does not bring harmony and peace. Peace is your natural spiritual state which has been lost from awareness. Peace is God within. Anxiety is the unawareness of the Peace of God within. All of our failure-bound rescue plans and symptoms arise from this spiritual unawareness, this inner belief that we are disconnected from the Source.

Anxiety, therefore, when properly understood is the entryway to peace. You do not need to run from anxiety, it will only increase in its effort to get your attention. Find your peace and then address whatever is left of your problems with calmness and creativity. Peace does not depend on any outward thing. Relax into the infinite peace which is concealed by your victim mentality and its superficial solutions

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Escape from anxiety is impossible. What you are attempting to escape from is the doorway to your Infinity, and that cannot be actually be denied or escaped from. Go through your anxiety. The more you run from it, the bigger it gets. Relax into it. It is just God calling you. You cannot find satisfaction and peace by running from your self. Your Self is Infinite Peace. Come home to within. Use your anxiety signals to awaken to your peace.

ANXIETY is the chief symptom of human ignorance

ANXIETY is the most universally dreaded and misunderstood human experience.

ANXIETY, when unexamined, prevents total relaxation, essential trust, and intuitive awareness

ANXIETY turns into depression when we try to shut it down

ANXIETY acted out does not get rid of itself

ANXIETY represents the loss or the threat of loss of what I think I control

ANXIETY about disappointments and regrets fuels the fires of shame and guilt, which then seem to entrap the human spirit

ANXIETY arises from the belief that we have to control this imperfect world in order to be secure

ANXIETY misunderstood is the cause of our addictive search for security and power in the finite world of shadows and illusions

ANXIETY is either my enemy or my teacher

ANXIETY is a gift of God, the meaning of which is buried in the soul, like gold in the earth

ANXIETY is a symptom, a mystery, which like a string can be wound up into a ball in order to lead us out of this shadowy cave into the Light of Consciousness

ANXIETY points to our infinite potentiality which we must embrace when our mind shudders at the sight of the void

ANXIETY represents the challenge to exercise the courage to live in the Eternal Now, letting go of past knowns and future unknowns

ANXIETY is our invitation to awaken from all of our limited self-concepts to our human divinity, to the possibility of all things, and to the certainty of our sacred destiny.

ANXIETY is our lifeline to the peace that passes understanding.

ANXIETY is the fiery door through which we must pass in order to find the True Treasure of Selfhood

ANXIETY is a wake-up call for us to realize that The Holy Spirit of God lives in this human body

ANXIETY is the whisper of the soul asking questions that I have forgotten and ignored the answer to.

ANXIETY is the fuel for the transformation of the caterpillar ego into the butterfly Self

ANXIETY is our chief response when Jesus asks "What do you want from me?" and "Who am I to you?"

ANXIETY is the path to the beginning of Self-knowledge and Individuation.

ANXIETY is the major symptom through which we become a Master instead of a Victim.

ANXIETY is a misnomer for the mysterious presence of the Infinite when our illusions are threatened.

ANXIETY represents the opportunity to embrace what you don’t know and haven’t even dared to suspect about the vastness and grandeur of your Infinite Imagination

ANXIETY is the unavoidable instruction code about the paradoxical meaning of pain

ANXIETY is our shared human experience which either destroys or heals relationships

PARTNERS in the exploration of the meaning of ANXIETY find the god and goddess in one another

Again, the chief question to ask yourself when anxiety first arises is "Am I a struggling, frustrated victim with an impossible dream, or an infinite spiritual being with a flawed story? If you actually ask yourself this question and wait quietly, you will get a response from a deep inner sense of hidden knowing.

Is anxiety a signal for Poor Me or Infinite I? Is anxiety a sign of more suffering or of the possibility of awakening? Is anxiety a symptom of something to fear or of unacknowledged peace, creativity and love? Is anxiety a symbol of illness or unrecognized health? Am I using anxiety for further self-victimization or for opening the door to my healing? Anxiety is either an enemy in your ego story, or a companion on your conscious journey of Self-discovery.

I begin my Anxiety Therapy sessions with the question "What have you been anxious about most recently?" Whatever the answer, I ask "Because?" and I keep asking "Because?" until the client is completely "stumped." What happens is that this question drives the storyteller through layers and layers of apparent causes, motives, feelings and defenses of every sort. And it becomes more and more obvious that all of the explanations and reasons that the client has given for their anxiety and its problems are not the taproot.

I discovered that anxiety is the chief symptom out of which all other sub-symptoms arise.  That is why I ask first of all "What are you most anxious about?" Almost no one can say they are not anxious at all. If they do, I ask "Does it make you anxious when I assume that you are anxious?" Some of our self-rescue plans work temporarily and have not been triggered sufficiently during a given day or week. However, every layer of anxiety, no matter how small or how great, is of the same genre.

Anxiety all springs from one source: the disparity between our story and the truth. When the scriptures counsel "Be anxious for nothing" or "Fear not" , it could be assumed that we must use will power to repress or to avoid anxiety or fear. But, metaphysically speaking, it could mean that there is nothing to be anxious or fearful about, except our story.

When you ask the patient "Because?" the patient will tell you his anxiety is due to relationship problems, financial stress, guilt or abuse or victimization of some sort. The patient will tell you that his or her anxiety is due to some external circumstance or person, or that it is due to some problem about their body. Then I say "You tell yourself that your anxiety is due to ______ because?"

Who will tell you that they are anxious because they are ignorant of their infinity? Who will tell that they are anxious because of their unawareness? Who will tell you that they are anxious because of their self-confusion and spiritual blindness?  Who will tell you that they are anxious because of the fictional identity story they are telling themselves? Rarely will anyone tell you that they are anxious because their self-rescue plans are failing. Who tell you that they are anxious because they falsely believe they are victims. Who will tell you that the suspected ground for their anxiety is fictional?

Everyone thinks they know what the cause of their anxiety is, they just can't figure out why their solution for it doesn't work. Few even suspect that their anxiety and its related symptoms are a gift from God for their benefit and personal growth.

Who realizes that they create and sustain their own anxiety? Who understands that illness arises from unexamined and un-transformed anxiety? Who believes that the anxiety-producing world that he sees is a projection of his own inner belief system? Who believes that all of his frustrations and resulting anxieties are self-created through the misuse of his imagination? Who believes that the power to create is only limited by his or her own doubts?

Here is an example of how the "Because?" process works:

What are you feeling anxious about today? I'm frustrated because I can't get my home business program to work Because? I want to make extra money. Because? I owe a lot of credit card debt. Because? I charged a lot of memberships and advertising expenses to get my home business started.  Because? I felt insecure that my regular job would provide enough income for me.

You felt insecure and so you created a solution for that insecurity? Yes and now I am frustrated because that dream is not coming true and I am even more in debt trying to get out of debt.

You are frustrated and anxious because your dream of becoming debt-free isn't working? I just can't give up my dream. Because? I feel guilty because I trusted these hair-brained schemes to get me out of debt. You feel guilty because? I should not have been so naïve. How do you know that you should not have been so naïve. You were.

Other people seem to succeed with this approach, but I didn't. Because? Maybe I'm not cut out for this type of home business sales program. Because? I can't seem to follow through. I'm distracted. I don't seem to have the knack to sell to others. Because? I'm not sure if these programs are really beneficial to others, or do they cheat people? You won't let yourself sell something to others that you aren't sure will benefit them? I guess so. What's wrong with that? Nothing except that I need extra money. Because? I want to feel more secure. Because? I'm anxious because I feel insecure.  Where did you get the belief that you are insecure? I don't know.

The "because" process can be done in many ways but it leads downward below the surface of the obvious awareness of the client. . This process is designed to question, make conscious, and challenge the assumptions and beliefs which undergird and fuel the anxiety experience.

Anxiety Therapy is an inquiry method of taking the client from the surface to the spiritual depths of himself. Anxiety Therapy assumes that the storyteller has unknowingly created his own frustrations. By intensive investigation of his frustration and anxiety, the patient can come within reach of his spiritual level of awareness.

In the case above, "insecurity" is a psychological/emotional belief that the storyteller holds about himself. This victim belief about himself is lodged in his unconscious belief system, generating all kinds of anxiety every day. The storyteller uses all of his imaginative powers and psychic energies trying to create solutions to this anxiety which, of course, he cannot accomplish. Effortful solutions to a false problem cannot cannot accomplish more than erratic patchwork results.. His inferiority complex just gets re-enforced by his efforts to reduce it.

Anxiety Therapy works on the assumption that all of the causes, reasons and excuses that the client gives himself for his failures, frustrations and anxiety are misleading. The patient is trapped in his own self-made system and goes in a vicious circle. His anxiety is feeding on itself and re-creating itself.

I'm anxious to buy a new Cadillac. Because? Cadillacs are great cars. Great for what? They make you feel cool, important, rich. Why do you need a Cadillac to feel cool, important, and rich? I guess I don't feel that way. Because?

 'm afraid I am going to lose my spouse. Because? She is very unhappy with my drinking. Because? She thinks I drink too much. Why does it bother you that she thinks you drink too much? I guess I think I drink too much. Because? She is unhappy about it. You are responsible for her unhappiness? She thinks so. You must agree that spouses are responsible for each other's unhappiness, is that correct? Yes. Because? I expect her to make me happy too. Because? I don't know.

If you pursue the "because" question to its depth, you will almost always find the level of "I don't know" and that is quite an achievement. When the client walks in your office, he "knows." He has an answer, he just doesn't like it. Whether he feels he is right or wrong, he has an answer. However, he is stuck because he has such an answer. "I don't know" is a step forward into the discovery zone. "I don't know" lays the groundwork for admission and inquiry. Until you "admit" you don't know, you will not inquire. Until you inquire, you will not really know.

Real knowledge is about your hidden spirituality. Anxiety is the signal that you are unaware of your hidden spirituality. "Because" is one of the more direct methods for awakening the awareness of your spirituality.

It is astonishing to realize that in all of our carefulness to be "right" and to protect ourselves from mistakes, attack and failure, that we hug our story so closely to our chest that we cannot even see that it is the culprit. It is not so difficult to see someone else's B.S. when it disagrees with ours, but it is very difficult to see that their B.S. and our politically more "correct" view have the same origin. It is no wonder that paranoid anxiety and its addictive solutions is one of the chief symptoms of our time. It is no wonder that according to various studies that people lie on the average of every 13 minutes. The story, which is actually our religion, is self-deceptive and most of its contents contain an undetectable mixture of truths and lies as well.

Every one has a religion, a story, that he or she lives by. The illusional nature of this story accounts for our constant state of underlying anxiety and all of its resultant symptoms, pain and suffering. This anxiety is triggered by various events and by the failure of our self-rescue plans to work sufficiently.