Starting out this week’s episode with a bit of slam poetry, Josh and Ella discuss anxious relapse. It’s a term that can evoke the feeling that anxiety is a vice that we fall back into or succumb to but, as we know, anxiety is not a wanted or enjoyable experience. On the other hand, we can consider anxiety an addiction to reassurance. It can manifest in our behaviour as safety behaviours: carrying first aid kits, emergency snacks, or other tools with us when we fear our anxiety will resurface, seeking out people that comfort us, or avoid things that challenge us. These are the compulsions that frame our anxiety. So long as we live in the loss of confidence in our ability to tolerate anxiety, we are still “in” anxiety, which is sometimes felt as a “relapse”. Ella’s background with addiction and recovery sheds a little light on how actually the stress of anxiety and the substance abuse cycle can link up to create a cycle of bad behaviour. Josh redefines “anxiety relapse” with a phrase that’s as self-compassionate as it is accurate about what’s actually happening to us.
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