Hi,
What does everyone think about the nature of our anxiety?
We often feel and say things like "My anxiety makes me feel like this or that" or "I have anxiety and so struggle with such and such". We all have a habit of making anxiety an object that we feel, and this may be incorrect. I'm not saying anxiety is good, far from it! However, if we begin our assessment of our feelings from an error, we will not be as effective in our attempts to understand ourselves.
I shall explain. Jean-Paul Satre says that "we are our possibilities and organise and our relationship with the world by transcending that instrumental complex toward ourselves. We ARE this anxiety" (last paragraph p317pdf or p250 printed book page, https://yunus.hacettepe.edu.tr/~cin/Being%20And%20Nothingness/Being%20and%20Nothingness%20-%20Sartre.pdf) I know he's talking about jealousy, but I think it is the same for anxiety.
What this means is that our Anxiety is not "over there" as an object we can feel or describe. It is part of us. This would explain why its so difficult to get rid of Anxiety without sedation. If we can accept Anxiety as being "us", rather than as "a thing", as a starting point, we are going to have better success in living happier lives than by beginning from an erroneous assumption that we can destroy an external fear. For example, If we attack the anxiety, because we want to get rid of the "object/thing of anxiety" but it is actually a part of us, then what we will be doing is attacking ourselves. I'm not saying we should leave anxiety alone, far from it! I think we should work with it rather than against it.
This also goes a long way to explain the brilliance of Kierkegaard's statement "Anxiety is an expression of the perfection of human nature" (The Concept of Anxiety, sorry dont have a page number for that one) What does everybody think?
