Why I Had to Quit Therapy to Overcome Anxiety

welcome everybody uh to this week's live stream um again we do these free trainings out for you guys every single week cuz we want you to have the tools and resources you need to overcome anxiety my name is Tai hick if you're brand new to our community um we put these trainings out to make sure that you can learn how to get the mental health you deserve um I used to deal with very very severe anxiety even suicidal depression as a result I'm learned to overcome it and I've been anxiety free for over 10 years and so we want to pass along some of the lessons um that can help you and also we've helped over 500 people uh either reduce their anxiety by 75% or more and we wanted to share with you some of the insights that are working well for our clients and our community as well so today I'm going to be sharing with you a little bit of my backstory that I haven't shared before a little bit about why I ended up having to make the shift away from traditional therapy and traditional methods to actually overcome my anxiety and why my traditional therapy was actually holding me back and keeping me from getting my mental health handled uh in the way that I needed to and so um I think this is an important story cuz I see people who are feeling stuck all the time who are doing the traditional methods so if you feel like you've got really really bad anxiety and you're doing the traditional stuff like you're trying to talk therapy you're trying medications you're trying to use your own little coping mechanisms you're doing what you see online and it's not really working for you I hope that the story kind of resonates with you because um I think that a lot of people get stuck in and kind kind of the way uh that I did as well and so for me this all started several years ago over 10 years ago when my anxiety was really really bad and um it was horrible you know I mean I was living with uh just really really uh bad fear pretty much every single day I was constantly on edge you know the overwhelm was so much um and it was so unbearable each day I started having suicidal thoughts and the worst part for me uh was that I felt like my mental health was never going to improve at that point oh quick little aside by the way if any of you guys have questions go ahead put them in the comments and we'll go ahead and answer those at the end of the the live stream as well so I'll be happy to answer anything I possibly can for you guys okay so anyway so when my anxiety was really high Depression was really high I was trying to do every single thing I could to get it under control so I really thought okay let's handle this let's tackle it let's do everything we possibly can so I was doing therapy at least once a week sometimes more right sometimes two or three times a week um I was also medicated pretty heavily at the time I did an inpatient program for 10 days um and then I was also um you know doing everything that I learned from therapy um I see a comment here says I've been struggling with anxiety since I was little just kept me still and stuck debilitating yeah that was exactly the situation for me too Jackie so um I totally can relate and the thing was I was being very proactive I was implementing every single thing I learned in therapy so you know he had recommended that I start journaling I was journaling he had recommended I should do breathing exercises I was doing breathing exercises uh my therapist recommended I should do uh meditation right and I I was doing meditation or at least trying to you know but the intrusive thoughts were so predominant it became really tough to to do that and none of it was really sticking it and I was doing this for you know four weeks and then 6 weeks and then 8 weeks and then 90 days and it just you know maybe I got a little little bit of a change right but not really like I never really felt like I was getting to the real root of the issue so my first thought was all right look I just need to give it time right but then six months went by of this right this ongoing therapy ongoing medication ongoing whatever and if anything it was like at that point things were getting worse not better I mean you know like sure I was no longer having like straight up you know panic attacks or anxiety attacks or anything like that but I was basically still freaking out inside all the time um and I couldn't help but ask myself you know is this as good as it's ever going to get Jackie I see your question will it always be a part of who we are so I hope that the rest of my story will help you great great question and I would love to see in the comments like how many of you guys have ever thought to yourself am I just going to have to live with this anxiety for the rest of my life like go ahead put me in the comments if you've ever thought that way or felt that way CU I certainly was um at that time so every time I did a therapy session I kept waiting waiting for my shrink to tell me like what the next step was going to be that's what I kept craving is what is that next step but he never really had one right he didn't come to the table with any proactive plan and that kind of bothered me right so he didn't seem to be in much of a hurry to get me anywhere although I was I was freaking out I'm like I want to get my mental health Square I want to feel normal I want to feel peace of mind I want to feel calm I want to feel happy how do I get that as quickly as possible but with my therapist they were so casual like every single session it was like so how was the week how was oh and we would we would chitchat about stuff that didn't really seem to shift the needle and it was perplexing to me like why are we spending so much time talking about this stuff that isn't really helping um so one day I asked him as nicely as I could I I was like hey so what's the plan like what's the plan to get rid of the anxiety and the depression and when he answered this question I finally knew why I I had been stuck for 6 months he said he kind of like shuffled in his chair like in an unsure way and he basically said like there is no plan you know he said well there is no plan exactly the plan is you keep coming to therapy and that was when I was like oh my God I don't think I'm ready to sign up for this like I do not want to be sitting in this chair talking about the same crap for the rest of my life like that sounds bad I was taking taken I thought you know even though I was confused and lost about my situation I thought surely he would have a plan right like he's the guy he's the guy that's I'm supposed to be going to for advice to get this under control and so I said to him I was like so I'm just going to have to deal with anxiety forever and he refused to flat out say yes right but his face kind of told me everything I needed to know he very clearly believed like yeah you're going to have to deal with this for ever and all of a sudden it clicked for me if I stay in therapy talking about the same stuff in the same way every single week I will only be running in circles for the rest of my life that's what I realized and so I thought to myself how in the world can I ever hope to overcome my anxiety by getting help from a guy who doesn't even think it is possible right of course it's going to be basically like impossible for me to solve a problem if I'm trying to get advice from the guy who doesn't even think the problem can be solved you guys follow me on that all right so I'm curious like how many of you guys have ever felt this sort of like plateau in therapy like if you could put me in the comments like have you felt that same sort of feeling of like what is the plan how are we going to get this handled and then feeling like there wasn't really like some sort of clear plan that you could sink your teeth into cuz that's where I was at right and so that was when I realized I was getting the wrong kind of help for me it was not the right thing for me I knew like hey maybe this works for other people but this is not cutting it for me like sure it's nice to have a conversation with this guy I like him he likes me that's cool but this isn't getting me anywhere like this is not the right type of help for me to get to that next level right I see Jackie says uh stuck on Xanax 30 years now I'm off at 8 years bad withdrawal said never again but I'm 60 I'm thinking maybe I should go back on them I don't know gotcha well Jackie stick with me till the end of the story here and and we'll see you know maybe this will give you some inspiration so here's what I did right so um it was after I started searching then I started searching online right so I was trying to find anything I could on how to overcome anxiety not cope with it but overcome it because that's when I realized oh my therapist is looking through this from the coping attitude I didn't want that I wanted to overcome it and so I started looking looking looking and a lot of it was garbage I got to say like and a lot of it still is garbage out there right so like I saw the basic stuff like hey eat healthy uh like yeah duh take these supplements uh no I don't want to do that right align your Shak I'm like are you kidding me right like where is something real like I was searching for something real that I could test that I could really Implement and see uh what would work I wanted something I could sink my teeth into I wanted stepbystep instructions I wanted something I could like Implement and that's when I started to stumble on the idea of training the brain and this kind of stuck me like you know struck me excuse me kind of like stood out to me I was highly skeptical at first right I really was and the people I found who were teaching this though they caught my attention because at least they believed that it was possible to overcome the anxiety with enough practice I was like all right fine I'll stick with you and see if this is legit so I was willing to take a chance on it you know cuz they told me it was possible so I was like all right well at least they believe so after about 6 months of trying every of everything I could find online you know prior to that I found the right combination of strategies that worked for me I used a lot from different courses and different books and different teachers and then honestly I had to figure out things on my own quite frankly to work for me Took a ton of trial and error but finally I got it in the long run and I got to tell you I could not be more thankful that I stuck it out because what I realized have been keeping me stuck with anxiety the whole time was I was asking the wrong question right before I was asking myself and my therapist how do I cope with anxiety that was the mental question that was the mental box I was in but in order to start my true anxiety recovery I had to ask myself a new question which is how do I overcome the anxiety and I was never going to be able to overcome anxiety by pursuing A coping method it was never going to get me there and that's when I realized my therapist didn't have those answers right he was an exceptional guy great guy fantastic gentleman he cared about me and he did help me a little bit you know he was helpful he tried and I appreciate that he was just doing what he was trained to do but what he was trained to do was to help people cope and I didn't want that so sure my therapy was helpful and that's why I kept going for a while you know but it was absolutely insufficient to reach my mental health goals and this was a key breakthrough I had that I really hope might help some of you guys sometimes we are doing something that is helpful but it is not sufficient in order to reach the goals that we really want to reach and it's a very important thing for us to f figure that out right because if we want to like lose 50 lb like sure we can go on like a 20-minute walk every morning and that would be helpful but it's probably not going to be sufficient to lose 50 lbs you know what I'm saying the walk is helpful but if we keep doing that walk for 6 months 12 months 18 months and we're still not there it's time to change the strategy so sometimes the things we had to do um you know in sometimes the things we have to do in the beginning of our anxiety recovery Journey are not enough to get us to the end of it and that's what I realized I I thought if I would have kept only getting advice from someone who didn't even believe that my problem was solvable I would still be riddled with anxiety and depression to this day and what's kept me anxiety and depression free for 10 plus years is being relentlessly committed to using the right strategies to keep my brain properly trained right using a conditioning mindset Not A coping mindset right so how do you know if therapy is sufficient for you or not you know I really believe that only you can answer that question for yourself but here's what I recommend considering to figure it out right number one first get super super clear on what your actual desired outcome is for your mental health right are you truly okay with just coping with anxiety because there's nothing wrong with that if that is and if so therapy will probably be just fine for you like are you totally committed to the idea that you're just going to be anxious for the rest of your life and you just need to be able to manage it if that's what you're really boxed into sure therapy is probably the right way for you to go right but are you the type of person who will never really be satisfied until you are fully in charge of your mind and emotions if that's the case therapy doesn't have the tools to deal with that at that level of depth and it's important to understand that okay number two I encourage you to ask yourself how confident am I that my therapy or whatever other methods you're using currently will be sufficient to reach my goals to reach my UL imate mental health goals you got to get clear on what your goal is number one where do you really want to end up mental healthwise number two how confident are you that your current method is sufficient to get to your ultimate outcome that's what I really had to ask for myself so if you feel like you are making substantial ongoing progress towards your ultimate mental health goals using your current method keep going but if you feel like you are stalling out it's probably time for a change and in my experience if people start to feel like they're stalling out and they're getting a plateau or diminishing returns especially after about a 6-month period of time with traditional therapy it's usually a sign that therapy might be valuable it just may not be sufficient and that's just an important thing to keep in mind so whatever you do my friends here's what I would encourage you to do don't do what I almost did right I almost just decided that I was going to be anxious for the rest of my life that I was just going to have to live with this and that would have been the ultimate like life sentence mental healthwise if I had decided to believe that I was going to be anxious forever I would have stayed anxious forever right ultimately choosing to believe that I could overcome the anxiety is what led me to the right answers the right method and the freedom I'd always hoped for right and so no matter what anyone else has told you I promise you this you can you absolutely can live a life that is not limited by anxiety however I'm also a realist right I'm not just trying to pump you up artificially and say hey you can do it I'm also a realist in the sense that you've got to do the right things to get the right results right different actions different strategies create different results so you got to get the right skills the right systems in place to earn it and I really hope you do because you deserve to do so okay so anyway I would love to know do any of you guys resonate with this story right have any of you guys hit a plateau with your particular process either your individual coping mechanisms your therapy your medications do you feel like you're hitting a plateau put the word plateau uh in the comments let us know I'd really love to hear cuz I know a lot of people in our community are struggling with that and if you feel like you need a little bit of an extra boost if you need a little bit of extra help okay I'm offering free mental health coaching sessions uh to the first five people who request them so if you'd like one of those simply go ahead and go to mentalhealth coaching.com to book that session or if you'd like too you can also just write session inside of the comments and myself or one of my team members will reach out and we'll go ahead and book that for you and that'll literally just be a 30 minute call where I'll help you I will literally just teach you some of the best of what I know I'll give you two to three actionable strategies you can use to reduce your anxiety right away and the reason I do these is because I want to convince you that I can help you and that my methods can help you by actually helping you in advance right so I'm going to take some questions and review the comments here go ahead pop any into the questions and comments if you have them um Jackie so you said does anxiety start because you're not comfortable and confident with who you are great fantastic question Jackie so I see you're joining us on Instagram I don't know if you're a member um of our Facebook Community but I did a live stream last week that I would highly highly highly recommend you we did put this up on uh Instagram as well and it was called how to identify the real root cause of your anxiety in 5 minutes I highly recommend you go check out that video because uh the short answer is yes that is a very common cause for probably 2third of people but if you watch that video I think you're going to get a lot more clarity on where your issues uh are coming from okay I see a comment here from Night Owl Daydreamer says I mentioned wanting to quit therapy to you and I don't regret that decision I have some good tools to use now but I feel like the power to overcome truly lies within myself I love that attitude and you're absolutely right we just got to make sure that you've got the right systems and the right processes in place so that's awesome um and then Jackie I know you had another question as well you said uh I'm thinking maybe I should go back on the medication I don't know so I cannot give you medical advice I cannot tell you to start a medication or to stop a medication cuz I'm not a doctor you got to do what's right for you here's the question though I encourage you to ask yourself if when you were on the Xanax did you really truly feel like that was your ultimate mental health goal as in like were you happy and content and did you have peace of mind while you were on the medication if the answer to that is yes then great right if you have no problem with being on medication then you there's no reason to not go ahead and do that right for some people medication is entirely sufficient for most people though medication is not sufficient and so if you either a getting on the medication you still don't feel how you want to feel or B you don't want to be dependent on the medic Med ation long term my invitation to you would be you really got to figure out the real root cause of the issue you need to get a conditioning system in place and then number three you need a relapse prevention plan in place in other words you need to you need to deal with the the core issue on your own using the right skills and systems um obviously people like us you know myself can help with that um but U that would be my recommendation you also had a question of will it always be a part of who we are so couple of thoughts on this I would like to share with you here's my first recommendation look at your anxiety as a pattern not a part of your personality okay and a big reason for this is because if you define your problem in unsolvable terms you will always feel stuck with your problem so rather than saying I am an anxious person you would instead want to say I have a pattern of anxiety right and that immediately makes the problem far more solvable because now all of a sudden we're dealing with a pattern right human beings have patterns that emerge and they go away and they emerge and they go away throughout the course of our life and if you have the right skills and tools you can actually design your own patterns you can change your habits you can change your habits of thinking feeling and behaving with the right tools so if you look at it as a pattern rather than oh this is a part of who I am that's the very first thing I would recommend and that's what I teach my clients too by the way I had a a client who was in her 60s and she had gotten diagnosed with panic disorder in her 20s and she had dealt with anxiety and panic her whole life and one of the questions I asked her is I said um I said well first of all when did the anxiety emerge she said oh in college and I was like what was going on she was like oh it was right around finals my first Finals I was like well duh of course you'd be a little anxious and so I was like well what happened she's like well I went to a therapist and then they told me I had panic disorder I never heard about panic disorder and I said well did the anxiety get worse after they told you you had panic disorder or better and she's like no it got way worse I was like well yeah of course cuz they told you that this was a part of who you are and now that you believed that that was a part of who you are it caused her mind to freak out about a whole bunch of other stuff it wasn't freaking out about before and so I asked her I said what do you think would have happened if the therapist would have just told you like hey it's your very first College semester it's your first final season of course you're a little anxious it's going to pass it'll be fine what would have happened and she's like I think my whole life would have been different so when you define the anxiety as a part of who you are it's oh it's something I have it's this it's this big Larger than Life thing then that's exactly what it becomes it BEC it feels like an unsolvable issue when instead you want to Define it as a solvable changeable pattern it is just a pattern your brain has gotten conditioned to think feel and behave a certain way and we can change that right you just need the right conditioning tools okay great question though uh Jackie you also asked have you used CBD Lemon Ball and mashanda do you think they can help so again um anything is uh I see you said don't like being labeled not a good feeling you're exactly right because the more labels we put on ourselves the more limits we put on ourselves right if I put a label on myself of this is who I am now everything I do in my life is going to be filtered through that lens of well I have this limitation so I'm not a fan of labels either okay now your question about CBD and all this stuff um no the short answer is no and I sure maybe some of that would be helpful but Jackie I think you're asking the wrong question Jackie what you're asking yourself is like what could I do that might make it a little bit better which is not a bad question but I would far more rather you ask yourself the question how can I deal with the underlying issue how can I deal with the real root cause of the issue because I think that what's going to end up happening for you is if you do those other things some of them may make you feel a tiny bit better but in my experience with working with the clients I've had in the years over the years going through all those different like medicinal supplemental like let me try this balm let me try this uh incense let me try this uh Crystal thing like none of that stuff really gets to the real root of the issue and so you're kind of just wasting your time um mostly uh night ow says fix the root of the problem don't numb it I spent 20 years doing that yep exactly I totally agree good advice okay so um I'm not seeing any additional questions here again guys if you would like to see if our solution our program our process is a good fit for you or if you just want to get two to three actionable tips to improve your mental health book a free call with me at mentalhealth coaching.com or put in the comments the words session and we will reach out to you and we will book a call with you and we'll happy to do that otherwise we put these free trainings out every Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern so I'll be excited to see you guys next week take care until then see you bye

Channel: Ty Hicks – Mental Health Coach

Views: 100

Keywords: Ty hicks, Ty hicks mental health, how to beat depression without therapy, How to beat depression and anxiety, How to beat depression and make it last, How to beat depression without medication, How to handle depression, How to deal with depression, how to beat depression and anxiety without medication and make it last, what is the cause of depression, how to overcome anxiety, how to overcome depression, overcome depression and anxiety, mental health

Id: 1kR6KJ25wVQ

Length: 22min 59sec (1379 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 29 2024