Welcome back to this section on the spirit in freedom from anxiety. Today we're going to talk about the observations coping strategy. It's 12 steps to help you maintain your freedom over fear and anxiety. I believe that as you go through these 12 steps, you're going to begin to see even more acceleration in your breakthrough over fear and anxiety. As you continue to work on yourself both in body and mind and in spirit. It's not just a one time thing that you have to do you have to continue to maintain your progress.

Even for me, I will sometimes experience some irrational feelings of fear or anxiety that will come up. It doesn't come up that often but when it does, I have the right tools to deal with the job. And this what this tool will do for observations. It will help you make tape make this into a lifestyle. So our observations is an acronym that's commonly used in the trauma informed practice field. This is a field of science.

That is, helps us understand trauma and how to have a good workplaces school situation, even good mental health services that addressed the trauma that people have experienced. And trauma often has a connection to anxiety. We've talked about this in other videos. But there is a link, I'm not gonna refer to that here. But I'm going to use this tool that traditionally used in that field, to modify it to address our concerns around maintaining breakthrough in fear and anxiety. So O stands for observe.

What I want you to do is just take a moment to observe what's happening in your body. When fear and anxiety may rise up again. Pay attention to it, what's it doing to your body? How do you feel it in terms of being cold or being warm or to be numb? Does it Create a sense of anxiety or butterflies thrown up in your stomach Are you feeling tension in your neck or heat in your face, just observe what's going on and what is triggering you. You don't have to do anything about this feeling right now you just want to observe it.

From there, you want to go to B, which is breathing. And this is the key to maintain all the calm states that you need to do in your central nervous system. You know, we're looking at this holistically. So we're looking at from body, mind and spirit. And we can't often do the interventions we need to do in mind and spirit until we've calmed the body down. We have that inner fight or flight mechanism that wants to kick off, and we have to get that down to a homeostasis or a balanced state so that our interventions about our thoughts and our spirit can actually stick.

Breathing is a simple way to do this. You can do it just a simple counting from one to 10 one odd numbers being the inhale and even numbers being the exhale, just a just a one, and two, three, and four. So as you're observing, you're also breathing and you're recognizing what sensations are coming up in your body. And you're beginning to play detective, that's a item s under situation. This is where you begin to notice recognize these responses that are going on inside of you, you begin to remind yourself that while these are feelings and they can be uncomfortable, like in a panic attack, they're not dangerous and they're going to pass soon you keep becoming aware of the situation that's occurring. And as you name these things, you can then tame these feelings that are in your body.

This is something that's commonly used in Narrative Therapy called externalization. And it's sort of a I see you anxiety or I see fear, and I'm I'm not going to be tricked or controlled by you any longer. I know it sounds silly. But when you externalize the problems and you name them, you actually can have greater control and power over them. He stands for emotions. It's really important as you are breathing and observing and you're understanding the situation you're in, that you recognize that your emotions come and go.

That's the beauty of all these tools is that emotions are not permanent. They come on you suddenly and then they leave suddenly, they come up based on a trigger or a circumstance or a situation, and then they go, they don't stay around forever. They do if you try to fight the emotions, it's like standing in the middle of a river and trying to push the river the other direction, it's just not gonna happen. You have to redirect by cutting a new group and direct the water a different direction, but you're not going to fight that water and push it back. And emotions. You can't push them back.

They're going to come and they're going to go. And that can be very important for us to recognize this is going to pass I don't have to continue to deal with this. After that is our we recognize that this situation does not define who you are, you are not your anxiety. Another narrative tool in the clinical field says we don't focus on the person as a problem. We focus on the problem as the problem. That's very important.

You are not a fearful person, you are not an anxious person. The problem is fear and anxiety and you are working against that problem and you're working with the tools that you have gained in this series to let this emotion pass to maintain your breakthrough to address head on the feelings of fear and anxiety when they start to pop up and not let them become wildly out of control. V stands for validate. We want to validate our experience, not trivialize it, even though we know that emotions are going to come and go, it's a serious problem. It has been a serious problem and again, will continue to be a serious problem, but not one that defines who you are. While you say my saying that we also recognize that we're going to take this very seriously and not just say, Okay, we got breakthrough, we've got some more productivity, we broke through some creativity at work, we've been able now to socialize and hang out other people.

We're not experiencing panic attacks and feel like we're going to die. So now we're just going to ignore it and never attend to ourselves ever again. No, you have to validate that this is a real problem and is starting to pop up again. If it is and then you know how to deal with it. But you want to make take it very seriously. Sometimes you need a little tuning up.

Sometimes you need to go back and reread some notes. You need to go back and re explore some of the things you've done before you begin to realize that I'm not taking good care of myself. I'm not eating right. I'm drinking too much. I'm not drinking sizing, isolating, and you got to be in again to validate, okay, this is a problem, I'm not going to have to find me again, but I'm going to take care of it. So once you have validated that, then you can go on to a which is asking for help.

Shame can be a big partner to anxiety and fear. Because it's embarrassing. And so we begin to feel like, you know, we've done something terrible. We have embarrassed ourselves and we're bad people. No one wants to hang out with us. If you start thinking really negatively.

It's really important that you take action against that and you say, I'm going to ask for help. So you go back and call your therapist, you go back and re watch and read the material here on the freedom from anxiety, you go back and talk to the people that are supportive and say, Hey, this is coming up in my life again, I've been struggling with this again. I've been dealing with this issue once more, and I need some help. And so you begin to address it and ask for some help. T stands for that. Or this shoot too shall pass.

We've been talking about this in many different ways, was a great way to think about fear and anxiety and it prevents you from having this negative irrational thoughts, that you're a victim, that you're powerless. Change wants to happen, let it let change happen, let those emotions go. You don't have to get in the way of all those feelings and believe that you're gonna be stuck in this feeling forever. It's fun to tell anxiety. I know you're not staying very long, so you might as well just keep on moving. And in the meantime, I'm going to go live my life.

I hope by now you're recognizing that you are strong, and that's the next acronym which is AI by stating I can handle my anxiety. I am master of my anxiety and my anxiety is not mastering me. This sets us up for understanding our identity can be another use of the word Hi. But you begin to actualize this by using this attitude of I can handle my anxiety. And then I am strong and I have the right tools and I know the right attitude. And I can reengage my practices and talk to my support systems to overcome anything that fear anxiety wants to throw at me.

By doing this, you have Oh, an open mind. You'll be open to new hopes, new possibilities, new ideas, new thoughts, new research, continuously be reading, be looking on YouTube, continuing to talk to other people come back here and get more information. Talk to the online support groups that we've established for you. Don't stop arrest on the fact that I've overcome that I don't have to work on it anymore. And even if I'm maintaining my practices, maybe the practices that I've learned are not sufficient. Now.

I need something else. I need something new. Be open to new ideas, and be open to new hubs be open to new possibilities. be looking for them all the time in your environment, and you will find them it's a law of attraction, if you will. This will bring new hope. Helping you manage your anxiety and maintaining your breakthrough.

You want to keep a record through journaling notes, and books that will name this is in name, the tools that have helped you. If you can go back and recount what has worked in the past, it will give you some confidence to continue working forward. When you're dealing with anxiety or fear that present. If you're an anxiety does pop up, you're ready, you're ready for them. You have all the tools just go back open those journals, go back and look at those notes. Go watch these videos and say, Oh yeah, that's what I need to be doing.

I need to be engaging in a safe place. I need to be calming down my brain through breathing. I need to be able to and you can deal with these ants that are coming up and destroying my picnic my life and you can deal with those negative thoughts again, S stands for spirit. Now this is the one place that I have varied from the traditional observations. acronym. Traditionally, when you're looking at trauma field S stands for survivor because there are many people who have been survivor and that's really important identity to recognize that I had been a survivor of domestic abuse, child abuse, other type of traumatic situations in life.

And that will help you give the courage to move forward. But here because I want to help this move to an even higher level, and this section on spirit, for freedom from anxiety is I want to be able to talk about as as spirit not just survivor, survivor, but also that you are spirit, your mind, your body, and you are spirit. That's also important when it comes to looking at identity. Because who we are, is we're not just alone in this process. We have God or a higher power who also supports we have a family of other people whether within our own faith in our churches, our our denominations, our synagogues are our organizations. That will help us support through this.

We're not alone. And that's really important when it comes to dealing with any type of issue or problem in life, but in particular, when dealing with fear and anxiety, one of my favorite verses in the Bible is second Timothy one seven, it says, For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of love, power and a sound mind. I like to have a sound mind, I'm sure you do, too. There's many times when I felt like I haven't. Other translations will refer to sound mind as sound judgment, or even self discipline. These are equally encouraging interpretations of this verse, and also on how to observe and maintain our freedom.

We have to have sound judgment, to recognize validating and keep our open mind about anxiety. We also have to have self discipline, to breathe, to name and to ask for help. to freedom from anxiety program uses spirit to reference our identity that Trumps all of our experiences and circumstances, knowing that you are a child of God and that God is good is essential to this program, in my opinion. I believe that in order to see our emotional and behavioral issues, from a higher perspective, we have to begin to have ongoing relationship with God, we need to have a sense of ourselves as a spirit. And when we have this higher perspective, we realize that we're not going to be weighed down by fear. We're not given a spirit of fear, but of love power and a sound mind.

There's a great story in the Bible about a man named Nehemiah who wanted to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, he got permission to do so. But it wasn't an easy task because a lot of work and all the neighboring kingdoms and their armies didn't want to see this happen. And so they threatened to come and attack him and kill him and stop this rebuilding. So when his own people came up to Nehemiah and said, hey, these armies are going to attack As we need to go hide inside the temple and protect ourselves. This is kind of reaction that we have to write when we feel something that's difficult like giving a presentation at work, or we have to go socialize, or we have to deal with the overwhelming sense of anxiety in the morning about all the tasks that we have to get done in the day, or beginning to feel overcome by a typical circumstance in our life and then feel panic attacks start to come back up again.

When we feel the lump in her throat, rise up or the butterflies in our stomach or the tension in our bodies. We have to stop and say, Hey, I know who I am. And I'm not going to be controlled by my circumstances or my situation, despite how much how badly I feel, how overwhelmed I feel, how panicky I feel right now. Nehemiah in this example, told the person who would come up to him and it was afraid, I'm sure Nehemiah was afraid to. But he said hey, am I the kind of man That would go run away and hide. Nehemiah knew who he was.

He says, I'm not going to act on this feeling because I know who I am. You can have feelings of fear and anxiety pop back up. If they come back up, that doesn't mean that everything you've done didn't work, or that you're going to go right back into that dark place that you were in before. It simply means that it's fear and anxiety. The world is full of it and it comes up, it generates it, it throws it on you. You know, it's kind of like you're standing on the side of the curb and a car rushes by and splashes water and mud on you.

You didn't cause that mud to be on you, but it is on you and you can clean it, clean it off. You know how to do it. It's annoying, but it happens and fear and anxiety happens in the same way. You have to remind yourself I'm not the kind of person to run away and hide in fear. I have the character I have the understanding and I have the tools to observe and maintain my healing. So as you work to maintain You're healing from fear and anxiety.

Remember who you are. You are not a man or woman who are running hide you have and you will find your breakthrough to freedom. Stay true to who you know you are and declare that you will finish this task and you will see it to the end so that you will have breakthrough for the remainder of your life.