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Welcome
to
Anxiety Anonymous
Meetings
Saturdays 12:30 pm
Zoom Meeting ID: 852 5894 2972
Password: Peace
A 12-step community for those wanting to resolve their anxiety, worry and fears . . .
Is this group for me?
Beyond anxiety, worry, and fear; this group is appropriate for a number of other people who struggle with a variety of other related challenges.
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This group is particularly appropriate for people who struggle with social worries and panic attacks.
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Many find that some of the roots of their addiction, sleep problems, depression, and rumination lie in anxiety. This group is for you.
Many find that anxiety is one of the roots their fatigue and pain. This group is for you.
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There are those that are going through life challenges that require greater support which involves worry.
This group is for you.
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However, while this group welcomes all,we urge caution for those who are challenged with OCD and PTSD. For some, the tools that we advocate could be temporarily problematic for their recovery. Note the letter to medical and mental health providers on our site. Nevertheless, you are welcome and are likely to benefit at some point in your recovery.
New Group - Site Under Construction
Meeting Format
1. The 15 Basics and Reactions 8 Minutes
2. The Tools and Reactions 8 Minutes
3. Reading of Step, Brief Explanation of the Step, & Reaction 8 Minutes
4. Personal Stories Relating to Anxiety 8 Minutes
5. Discussion on how to use the tools. 8 Minutes
6. Check-Ins & Sharing 8 Minutes
7 . Guidance for Newcomers and Time for Questions for Newcomers 8 Minutes
New Group - Site Under Construction
Suggested Goals for New Members
1. Vent.
VEnt your anxiety by naming your worries and expressing them. Having unexpressed steam within can cause our tea pots to build up.
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2. Develop a recovery network.
A recovery network is a group of people who will be supportive to you. Identify people in the group who appear to be non- judgemental. Ask to exchange phone numbers with them. They will then be a part of your recovery network. Together, you will find that you can do things with your anxiety that you could not do alone.
3. Get a temporary sponsor.
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A sponsor is a mentor. In programs like ours we can get temporary sponsors who will fill in while we pursue our long term sponsors. This is a new program. It may be some time before there is people who could be a sponsor or temporary sponsor. Nevertheless, temporary sponsorship is a critical first step to healing our sleep. Look to develop a mentor or advisor who is willing to make a commitment to help you work this program whether they themselves are in this program or not.
New Group - Site Under Construction
The 15 Basics
1. Build your recovery network. A recovery network is a group of people who you can vent to. It is important that they be non-judgemental. They do not need to necessarily understand you or for you to like them. In early recovery, you just need to talk and to vent. Later it will be important to develop a network of people who are understanding of your worry problem, and then someday people who you actually like and see as potential friends.
2. Work on Getting Support from your Network. It can take an incredible amount of support to do the basics. We video call, traditional phone call, text or other forms of communication to get support. In person is best, then video, then voice, then written. Something is better than nothing. We offer support to others for working the basics. Just hearing and saying, "I support you," can really help.
3. Grow in awareness of our Psychological Defenses. As we grew, we worked on identifying the role that our psychological defenses played in making it harder for us to identify our feelings. The biggest defense we used may have related to avoidance because of pain or discomfort of facing or feeling our feelings. Though there are many we grew in our knowledge of defenses referred to as denial, minimizing, and rationalizing.
4 Identify our Feelings. We became aware that we didn't know how we were feeling, or we were numb, or we didn't know the difference between one feeling that we were having and another. We realized that in order to recover, we needed to get to know ourselves emotionally. As we grew, we became more aware of the role that our defenses played in identifying our feelings.
5. Accept our Emotions. For some of us, at times, we just couldn't accept that what we were feeling was what we were experiencing. This became a key area that caused problems for us right off the bat! As we grew, we began to see the role that our defenses played in accepting our feelings.
6. Refrain from Juding our Feelings. We worked on seeing our feelings as signals. At first, we accepted them unconditionally without concern about whether they were logical, healthy, or understandable. For many, we realized that in the past when we Juding our feelings that make everything worse and complicated our ability to think them through and deal with them in a healthy way.
7. Write down your feelings in a complete sentences. In the beginning, we found it best to write down our feelings in short but complete feelings. For example, "I'm worried that I won't have enough money to pay my rent." Just the act of listing and organizing our worries often reduces our anxiety incredibly.
8. Vent your feelings out loud. In early recovery, it is important to vent your feelings. This will make them more manageable. Ideally, this will be at a meeting or with your recovery network. However, you can do this in any private place such as driving in your car to work or out loud in prayer.
9. Get your Feelings Validated. In early recovery, we need to hear from people, "It's okay to feel that way." We call this validation. For many of us, we immediately judged or assessed our feelings in a way that made us worse. This does not mean that our feelings are accurate, healthy, or understandable it just means that it is okay to feel what we feel.
10. Identify our Thoughts and Beliefs. For some of us, when we learned that our thoughts and beliefs affected our anxiety, we didn't really know the kind of thoughts that were going on in our minds. For others we didn't know the difference between our thoughts and our feelings. And we didn't really know what we believed. As we grew, we became more aware of the role that our defenses played in identifying our thoughts and beliefs.
11. Identify our Body Sensations. For some of us we didn't know that our body had sensations. The program encouraged us to differentiate body sensations from our emotions and our thoughts. Still others had so many body sensations that it was difficult for them to tolerate. As we grew, we became more aware of the role of our defenses in identifying our body sensations.
12. Accept our Thoughts and Beliefs and our Body Sensations. For some of us, at times, we just couldn't accept that what we were feeling was what we were experiencing. This became a key area that caused problems for us right off the bat! As we grew, we began to see the role that our defenses played in accepting our feelings.
13. Keep a list of your worries. The act of getting your worries out of your head and onto paper often helps a great deal. Rank your worries from the scariest to the least. This will allow you to start with easier fears, so you can gradually build up your confidence in resolving your worries.
14. Rank your worries. Rank your worries from the scariest to the least. This will allow you to start with easier fears, so you can gradually build up your confidence in resolving your worries.
15. Maintain a to-do list. Write down things that you need to take care of. In early recovery, it is particularly important to rely on your system not on your memory to take care of tasks and projects.
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The Five Tools
1. Healthy vs. Unhealthy Anxiety Is this worry a healthy worry, an unhealthy worry or a combination of both. In our experience, many times it is a combination of both.
2. Likelihood Tool What is the liklihood that your worry will come true.
3 Worst Case Scenario Tool If your worry came true, how bad would it actually be considering all of the worst things that can happen in a lifetime.
4. How much worry do I need tool. 0 - 100 assess how much worry you need in this moment to do what you need to prevent your fear from occurring.
5. If you need some worry, when do you need it? I might not need any worry now, but I do tomorrow morning, 2 weeks from now etc. Use your technology to schedule a reminder to worry when you need it.
Advanced Tools
6. Optimal performance tool. 0 - 100 what level of worry would help me temporarily perform optimally for this time limited event?
Common Problems in Processing Worries
1. Dealing with hard worries too early in your recovery.
2. One worry containing several worries.
3. Not qualifying a worry enough.
4. Not trusting yourself that you will take action on your healthy worries.
5. Having a part of you that that does not want to worry less.
6. Not having enough knowledge in using the tools.
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Panic Attacks
Our program holds the view that when you reduce the amount of anxiety that you are feeling in your life the frequency and intensity of your panic attacks will diminish. In fact, they could diminish dramatically. We believe that our tools are a necessary component of resolving this challenge.
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However, we also believe that challenges with panic attacks are different and we recommend that you pursue additional tools to completely resolv this challenge.
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Frequently Asked Questions
1. Can you guys help me with my panic attacks? Yes, and you are welcome to talk about panic attacks here and get support for them here. Our view is that when your anxiety goes down generally, you will see a decrease in the frequency of panic attacks that you have. However, the tools that we are recommending aren't strictly for panic attacks. We recommend that you pursue other tool boxes to use with panic attacks. This program is not designed to treat panic attacks directly, but we believe that you will greatly benefit.
2. Can you guys help me with my social anxiety Yes, and you are welcome to talk about your social anxiety here and get support for it here. Our view is that when your anxiety goes down generally, you will see a decrease the level of social anxiety that you have. However, our view is that social anxiety may require other tool boxes in addition to what we provide. We recommend that you pursue other tool boxes to use with social anxiety as well. This program is not designed to treat social anxiety in its entirety directly but we believe that you will greatly benefit.
3. Can you guys help me with my OCD? Yes, and you are welcome to talk about OCD here and get support for them here. However, we believe that OCD has unique psychological that could be unintentionally worsened OCD for some. We recommend that you attend in consultations with your doctor and/or mental health professional to determine your readiness and recommended use of tools in this program. phenomena that c Our view is that when your anxiety goes down generally, you will see a decrease in the severity of your OCD. you have. However, the tools that we are recommending aren't strictly for panic attacks. We recommend that you pursue other tool boxes to use with OCD. This program is not designed to treat OCD directly, but we believe that those who are ready could greatly benefit.
4. Can you guys help me with my trauma? Yes, and you are welcome to talk about trauma here and get support for them here. Our view is that when your anxiety goes down generally, you will see a decrease in the frequency of panic attacks that you have. However, the tools that we are recommending aren't strictly for panic attacks. We recommend that you pursue other tool boxes to use with panic attacks. This program is not designed to treat panic attacks directly, but we believe that you will greatly benefit.
The 12-Steps
1. We admitted we were powerless over anxiety—that our lives had become unmanageable.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
About Us
We are a community based upon the 12-steps first made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous and have come to be used by many other groups such as Overeaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Marijuana Anonymous, and many others.
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We are new. Our site is under construction. The governance will be by its members. There is no cost. Information will be determined through the conscience of the group.
A Letter to Medical and Mental Health Professionals
This group is for:
1. The purpose of this group is to create a forum where members can vent, make new connections, and socialize
2. Gain some common sense additional tools to practice self-help with anxiety.
3. This group is mainly designed for those seen as having generalized anxiety.
4. This group supports the use of psychotropic medications.
5. This group supports science, doctors, mental health professionals, and experts.
6. It is our intention to support the community and professionals whenever possible.
7. People who believe that asking others and/or a power greater than ourselves for help can be useful in resolving anxiety.
8. People who wish to choose any tools or therapy that they prefer to resolve their anxiety.
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This group is not for:
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1. We are concerned that attendance in this group by people with OCD could by detrimental. We ask that you provide guidance to your client about how to use the information in this group.
2. Critiquing any form of therapy.
3. Persuading people that any form of therapy is better than any other.
4. Advocating for any form of therapy over any other form of therapy.
6. Indoctrinating or proselytizing Christianity, any religion, or particular spiritual view.
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Meeting Script
Say, "Welcome to the 12:30 pm Saturday meeting of Anxiety Anonymous! This meeting is run in the spirit of 12-step programs around the world. We begin this meeting with saying the Serenity Prayer. You are welcome to join us if you wish. God, Grant us the Serenity to acceot the things we can change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Now we offer you to join us in a moment of silence for all of those suffering from anxiety. Pause in Silence. "Thank you" The format of this meeting is as follows: 8 minutes for the basics & sharing, 8 minutes for the tools, & sharing, A Step, Explanation, and Sharing, Personal Story and Sharing, Discussion on how to use the Tools, Check-Ins & Sharing, and Time for Newcomers to ask questions.
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Say, "Welcome to the 12:30 pm Saturday meeting of Anxiety Anonymous! This meeting is run in the spirit of 12-step programs around the world. We begin this meeting with saying the Serenity Prayer. You are welcome to join us if you wish. God, Grant us the Serenity to acceot the things we can change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference."
Say, "Welcome to the 12:30 pm Saturday meeting of Anxiety Anonymous! This meeting is run in the spirit of 12-step programs around the world. We begin this meeting with saying the Serenity Prayer. You are welcome to join us if you wish. God, Grant us the Serenity to acceot the things we can change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference."