Radical Healing from Anxiety

Hi, this is Dr. Jameca Cooper, and I want to welcome you to my channel. And we are still doing the 30 Days of Radical Healing. Today we're talking about 30 days of more radical healing, with the focus today being on healing from anxiety. So this whole series is dedicated to how mostly women of color Indigenous women can heal from some of the issues in their lives. And I devoted 30 days to talking about different aspects of this. So the purpose is to help you start the new year in a better place, in a more improved place, so that your trajectory is a lot more whole in the next year. So today we're talking about healing from anxiety, and there are 3 things that I want to focus on that I believe can help you recover from some of the issues and anxieties that you've dealt with your whole life, make sure you like this video and subscribe to this channel. The first thing I want to talk about that really has to do with healing from anxiety, it really sets the foundation for how you heal and what you're healing from, is recognizing, identifying your triggers. That's the first thing, making sure that you know what your triggers are. Everyone has different triggers for their anxiety. Sometimes what triggers anxiety is riding in a car. Sometimes it can be health situations. It can be dietary. It can be living situations. In other words, who lives in your house, who's left your house. It could be sleep and regularity of sleep. That could be a trigger for it. It could be things in your past that remind you of things that cause you anxiety. For instance, let's say you grow up in a household where keeping the house clean is really important to your parents or your caregivers, so that when you're living in a situation or in a situation where you don't feel like it's clean enough or tidy enough, it starts to trigger your anxiety. So in other words, what would be the trigger here would be your living situation or the hygiene or the appearance of it that takes you back to a time when you had to be on point regarding your cleanliness and everything around that. So recognizing your trigger, whatever your trigger is, you have to find out what that is. In other words, sometimes it helps you to journal about that, to journal about times when your anxiety is higher versus when it's lower, times of the day, times of the year, times of the week. And then you can start to look at what's different about all those times. That's how you get to the trigger. Of what is behind your increase in anxiety. So first thing, finding the trigger. Second thing is, what is the programming? Programming. We've all been programmed in one way or another. So what is your programming? In other words, what are the scripts that you've learned over your lifetime that play into how you feel and maybe what causes you anxiety? Let me give you an example of what I mean by programming. What is a programming? So for some people, they grow up in families that tell them that, let's say you're a student and your family tells you that you have to get all A's, everything you do has to be perfect. You have to walk out of your house looking a certain way, like no hair can be out of place. So if that is your programming, then you would imagine that a person who has experienced this in their lifetime would then get to a place in their life, maybe as a student, maybe as a high school student, a college student, or graduate student, where you get to a class and it's really, really hard and you cannot make an A no matter what you do, how much you read, how much you study, and you cannot make an A. So that would trigger your anxiety because everything in here tells you that something is wrong with you and you are wrong because you are not making an A in this class. So things like that, that's what I mean by programming. What's the programming? What are the messages you learned growing up, either from your parents, extended family, your caregivers, teachers, whatever stuck with you. Programming doesn't have to be from in your home or people that you know or love. It can be from television. For those of us Generation Xers that grew up on TV, coming home, last few kids, being at home by ourselves, the programming of the shows we watch could also be a part of it, right? I definitely know I watch shows, corny shows like The Munsters, The Addams Family, Bewitched, things like that that were on TBS because those, those We only had a few channels then, so that's what I was watching. So programming is very important. You have to find out what the programming is. What messages have you learned? What things have you been told? What are those things that stick with you no matter what? And sometimes it helps to journal about that so that you can figure it out. I talk about that in my book, which is I Am My Sister's Keeper: The Brown Girl's Guide to Radical Healing. You can find it on Amazon. I talk about ways you can journal, questions you can ask yourself to get to the root of that. And so then the third thing that is really important about healing from anxiety is reprogramming. How are you going to reprogram? And sometimes you can reprogram on your own if you're really insightful and aware and you journal and keep track of your feelings, your thoughts, and your emotions. You can do it on your own, but of course, ideally, it's best if you have someone like a life coach or a therapist working with you. So reprogramming is the biggest step in how you go forward, like what your next steps are going to be, right? So reprogramming could be things like, in cognitive behavioral therapy, a lot we look at irrational beliefs or dysfunctional beliefs, beliefs that you feel like, that you think and that are consistent for you that are impairing you in some way. So we need to change those. So again, if I go back to the same example of how your programming had to do with you have to be perfect in every way. So you have to start to reprogram yourself. So perfection is not always possible is one way you could reprogram that. Or you could reprogram that to say perfection in some areas may be possible or likely, but in some areas it will not be possible or likely. So you'll have to reprogram your thoughts, your scripts, and the ways that you think about things. In order to fit with the world and the world that we live in and your life, it's not always possible to be perfect, right? It's not always possible to do everything right because there are so many factors in the world that play into that. So reprogramming could be reading books, reading books that give you new ideas about how to think and heal from your past. Reprogramming could be working with a therapist, changing your thoughts. Reprogramming can also be one of the big things that I focus on in therapy. Narrative therapy, so writing your own story. What is your story going to be? What is your new story? What does it look like? If you can envision your new story looking like this new person, this new version of you not having anxiety, if you did not have anxiety, what would that person do? What would they think? What would they wear? What would they look like? How would they act and behave around other people? How would they react to situations that previously triggered them?, right? That's reprogramming. What type of TV shows would they watch if they wanted to be reprogrammed? You have to think about all of those things because they're all components. They're all playing into how you feel about yourself, right? It's playing into how you feel and how much anxiety you might feel. All these things are very, very, very important. So reprogramming sometimes requires that you surround yourself with different people. Now, if the people that programmed you and had you stuck on these irrational thoughts, then you might have to separate a little bit from them. That doesn't mean cutting off all communication relationships. It just could mean putting some distance and some space there. So reprogramming could involve lots of things, not just changing your thoughts and your emotions, but changing your behavior, changing your environment, changing what you watch on TV, changing what you read, changing what you eat, changing your behavior. Because lots of different things play into anxiety. Diet is a really big part of it. I talked about this before, mentioned it in other videos before, but those are my 3 steps for you on how to start healing from anxiety, radical healing from anxiety. Again, we go back to radical healing. It is not just about getting over, it's about getting through and getting on with things that don't involve anxiety anymore, right? Because if you've lived your whole life struggling with anxiety, you know that it can be a huge impairment. And we don't want to end this year or start the next year with that same stuff, right? So we're going to get better. We're going to move forward. And we're going to heal from some of these things that have been dragging us down all this damn time, right? Are you with me? Yes, you are. So hopefully you learned something. Stay tuned for more 30 Days of Radical Healing with Dr. Jameca Cooper Cooper. It's going to be awesome. You're going to learn something. We're going to go into the new year being about that life, right? Thanks for tuning in.