PLR: Acknowledging Anxiety

PLR – Acknowledging Anxiety

Tonight we learnt about anxiety and how it can affect us. Anxiety is a state of displeasure, fear or concern. Anxiety is normal when reacting to stress but when anxiety becomes excessive it can affect a person’s life for the worse. Fear is a natural behaviour when a threat is present whereas anxiety is usually related to a feeling of loss on control or an unavoidable situation. An example of this would be going out in public, this is an unavoidable situation but for an agoraphobic this can cause a high state of anxiety.
I acknowledge anxiety in myself when I have to do role plays in class. My heart rate increases, I am not able to concentrate and I think of ways to get out of the situation long before I
It is more than likely that I will always have some anxiety before speaking in front of a room of people; this is a natural reaction and can be managed quite easily. I have learnt to take this type of anxiety as an advantage as I use the anxious feeling to focus on what I need to remember. I have learnt that by being congruent and showing positive regard to myself that I can increase my confidence levels. When trying to deliver a message in a way that wasn’t true to me I became confused and this showed in my role play work.
Through self-reflection and receiving feedback I notice that I often ask too many questions when in the helping relationship, upon reflection I now know this is because I was using questions to fill the silence as I was not at ease with being watched. This is where I should have been using my listening and challenging skills.
Egan 2007, ch 8 suggests “using specific challenging skills such as encouragement, paraphrasing, reflecting and summarising what has been said to keep the client
The closer our self-image and ideal-self are to each other, the more consistent orcongruent we are and the higher our sense of self-worth. A person is said to be in a state of incongruence if some of the totality of their experience is unacceptable to them and is denied or distorted in the self-image.
Incongruence is "a discrepancy between the actual experience of the organism and the self-picture of the individual insofar as it represents that experience."
As we prefer to see ourselves in ways that are consistent with our self-image, we may usedefense mechanisms like denial or repression in order to feel less threatened by some of what we consider to be our undesirable feelings. A person whose self-concept is incongruent with her or his real feelings and experiences will defend because the truth hurts.
References
Rogers, Carl. (1951). Client-centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications and Theory. London: