Caroline Greenwood Dower - ‘Experiences of Anxiety: Exploring the phenomenon for therapeutic benefit’

<p>This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Caroline Greenwood Dower, University of Durham. The paper is co-authored with Benedict Smith, University of Durham. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.</p> <p> </p> <p>ABSTRACT: Anxiety is the most common mental disorder in primary care and higher education counselling settings.  Observations from clinical psychotherapy suggest a shift in reporting towards “I have anxiety”, an object-related sensation, rather than “I feel anxious”, a subject-related sensation. In anxious states individuals are typically highly vigilant, attentive to and at times preoccupied with the external world.  The physical symptoms of anxiety – breathlessness, increased heart rate – draw attention back to the inner experience of the body, but as with anxious thoughts, they are often reported as ‘intrusive’. In response to the increase in help-seeking students a programme of workshops entitled ‘Calm to the Core’ was developed within a higher education counselling setting, as an applied phenomenological therapeutic alternative to individual counselling sessions.  Group facilitated workshops help participants to explore and share the lived experience of anxiety, through a series of movement and breath-based enquiries.  Our interest is whether these workshops increase body awareness and specifically awareness of how the individual experiences and organises their contact with the world. A helpful way to understand the benefit of this approach is by utilizing Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, particularly how an enhanced sense of embodied agency can help mitigate the effects of previously ‘intrusive’, passively-experienced, anxious symptoms. This paper addresses the practical application of phenomenology to common mental disorders for therapeutic benefit.  Some modalities of psychotherapy have a rich tradition of employing phenomenological methods within a talking therapy.  Here, movement is central to the approach, combined wit