You are highly creative and you live to express that creative drive. Your mind is full of ideas and pursuing your passions is important to you.
But if you’re struggling with anxiety, more than likely, you often find yourself frustrated with its impact on yourself and your life. When anxiety hits it interferes with your connection to your authentic self, your sense of agency and your creativity. Your talents and skills. Your connection to others and the world.
You’re left feeling you can’t be fully invested in yourself, your life, career, and important relationships. It interferes with your ability to show up and be fully connected to the experience of the moment to create your life and career.
Anxiety doesn’t allow you to stay present with all that you are, to really see what you are capable of – to fully express your creative mind and your sense of agency.
It impacts your relationship to everything – your intimate connection to yourself, others, the world. Although you yearn deeply for a real, meaningful connection to all that you are and all that there is; you’re left with a sense of emptiness, numbness, and feeling unfulfilled in your life and creative career.
The more you feel disconnected the more you withdraw from your creativity, your sense of agency, your connection to yourself or others, and your life goals and dreams – the more anxiety takes a hold of you. It’s a vicious cycle. You don’t want to live this way, but you don’t know how to move beyond it.
There is hope! You can heal anxiety and live with a sense of deep connection to who you are, others, and what you want to create or accomplish.
An excellent place to begin is to understand why anxiety causes this sense of emotional disconnection and withdrawal
Your emotional resources are used up instead of you using those resources to connect, create, and be productive. Anxiety takes away your energy.
Much of your emotional resources are spent up by battling with your fears and doubts, not working with those fears or doubts – or, rather than trusting that you can show up and push through the fears and doubts.
Your feelings and thoughts go round and round instead of really connecting with your emotions and thinking and use them to create your path – dreams or goals.
With so much emotional energy required just for dealing with being anxious, you may not be able to connect with your life energy and be motivated, inspired, and creative.
Emotional withdrawal and disconnection can be just the result of living trapped in your fears and doubts.
Anxiety Kills Authenticity
Maybe you strive for authenticity in your life – in what you want to create or accomplish and your relationships. It’s natural to want to feel connected to who you are to live from your real self – your unique abilities, talents, and skills. To be able to express your own gifts. To have a genuine impact on others – close people, your audience, or people you work with. You want to be understood and accepted.
When anxiety kicks in it keeps you so preoccupied that authenticity becomes difficult, if not impossible.
Emotional withdrawal protects you, but it keeps you and your life small
While you don’t always acknowledge it, emotional withdrawal and disconnection can be a way of protecting yourself. People who feel anxious often feel self-conscious about their anxiety. You worry that others around you will see your insecurities, discomfort, and “otherness.” You feel embarrassed and insecure. You lose the trust in your abilities, talents, and skills.
While emotional withdrawal may feel safer, a real feeling of safety comes from being able to navigate your life and career challenges. Disconnecting from what you’re afraid of just makes your fears feel bigger, more powerful, and more in control of who you are. Instead of you feeling grounded in who you are and being in charge with creating your life.
Emotional disconnection is deceiving, it offers you an unreal sense of being safe. You want to live with a real and grounded sense of feeling safe – developed by taking on life challenges and by being an active part of your life and career development.
EMDR psychotherapy can help you heal the roots of anxiety and reconnect you with your authentic self – so you can connect, create, and invest yourself into your life and career pursuits.
The beauty of EMDR is that you don’t have to explore your past in-depth to heal. You can notice how and when anxiety is triggered in your present and how you disconnect and withdraw. You can use these current triggers to see what is from the past that has not been healed. With EMDR you can process emotionally charged memories of the past.
Not all the difficult memories are traumatic or interfere with your present. So, EMDR cleans only what stays in the way of your present.
Usually you only need to identify a number of charged memories and with EMDR, your mind will “light up” or connect you with the memories that are related to your current anxiety. EMDR will process related traumatic memories all together in layers.
Layers after layers of processing emotionally charged memories, you can reconnect with your authentic self and sense of agency – to create your own unique you and your own fulfilling life. 
To set an appointment for EMDR therapy please contact me for your 15-20 min free phone consultation.
I am Mihaela Ivan Holtz, Doctor in Clinical Psychology. I help creatives and performers with their life struggles, depression, anxiety, performance anxiety, creativity, relationships and love, PTSD, and addictions – to become their own best version. You can read more about Therapy for Creatives and Performers.
