Understanding Anxiety
How Unprocessed Emotions Shape Anxiety
Anxiety is not one single emotion – it is the link between past unresolved feelings and projected future fears. IEMT helps untangle that link.
RETROSPECTIVE
STRESS RESPONSE
PROSPECTIVE
Anxiety often shows up when your mind mixes the past with the future. From the past you may be carrying feelings like guilt, shame, regret or remorse. These don't just sit quietly; your mind projects them forward into the future.
This is when they turn into things like frustration, anger or even panic.
So anxiety isn’t just one feeling, it’s the connection between past feelings you haven’t fully processed and future feelings your mind is trying to predict.
The three pillars of anxiety
Guilt
Shame
Regret
Remorse
Anxiety
Panic
Worry
Dread
These are not emotions, they are over-arousals of the autonomic nervous system caused by underlying emotions
Temper
Anger
Frustration
The Suitcase
Think of anxiety like a suitcase. When you say ‘I have anxiety’ it’s like carrying around a heavy bag. But if we open that bag, we find it’s not one single thing inside, it’s filled with different items like worry, panic, dread or nervousness.
Each of these items actually come from a specific feeling for example:
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Panic often comes from fear
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Worry comes from uncertainty
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Dread comes from imagining something
in the future going bad
So anxiety isn’t one emotion, it’s the suitcase that hold all these different feelings together.
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In IEMT, we don't treat ‘the suitcase’ as one big lump, we open it up and look what’s inside, and help your mind process each feeling. That way, the suitcase gets lighter and lighter until you don't have to drag it around anymore.
