The most obvious dysfunctional behaviors you will be helped to eliminate are panicking at the first sign of trouble, indulging a pessimism that seems to have a life of its own, using irrational stubborn behavior and having a mindset of HAVING to be right!
Some other defense mechanisms to avoid include blaming others, losing your temper, talking more than listening and using mind-altering substances to reduce anxiety.
It will take work and deliberate effort to remove them from your life but if you do not work on changing these behaviors now you will be prolonging your treatment time.
If you would like more rapidly successful therapy, develop a chart to monitor your progress in reducing these behaviors and work it seriously. Counseling and therapy are often associated with a person who is troubled but intelligent and desirous of enhancing his or her quality of life.
The IQs of those entering therapy are sometimes much higher than those who do not. Similarly, counseling for adults can be easier than for teens; the latter have dysfunctional ways of coping of which they are unaware and sometimes their ability to reflect on their emotions is limited or seems overwhelming.
In some serious cases, patients have to take anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication along with their counseling and psychotherapy. The most popular kind of counseling today is called cognitive-behavioral.
This type of therapy can sometimes achieve positive results in 3 to 6 months. Patients are taught to become aware of their subconscious thoughts that cause painful feelings or behavioral symptoms.
Also, reviewing your familys history of problems can speed things up by helping you to become even more aware of thoughts and behaviors that have been passed down from generation to generation in your family. Some of your resulting insights will be startling.
How about a technique that could help you replace the family symptoms with more constructive behavior? Sound good? Well, cognitive re-structuring will help you with that.
This technique inventories the subconscious thought patterns you received inadvertently from your family that cause your rage, depression and anxiety to rear their ugly heads. The therapist helps you to discover these unhealthy thought patterns and helps you to almost magically transform them so that your rage, anxiety and depression are eliminated.
This counseling technique is also safe, because it is drug-free and when used by a professional counselor, it virtually has no side effects. Writing your thoughts down two or three times a day, then discussing them with your counselor or psychologist can help minimize and re-shape, if not eliminate, these unhealthy thinking patterns and the anxiety that is caused by them.
Also, practicing time-tested relaxation exercises can help if you are having serious anxiety problems, such as panic attacks or irrational fears. It is likely that genes can play a not insignificant role in the development of your vulnerability to episodes of anxiety or depression.
Some researchers believe that there are certain genes that affect a persons likelihood of developing emotional problems. Some believe that the connection is how certain people metabolize various chemicals and hormones that are related to emotional reactivity; rates and efficiency of their metabolism may be impaired in these people, causing more emotional discomfort.
Stress is clearly related to anxiety and is something that cannot be avoided. It is an everyday circumstance and may arise in any given situation.
Though the link between severe stress and heart attack is established, other dysfunctional behaviors have recently been linked to it: chronic rage and anger.
Although the relationship is somewhat hazy, researchers are learning more about it.
One theory is that anger causes the bodys nervous and circulatory systems to prepare to fight danger, causing blood vessels to constrict, blood pressure to increase and the heart to work harder. This might cause cardiac stress which would be sufficient to lead to a heart attack.