How Does an Anxiety Therapist Not Get Triggered?

When you are currently struggling with an anxiety disorder, your body and mind feel like enemies. The somatic stuff — racing heart, air hunger, dizziness, tingling, feeling off-balance, depersonalization — feels like genuine threat. Scary thoughts feel like urgent instructions you have to respond to, neutralize, or escape. Big emotions feel dangerous and unhandleable. And because all of that feels threatening, anything that might trigger those experiences feels threatening too. You protect yourself from potential triggers because getting triggered feels like a disaster you cannot afford.

That’s the key word there. Feel. That’s the whole thing.

Here’s what changed for me. Through the process of recovery — and it was a process, not a moment — I learned that I don’t have to be afraid of what my body does. I don’t have to be afraid of the thoughts my mind produces. A racing heart is uncomfortable. Feeling depersonalized is disorienting. Thoughts about death or illness or losing my mind are unpleasant. But none of those things are disasters. None of them require me to do anything. They are just experiences, and like every other human experience, they come and they go.

I’m not a robot. I want to be clear about that because I think people sometimes imagine that recovery means becoming numb or emotionally flat. That’s not what happened. When I’m sitting with a client who is telling me something genuinely difficult about their life, I have emotional reactions to that. When my dog Copper was sick and fading at the end of his life, I found my heart racing in sessions sometimes, or felt that old dissociated feeling creep in. That happened. What didn’t happen was fear about it happening. I noticed it, understood what it was — stress showing up physically — and continued doing my job. The experience was the same as something I would have found completely destabilizing twenty years ago. The interpretation was entirely different.

That shift in interpretation is everything. That’s what recovery actually looks like.

Let me use an example I sometimes use with people because I think it illustrates the point clearly. Imagine someone spent twenty minutes talking to you about chicken salad sandwiches. Recipes, variations, their personal favorites. Would you spend even a second worrying about a chicken salad sandwich suddenly appearing in your hand? Of course not. Because you don’t fear chicken salad. You might get bored. You might want me to change the subject. But there’s no threat there, so there’s no vigilance, no bracing, no protective behavior. It just doesn’t register as something that could hurt you.

That’s what anxiety feels like to me now. The content — panic attacks, OCD thoughts, health anxiety spirals, agoraphobia — doesn’t carry a threat signal anymore. I can hear about it, talk about it, think about it, and what shows up is interest, empathy, and memories of what it felt like, not fear that it’s going to pull me back in. There’s nothing to trigger because the fear that used to fuel the disorder isn’t there.

My OCD used to hit hardest on existential themes. The nature of existence, death, the mortality of everyone I love, what any of it means. Those thoughts would pin me down for weeks. I would loop through them compulsively, research the afterlife desperately, do anything to escape the dread they produced. Those same themes now are things I actually find intellectually interesting. They’re still uncomfortable in the way that thinking about your own mortality is uncomfortable for any human being. But they went from an abyss I couldn’t look at to a topic I genuinely enjoy exploring. Same thoughts. Completely different relationship to them.

That’s what I mean when I say recovery produces a different relationship with your own body and mind. Your body and mind are not your enemies. Right now they might feel that way. Right now the sensations and thoughts and emotions they produce might feel like threats you have to constantly manage and protect yourself from. That relationship can change. It changes through the same process I talk about all the time on this podcast — stopping the escape, stopping the control attempts, stopping the reassurance seeking, and learning through repeated experience that what your body and mind produce, however uncomfortable, is not actually going to take you down.

One more thing worth saying. Some people who get through this choose to leave it all behind completely. They don’t want to think about anxiety ever again, don’t want any connection to the community they were part of while they were suffering, don’t want to revisit any of it. That is a completely legitimate choice and I have nothing but respect for it. The reason you find mostly struggle stories in online anxiety communities is partly that the people who got better often just left. They moved on. That’s not a failure — that’s someone exercising their right to put a painful chapter behind them. The only difference between that and what I do is that I chose to stay involved. Both are fine. Neither involves fear. That’s the point.

If recovery looks fragile to you from the outside — like something that could be undone by talking about anxiety too much — what you’re actually seeing is what happens before the relationship with your own mind changes.

On the other side of that change, there’s nothing left to trigger. That’s what we’re building toward.