Of course you're right, Anne: anxiety comes in all shapes and sizes. But here's what I'm hearing from my T: according to her, anxiety in itself is the signal of a conflict. But you can't learn about the nature of the conflict directly from the anxiety (she says). You have to poke around "behind" the anxiety to find out what's causing it, which means that while you're "poking" you have to put up with the anxiety. I don't know about you, but when I'm anxious, putting up with the anxiety is counterintuitive. I just want out, ASAP.

However, I have started using her instructions and, in fact, they actually work! When I do find out what's "behind" the anxiety, and I go through the process of understanding it's a leftover from infancy and no longer a relevant trigger, the anxiety disappears. It really does work. In real situations.

I would have to say, though, that in my experience ALL anxiety makes me want to "be somewhere else." However minimal it may be. To me, that's just the nature of anxiety, which has plagued me all my long life. I now have the advantage of having a pretty darn good idea what went wrong back at the beginning, and therefore have pictures of the specific kinds of infantile triggering situations that set off my anxiety now. That does make it easier to spot what's really going on behind the anxiety.

And even in situations (unfortunately not uncommon with me) where anxiety starts out low and then builds up, T says it's much, much easier if I go looking for the trigger when the anxiety is low, before it builds up. I did this last Friday, in a work-related incident I've been through ten thousand times, and THIS time I was able to defuse the anxiety, trash the conflict and improve my performance. Yay.