People with generalized anxiety disorder tend to worry about a number of different themes in their lives. For example, family, friends, health, the future, being late to appointments – all the way down to what they need to talk about in therapy.

This might resonate with you. For example, you might be worried about what to say in therapy or what goals that you might set. This post provides some general information about possible treatment goals based on what we know about generalized anxiety disorder.

Normalizing anxiety

Before we discuss possible goals, it is important to note that the idea behind therapy is not to get rid of anxiety. A normal amount of anxiety is actually helpful to make sure we are prepared to tackle any threats in our environment. If we had no anxiety, we would never study for tests, constantly be late to appointments, or stop taking care of ourselves or plan for our future.

Therefore, we are not trying to get rid of anxiety. Instead, we want to turn down the volume of our anxiety and worry so that it does not bother you on a day-to-day. That way, we can still use anxiety to motivate us towards our goals without it constantly wearing you down and negatively affecting your life.

Goal 1: Tolerating uncertainty in people with generalized anxiety

Some researcher describe folks with generalized anxiety disorder as having an ‘allergy to uncertainty.’ What this means is that these individuals tend to be really nervous about vague or ambiguous situations (e.g., whether or not they passed a test, or if trying out a new restaurant might end up being a terrible experience). In fact, this ‘allergy’ is so strong that some folks prefer to just know that it is negative outcome rather than sitting with uncertainty. For example, they might say: “I’d rather just know I failed than have to continue wondering if I passed the test or not.”

Consequently, one goal of therapy could be to increase our ability to tolerate uncertainty. By sitting with the distress, we may begin to realize that uncertainty does not always end up being negative. Moreover, we learn that we can cope much better than we thought even if the bad thing happens. For some people, they may even begin to see uncertainty as novel and exciting!

Goal 2: Changing our relationship with worry

Our worry thoughts tend to take the form of ‘What ifs’ to its illogical extreme. Folks with generalized anxiety disorder often find themselves paralyzed because there are so many possible scenarios that our worried minds can dream up.

One possible therapy goal then is to notice when our worries tend to take us away from engaging in behaviours that are important to us. As a result, we stop being controlled by our worries and are simply allowed to put them away if it is not serving us (and it usually isn’t).

Goal 3: Become more aware of worry thoughts

Sometimes when we are constantly worried, we don’t even know what exactly we are worried about! We just have a general feeling of dread that we can’t do anything about.

By becoming more aware of our worries and its contents, we can then make sense of this thought and work with it. This makes it much easier for us to problem-solve or simply recognize that the worry is a bit exaggerated, and we can scale down our anxiety. If we know problem, then we can solve for it.

Goal: 4 Develop skills to become our own therapist

Once we become more aware of our worries, we need the skills to be able to handle different types of worries. For example, real-world worries (“I need childcare next week”) might require us to learn how to problem solve, whereas scary hypothetical worries (“What if my child does not get into college?”) might require other types of cognitive strategies.

Either way, one goal that you might have when entering therapy is to become your own therapist and learn these skills to be able to handle whatever comes up in your life.

Developing more goals using the magic wand technique

One strategy that can be helpful to explore goals is to use the ‘magic wand’ technique. This technique makes you ask the question of: “If I could wave a magic wand and my life was the way that I want, what would be different about it?”

By using the strategy, you can explore how worries get in the way of your goals and how your life might play out differently if you weren’t struggling with generalized anxiety disorder. For example, you might say:

  • “I would be more likely to say yes when people invite me out”
  • “I would go back to school”
  • “I would take a solo trip to Japan for a month”
  • “I would stop checking my emails 10 times before sending them”

By using this technique, you give yourself permission to dream about how life might be different. These differences can then help guide your goals.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post helped guide a few possible goals you can have in therapy. Of course, this list is not exhaustive and any good therapist will help you figure out what is most important to work on in your life. Now let’s start tolerating some uncertainty, and jump into the unknown of therapy!

Best wishes,

Parky