When I work with anxiety, depression, grief, or any heavy emotion, I don’t treat it like it’s the core of who you are. You are not “an anxious person” or “a depressed person.” Those labels collapse you into the problem.
Instead, I treat these experiences as characters in your story. Separate voices. Roles that show up and try to take the microphone. You can listen to them, talk back to them, even laugh at them but you don’t have to hand them the script.
This comes out of a mix of approaches. In Narrative Therapy, we call it externalization: separating the person from the problem. In ACT, it’s defusion: stepping back from thoughts instead of fusing with them as absolute truth. In Gestalt, you might go so far as to put the character in an empty chair and talk to it directly. Different names, same point: when you create distance, you reclaim choice.
Anxiety in particular is slippery. It doesn’t wear one face it shifts. I often describe it to clients as four different characters you might meet.
The Scared Child
This face of anxiety wants nothing more than to hide under a blanket. The world feels too big, too loud, too unsafe. If you try to argue with the child, you’ll only make them cry harder. The job here is comfort. Wrap them in reassurance: You’re safe. I’ve got you. We’ll get through this together.
The Schoolyard Bully
This one is loud, mean, and convinced you don’t belong. It pushes, taunts, and sneers: You’re not enough. You’ll never make it. The right move isn’t to run away. It’s to stand your ground. Talk back. Argue. Defend yourself. The bully loses power when you refuse to cower.
The Overprotective Parent
This face of anxiety comes wrapped in love but coated with control. It’s the voice that won’t stop asking: Do you have your coat? Do you know the number to call? Did you pack extra toilet paper? (because for some unknown reason during Covid the world decided toilet paper was the ultimate survival tool). The parent means well, but they smother. Your job is to reassure them: I’ve got this. I’ll handle what comes. Staying behind won’t protect me, it’ll only hold me back.
The Babbling Kid Who Can’t Finish a Sentence
And then there’s this one: the face that never lands on a point. It spins out in endless loops of What if? What if? What if? like a kid who keeps restarting the same sentence and never gets past the third word. You can picture it: frustrating, a little funny, impossible to take seriously.
Here’s the trick: don’t fight it. Let the babbling kid speak out loud if you need to. When you actually hear it, three things happen:
- You notice how incoherent and silly the thought process is.
- You separate yourself from it. (You are not the babbling kid.)
- You laugh. And laughter cracks anxiety’s grip.
Different Responses, Same Core
Each face of anxiety calls for something different:
- Scared child → comfort. (Compassion, Grounding, Self-soothing)
- Bully → push back. (Respond with strength and assertiveness, reframe the argument)
- Overprotective parent → reassure. (Needs boundaries, self-trust, reality checking the argument)
- Babbling kid → laugh. (Defuse from the argument, never feed the loop, don’t go down the rabbit whole of “what if”)
But the core doesn’t change: you’re meeting a character, not your identity. You don’t erase anxiety, but you take away its control.
That’s the work. Don’t collapse into anxiety. Step back. See which face is talking. And choose how you want to respond.
Burn The Script 