Thanks Nina for these very significant comments. I am grateful for your insights.

I pick up on Dahl’s suggestion regarding anxiety at ‘5’ above. Such behaviour is an area of interest for me, and I trust that what I say next will be received openly and with a view to greater love and compassion for those who either suffer anxiety or care for someone with anxiety.

It may be that Dahl goes on to include and cover in the book what I am about to say; I shall discover this when I read the book, and ask that, having not yet read the book, this also be taken into consideration for what I am about to say.

By experience of self and others, I have come to see that intentionally calming the self can also lead to a capacity for tolerance that goes above and beyond the deemed ‘norm’, especially where the person has been pre- conditioned by culture, experience and/or tradition.

It is the escalated anxiety in a human being that communicates to those around that there is something not quite right for that person. When anxiety escalates, help is required for that person, because it is obvious the person cannot reduce the anxiety by themselves; they require help. Most importantly, the person requires to be heard and listened to (and if anyone has ever tried to hear and listen to a highly anxious person, they will immediately recognise that this is often a difficult task. On the other hand, for the anxious person, he or she struggles to see why the words he or she says are not being understood.)

However, once the anxious person is listened to, anxiety in the person decline’s; yet, it is only when truly heard that there is hope for that person to return to ‘normal’.

When the anxious person is not heard, they may either:

increase their tolerance to the anxiety level and then move on in a new ‘normal’ state, whereby future anxiety is likely to begin in an escalated mode; or

visit the GP to be provided medication to intentionally subdue the alert, which can go on for years where there is a lack of monitoring of the condition by either the patient of the GP, the GP, or both. As a patient they cannot be expected to be held 100% responsible. Yet, neither can the GP be 100% responsible; at times the GP may have only one option, and that is to no longer see the non compliant patient, in the hope that the action of refusal will communicate to the patient he/she is not helping him/herself: as to what happens for the patient continually held on prescriptive medication for unusual amounts of time, one trusts to monitoring by the medical body and its systems: and

Perhaps the best option (and possibly most frowned upon by society or certain societies), the person continues in a state of rising anxiety until someone actually hears them, connects and sets out to walk alongside, connecting them further to other help, as the person comes to understand himself or herself, and how to work with the self rather than against the self, just as each and every person was first ever created to do.

I agree with Dahl’s suggestion that we learn to note when anxiety starts to escalate; most importantly, that we come to know why for each and every event; that we can connect the event to the emotion for complete understanding of the self.

In gratitude for the space to chat.