I have already written about avoidance and control in anxiety disorders from one angle or another many times and, I think, I will write many more times, because the topic of control and avoidance is key in understanding the nature of anxiety disorders and in understanding how to overcome these disorders. Actually, most of the anxiety that accompanies and fills anxiety disorders is formed precisely through the mechanisms of control and avoidance. Simply put, control and avoidance themselves create the anxiety that brings maximum suffering to a person suffering from an anxiety disorder. As I have written and said many times: to understand the essence and meaning of anxiety disorders, why it is so difficult to deal with them fight, you need to learn to understand the difference between fear and anxiety. And this difference, although, at first glance, is not obvious, is still fundamental: with fear there is always a specific source of threat that you can point to, but with anxiety there is no such source, but there is a feeling of the source of a potential threat. That is, with fear, the source of the threat is found in the present, in the “here and now,” but with anxiety, this source is either invisible, or located in another place, or its occurrence is expected in the future. My favorite example is with a dog (my clients know that I always talk about him)): if an angry dog ​​runs after me and wants to bite me, then I know exactly what I am afraid of right now and what gives rise to my fear, since the dog is the real source of the threat. But if, let’s say, I’m walking through the park in the evening and I think that a dog might be waiting for me behind those bushes in front of me, then I don’t feel fear, but anxiety, because I’m not sure whether there really is a dog behind those bushes, or it's not there. That is, such a threat is potential and creates anxiety in the form of the same excitement and anxiety, for example. In the case of fear, we do not have many reactions to it: flight, attack or freezing. Most commonly referred to as flight or attack, freezing is a less common form of fear response. If a dog is running after me, then I, of course, will try to run away from it, or, if I feel strong enough, I will try to fight it in order to neutralize this threat. Similarly, in the case of anxiety, we have exactly the same reactions, but adjusted for a collision not with a real threat, but with a potential one: instead of flight there will be avoidance, instead of attack there will be control, well, freezing during anxiety will remain freezing. When We are talking about normal anxiety, everything works great: we know that we should not stick our fingers into a socket (otherwise we will get an electric shock), we should not walk carelessly on highways (because there are cars driving there that can hit us), and so on. Here our avoidance and control help us, protect us from potential threats that still have very real grounds. But when anxiety becomes neurotic (and I wrote about this recently in an article about the “cup of patience”), then everything turns upside down , since anxiety itself begins to be perceived as a source of threat. Of course, the brain at such moments creates a huge number of obsessive thoughts describing all kinds of threats, troubles and suffering, but a person, in fact, at such moments is afraid of only one thing: to experience anxiety again and lose control. And then the good old mechanisms of defense against the threat are activated for anxiety: control and avoidance. But as you already understand, these mechanisms protect precisely from threat, and not from anxiety. The task of these mechanisms is to help a person protect himself in dangerous conditions, and this means: increasing vigilance, caution, sensitivity, sensitivity - in general, everything that anxiety is responsible for. A person experiencing a feeling of threat literally strains to be as ready as possible to meet this threat. But only if the feeling of threat itself becomes a threat, then.