Chapter 6: The Prisoner

Overview

I am amazed by how high a percentage of the people who come to me for help say, ˜ ˜I don t know what s bugging me, but I want to get to the bottom of it. It drives them crazy not knowing what s behind their feelings. They feel they are in prison , and they want out.

You would think that somebody who feels troubled would be able to say why. But not being able to pinpoint what is on our minds happens to all of us. We can cite three or four possible causes, but for some reason we can t quite put our finger on the true source of the angst. Sometimes we know the general category of the thing that s bothering us, but we just can t trace the direct link between that heading and the specific anxiety we feel.

We can be prisoners of unresolved arguments, of anger over somebody else s behavior, of guilt over our own behavior. I ve worked with parents who lament that their children have grown up and don t need them anymore, leaders who fret over not being able to control a certain employee, employees who groan about feeling trapped in their jobs, and sales managers who ˜ ˜catastrophize when several sales opportunities in a row have fallen through. Most of these feelings can ultimately be traced to fear, but they manifest themselves at the surface level as highly situation specific.

In one sense, all of us are prisoners, since all of us periodically face challenges that provoke an anxious response. Some people, however, are more troubled by their anxiety than others. These are the ones who seek the help of a coach. They find their reactions either too troubling or too frequent. This chapter is about how these prisoners can break free.

The symptoms of anxiety experienced by prisoners include insomnia, difficulty with concentration, muscle tension, and tightness in the chest. In more serious cases, people complain of sweating, trembling, muscle aches, stomach cramps, and headache . I ve also known people who even claim a fear of losing consciousness. When feeling these symptoms, people tend to have elevated pulse and blood pressure. When it comes to working with prisoners of anxiety, the majority of my work is on mild problems caused by the day-to-day challenges of the workplace. I refer people with the more serious problems to medical practitioners .

When people are in prisoner mode, they are less productive. They tend to hide away from managers and fellow workers, avoiding interaction with others. They are preoccupied. They can be snippy in conversation. When flushed out into the open and challenged on any issue, they can be quite volatile. They hurt. Their body language shows defensiveness, and eye contact is less frequent. They are halfhearted, showing up at work for appearance s sake but uninterested until what is bothering them gets sorted out. In a sense, their real work is going on inside.

Prisoners have much in common with worriers. Both are preoccupied while on the job, and both suffer from anxiety. But whereas worriers are concerned about what may happen in the future, prisoners are preoccupied with what has already happened . They have already experienced something that pushed their buttons , and they carry that experience with them.