There are four types of anxiety, related to pain, failure, violence and death. There are multiple strategies to control these forms and anxieties but ultimately all boils down to avoiding one or more out of this four consequences.
Because life happens in cycle to some degree we all suffer the four consequences at some point in our lives. Healthy people simply flow between negative and positive with relative ease, people who suffer some degree of abuse are confused and deny the negative aspects of life which make them persist. As Socrates said that all evil in the world happens because of ignorance is not only true for the abuser but also for the victim of chronic abuse, after all this is how you become ignorant by being abused and not examining yourself. When you reject part of life, you don't only rejected in others but you also rejected in yourself, for example if you are the victim of chronic physical abuse, you reject violence and if this goes long enough you risk becoming a bully because you deny the fact that you are capable of violence so you are going to wrongly justify somehow your aggression as not being violence.
Because you deny the negative aspects of life you are trapped in a feedback loop, whenever you encounter the chance of something negative happening to you, in order to maintain your denial you have to avoid it. This is why anxiety can persist long after the traumatic event that triggered it.
Anxiety is a discrepancy between your intentions and your emotions, for example if you have an elevator phobia, you might intend to use the elevator because is the easiest way to get at the highest levels of a building but your emotions are going to dictate you the opposite.
Unfortunately we don't have any conscious control over our emotions, so changing the emotions it is impossible, the only variable left that you have some control over is your intention. The problem with this is that if you change the intention to match your emotions you are back at square one, in the example above the person that is afraid of elevator would have to keep avoiding elevators in order to control his anxiety.
Luckely your emotions change constantly, if you match your intentions with your emotions, the emotions will eventually change and after the emotion changes you can have a new intention that matches the new emotion. The contraintuitive part out of dealing with anxiety is that in order to change it you have to first accept it, which creates a seemingly paradox when the first step out of the action of addressing a problem is to don't do anything about it.
But it is important to understand that you are dealing with forces and events that are out of your control, the psychologist Abraham Mallsow coined the term paradox of change that states that you can only change when you are satisfy where you already are.
Accepting your emotions and behaviors means that you should expect that the situation in which you are won't change. Doing that will allow it to pas quicker, and allow you to move on. There is not much to lose, if you have something that you are unhappy with about yourself, if you can change it you have to accept it first, if you can't you have to live with it for the rest of your life so accepting it will make your life easier.
