CR spoke with psychotherapist Peter Mockford

Peter Mockford

Change affects us all. Whether it's starting a new stage of education, a new job, getting married, or divorced, starting a family, death, illness, or countless other types of change; none of us can avoid it and we all cope with it differently.

For some people change can bring on anxiety. A YouGov survey in Britain carried out for Mental Health Awareness Week 2014 revealed that almost one in five people feel anxious all of the time, or a lot of the time and only one in 20 people never feel anxious. Heather Bellamy spoke with psychotherapist and Vicar Peter Mockford to find out why we struggle with change and how to overcome anxiety.

Heather: Is habit and having things the same a healthy thing?

Peter: I don't think it's unhealthy, but I think what the real difficulty is, is our capacity to absorb change. Unfortunately I think what's actually happening, is our capacity to deal with change is getting less and less, so we get more and more concerned and more and more worried and more and more upset by change, and particularly things that are traumatic.

Heather: That's an interesting point. What makes you think that we're finding change harder to handle?

Peter: Well from a psychological viewpoint, our capacity to handle change starts when we are very young babes. What happens is that we look to our caregiver, normally our mums, and when things happen that are frightening we look to her to contain them. We internalise her capacity, or his capacity to actually make it safe. I think one of the difficulties is that, as parents, we are less and less able to make it safe for our children, so our children are not absorbing internally the capacity to face change easily.

Heather: So are you are saying that our ability to face change is dependent on how safe we feel through change?

Peter: Absolutely.

Heather: So if that's the case, how do we go about changing that situation? If we are struggling with change, how do we go about feeling safe, in order to be able to handle it?

Peter: Speaking as a psychotherapist, psychotherapy says that the best way to do that is to sit with someone who is able to absorb the change, and the terrors, and the fears, and you absorb their capacity to stay calm, so it gives you peace internally. That's the way therapy works. It's kind of mimicking what should have happened in childhood and it repairs the damage that has happened.

Now obviously we can't all waltz ourselves off to therapy, much as though I think it would be a good idea, but I think if we just learn how to listen to one another, how to absorb one another's worries and fears, and actually make it safe for one another, we'd get an awful lot healthier.

Heather: What are the symptoms that would show you struggle with change and you're not feeling safe and you're not handling change well?

Peter: I think some of the most common things are, at a very low level, all of us will experience some kind of anxiety, but if that peaks and is very high, then that's quite difficult to handle. I think this is where things like Obsessive Compulsive Disorder or OCD comes in, is if you try and make everything safe around you, or you get very controlling, then you can probably say that you are getting a problem with change.

Heather: If you are struggling with fear or panic, what are the tools that you can use if you haven't got somebody to turn to, or talk to, or everybody around you wouldn't be a safe place to go?