Clinic Teaches the Anxiety-Prone There’s a Time and Place to Worry

Merrell Scott was afraid to leave her house.

“When you have a panic attack, you feel like you’re going to die. Your hands and feet get tingly, you feel nauseated, the room spins, you have hot and cold flashes. It’s awful,” said Scott, 35, who suffers from agoraphobia, the fear of open spaces. “For me, outside pressures or just anything can start it and once it starts, it just starts rolling and takes off.”

But she and other anxiety-prone worriers are finding help.

“Worrying isn’t necessarily bad, but ruminating over and over about what awful thing can happen is useless,” said psychologist Rowland Folensbee. “It distracts you and you become too preoccupied with ‘what ifs.’

“It’s usually ‘What if?’ rather than ‘What can I do about it?’ ”

Folensbee, operator of the Worry Clinic, specializes in treating anxiety disorders.

“For some, worry is a way of being on guard: ‘If I’m always thinking of things that happen, I’m always vigilant,’ ” he said.

“For others, it’s an avoidance technique: ‘I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about it, so I don’t have to go and tell my boss I need a raise. I’ve done my part, I’ve worried about it.’ For some people, worrying about it gives them a sense of control: ‘If I worry about it, it won’t happen; if I fail to worry about it, it will happen.’ ”

Folensbee recommends that people learn to identify when they begin to worry, and then to refocus their attention. One technique is to set aside a time to worry each day, allowing nothing else during that time and allowing no worrying at any other time of the day. “We approach worry as being a process rather than whatever the worry is about,” he said.

It’s not that worriers don’t have legitimate problems, it’s that they become obsessed--and often depressed and stymied, he said. “It appears to me that people who are worriers have some things to worry about, but no more than the average person. We all have the concern about how our kids are going to do in school, but we don’t spend the greater part of the day worrying about it.”

Folensbee met with Scott and then had her join a support group of 10 to 30 clients who suffer anxieties and meet weekly at Charter Hospital.

“We’ve become like a family to each other,” Scott said. “It’s like my husband says: He can sympathize with me but he can’t empathize. With the group, you know there are other people around who have this, and you are not alone.”

“Some of the people in there seemed to be worse off than me,” joked Charles Higginbottom, 36, a telephone lineman who joined after he had become so stressed he no longer could function at work.

Many of those who suffer crippling anxieties are “people pleasers” who do anything and everything for someone else, overextending themselves and leaving themselves short in personal time, Folensbee said. In the group, clients with different fears of anxieties share common feelings and physical complaints.

“They suffer with something similar to me,” Higginbottom said. “Some people have a fear of flying or a fear of driving. I didn’t have a particular fear, but the things we talk about are problems for me, too.”

Higginbottom, who was so worried about being called on yet another string of emergency repair jobs that he had to leave his job for two months, said that thanks to the group, “I just went from dark to daylight.”

Scott, too, has found strength from Folensbee and the group.

“It was hard, and I found out I had to go by myself to get out there. Before, I would either rely on my husband or friends or neighbors. But I started out small--going to the grocery store for five minutes--and building up.

“I had to face the fear, be in crowds, sit and have to live through the panic attack. I can remember he sent me to a Macy’s one-day sale and he made me stand in line for 20 minutes and I cried the whole time.

“Last week, I went to Macy’s one-day sale and I stayed four hours and didn’t even think about it.”