"I came to you to make this monster go away." It's one of the most common reactions Barbara Spaulding, LCSW, hears when she introduces a core idea in her recovery work — that the way out of anxiety isn't to fight it harder. In her book Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery, she puts it as plainly as possible: if you are at war with your anxiety, you will lose — every time.
That's a hard thing to hear when anxiety has cost you sleep, relationships, jobs, or years of your life. It sounds like giving up. It isn't — it's actually the opposite.
Why the fight backfires
Anxiety responds to how you treat it. The more you yell at it, criticize yourself for having it, or try to muscle through it with sheer willpower, the louder it gets. Barbara's clients often arrive believing that if they stop actively fighting their anxiety for even a moment, it will take over completely. In practice, the opposite tends to be true: the fighting is what keeps it in control. Being at war with your anxiety means being at war with yourself, and that war produces more anxiety, not less.
"You are not your anxiety. You have anxiety."
This phrase, one of Barbara's most repeated teaching points, is a small but important distinction. Anxiety isn't a character flaw or a permanent identity — it's something happening to you, not something that defines who you are. She often describes the anxious part of a person as a scared, protective "kid part" — trying, clumsily and without good judgment, to keep you safe. It doesn't have good instincts (it's based in fear, not logic), but its intentions, in a strange way, are protective, not malicious.
From enemy to partner
The reframe Barbara teaches — and it's genuinely one of the more counterintuitive ideas in her book — is to move from a relationship of hatred toward one of understanding, and eventually, partnership. That doesn't mean liking your anxiety or wanting it around. It means recognizing that if you already have anxiety, you already have a relationship with it, whether you've chosen to or not — and an adversarial relationship keeps you stuck in ways a compassionate one doesn't.
One exercise from the book: write your anxiety a letter. Say whatever you want to it — your honest thoughts, the ways it's hurt you, the ways it may have tried (however badly) to protect you. Then write a second letter, this time from your anxiety back to you. What has it been trying to tell you? How long has it been around? People are often surprised at what surfaces when they let themselves do this exercise honestly, without overthinking it.
What this looks like in a real moment of anxiety
Practically, moving from fighting to partnership doesn't mean passivity. Barbara's clients still use active tools — breathing techniques, grounding, the "three words" method, a shift from an anxious lens to a calm lens. The difference is the posture underneath those tools. Instead of "I need to defeat this feeling right now," it becomes something closer to: "Thank you, and I am focused on calm." Acknowledging the anxious thought without engaging in combat with it tends to quiet it faster than trying to shout it down.
This isn't the same as giving up
It's worth being clear about what this approach is not: it's not resignation, and it's not deciding anxiety gets to run your life. Barbara's own recovery — fifteen years of panic attacks, followed by more than three decades anxiety-free — didn't come from accepting anxiety as permanent. It came from ending the internal war that was keeping it fed, and replacing that fight with specific, practiced calm skills that gradually built a different foundation.
If you've been fighting for years
If you recognize yourself in the pattern of yelling at your anxiety, calling it names, or believing that giving it an inch means losing everything — you're not doing anything wrong by feeling that way. It's an understandable response to something that has caused real harm in your life. But according to three decades of clinical work and Barbara's own recovery, it's also the pattern most likely to keep you stuck. The way out starts with putting the weapons down.
This reframe is one of the foundational ideas in Anxiety and Panic: Your Path to Recovery by Barbara Spaulding, LCSW, alongside 17 practical calm skills for building a genuinely different relationship with anxiety. She also runs a free biweekly Anxiety Relief Zoom group — details at anxietyandpanic.net.