Being AWARE in Cognitive Therapy & Hypnotherapy

Copyright (c) Donald Robertson, 2009

The short handout below is based on the AWARE acronym used by Aaron Beck and his colleagues in their cognitive therapy for anxiety and phobias.  For more information see Beck, Emery, & Greenberg, Anxiety Disorders & Phobias: A Cognitive Perspective (2005).  This self-help advice to clients can precede typical cognitive therapy to modify negative automatic thoughts.  Similar acceptance and self-awareness strategies have been used in hypnotherapy and humanistic psychotherapies for many decades, especially in Gestalt psychotherapy. 

Your First Job: Being AWARE

At the beginning of therapy it helps to start learning a whole new attitude toward your anxiety, which has been summed up in the acronym “AWARE” to help you memorise the instructions.  You can think of this as defining your initial “role” in therapy, or as a kind of job description.  Paradoxically, learning to accept anxiety tends to help overcome it.  People sometimes describe this as stopping “battling against” or “fighting with” their symptoms, taking the pressure off themselves, being non-judgemental, or forgiving themselves for feeling anxious. 

• Accept that your anxious thoughts and feelings are natural.  Allow yourself to feel anxious without becoming annoyed or frustrated with yourself.  Say “hello” to the thoughts and feelings, think of them as being fairly normal, acknowledge the fact that they exist, and adopt a patient attitude toward change.
• Watch your anxiety from a distance.  Observe your thoughts and feelings non-judgementally, without making strong value judgements about them being bad, or about yourself for having them.  Just imagine you’re observing your thoughts and feelings from a detached perspective, from a distance, without placing too much importance on them.  You are not your thoughts or your feelings; rather you’re the person observing them.  Observe your thoughts and feelings as if they’re transient things, like clouds passing across the sky, instead of becoming absorbed in them.
• Act despite your anxiety.  Act as if you’ve overcome your fears, act as if you’re in control or you’ve already achieved your goal of getting better.  Reverse your avoidance behaviour and face your fears in steps and stages, dropping any unnecessary signs of anxiety such as gripping objects for safety or averting your gaze from people.
• Repeat as much as possible.  Keep accepting your anxiety, watching it from a detached perspective, and acting as if you’re better until it becomes second nature and your feelings change.
• Expect realistic improvement.  Be hopeful and confident but don’t rush things.  Be realistic and expect possible setbacks but see them as temporary, surmountable, and opportunities to improve your coping skills.  Expect that anxiety may return, because it’s human nature, but also expect that you can learn to cope and make more and more progress if you persevere.

In other words, begin by accepting things, watching the symptoms of anxiety without worrying about them, and acting as if you were feeling better already.  To begin with, adopting this mind-set might take some effort and you’ll need to keep reminding yourself to do it, but it soon becomes easier and easier until it has evolved into a habit and something you’ll find yourself doing automatically.  It takes a lot of fuel to get a steam engine to start moving but a lot less fuel to keep it going once it’s started rolling.  It sometimes takes a lot of motivation to begin learning new thinking habits but it takes less and less effort with each attempt – the main thing is to take the first step and get the process started.  So why don’t you begin right now and see what happens if you put the AWARE strategy into practice as often as possible over the next few days or weeks?