To many people, the notion of feeling anxious is a fairly normal human reaction or emotion to certain situations that any individual might go through in life. Most people would not give it much of a second thought and would find a temporary solution to dealing with the anxiety that the situation provoked.
To anyone who is an alcoholic, anxiety can arrange from mild trepidation through to a sense of impending doom. This feeling can be about any situation or reaction in life, big or small.
The issue of anxiety and the nation of fear or sense of impending doom goes to the heart in many ways of the recovery process that an alcoholic will need to go through, both in rehab and once have left probably in a 12 step fellowship such as Alcoholics Anonymous.
Anyone who has ever been to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous will most likely have heard the individual talk about them having a level of fear in their lives an early age. Fear again is one of those words that can mean differing levels of anxiety and dread to different individuals.
For many people dealing with the legacy of alcoholism, alcohol was the main thing that helped them deal with the fear or got rid of the fear altogether.
For many alcoholics the fear was internal not external.
Whilst it is sometimes difficult to define this feeling, the fear that many alcoholics experience was in some way a fear about holding themselves together, an internal rigidity that they need to somehow try and feel safe.
It was not purely a fear based on an external trigger that generated a sense of being frightened.
The recovery process from alcoholism begins for many people in a rehab or treatment center.
Aside from anything else, this needs to feel a safe and secure environment where there is no real pressure on the individual, where an individual can begin the process of exploring their inner world and discover and find out some of the reasons for the emotional distortion.
Anxiety can seem quite a mild word at times for an alcoholic who has experienced levels of fear and dread that have completely overwhelmed them.
However the issue of words can often disguise differing levels of meanings of emotions, where the important thing is the emotions themselves.
What is important is to give the alcoholic freedom and space to explore their internal emotional drives that have fuelled their alcoholism, and created an internal environment where alcohol seemed to be the solution to their problems not the problem itself.