Example: You get anxious about being unwanted, so you ask for friends for reassurance frequently. Eventually it occurs to you being asked to reassure all the time is annoying, so you develop anxiety around asking. This solves the immediate problem of annoying your friends, but the underlying anxiety is still there. So at best, this creates more suffering than actually resolving the problem. But there may actually be a worse thing going on, where you’re reinforcing the use of anxiety as the mechanism to change your behavior, instead of learning new ones.
What is “counter anxiety”? If your seed never makes it to a post, I’d like to at least have this clue.
Example: You get anxious about being unwanted, so you ask for friends for reassurance frequently. Eventually it occurs to you being asked to reassure all the time is annoying, so you develop anxiety around asking. This solves the immediate problem of annoying your friends, but the underlying anxiety is still there. So at best, this creates more suffering than actually resolving the problem. But there may actually be a worse thing going on, where you’re reinforcing the use of anxiety as the mechanism to change your behavior, instead of learning new ones.