This was insightful and informative. I appreciated the author sharing their own struggles with anxiety and trauma. I was pleased to see the inclusion of IFS and EMDR as well.

Practical book about working with anxiety.

Great resource as it contains many exercises to be done as you progress in your journey of understanding and treating anxiety. It provides self guides for mindfulness and journal in order to better approach to support the treatment.

I recommend this book for anyone dealing with anxiety in everyday life. Jamie Castillo uses a mix of exercises, EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) and Internal Family Systems to help the reader find the root causes of their anxiety and learn how to address them.

I found this book to be extremely informative and insightful! The author’s personal experience and knowledge of anxiety offered a one of a kind perspective into anxiety and mental health struggles. I found the content very useful to me as someone who suffers from many of the issues that were discussed in this book. The journal activities were easy to understand and the author did a great job of giving the reader guidance on when to continue and when to pause and hold off.

I found the inclusive mindset of this particular LCSW very refreshing and validating! I was hooked from the first chapter due to their perspective of environmental and systemic mental health setbacks.

I’ve already recommended this read to friends who suffer from anxiety and plan to purchase a physical copy of this book, so that I can continue to reference particularly helpful parts, highlight eye-opening passages and work through the exercises again and again.

If you suffer from Anxiety, and who doesn't, this book is a great read for you. It's different than some of the others that I've read as it's focus is on the source of the anxiety and how to accept it. There are a lot of great exercises in the book that seem really helpful. I didn't get a chance to do them all, as I need a hard copy of the book. I intend on investing in one! The author hit this one out of the park in my opinion.
Thank you for allowing me to read and review this book!

Here is another anxiety related self help book that I have read recently. Most of the books I have read have used Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy but this book has a fresh take. It focuses on Internal Family systems and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. These techniques are becoming more widely used in therapy and I am a particular fan of internal family systems.

This book brings you back to when your anxiety started. The initial trigger as such. Instead of blocking your anxiety the book helps you to accept your anxiety. With understanding comes less fear. This is a great read if you are looking for something new.

I received an arc of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thank you New Harbinger and NetGalley for this ARC.
A wonderful book explaining anxiety, what may cause it and how the reader can welcome it without shutting it off. There are lots of exercises provided to accompany the information and assist the reader. A very informative, reader friendly book that is highly recommended,

Thank you Netgalley for this ARC for an exchange for an honest review.

Excellent read, highly recommend it.

As someone in therapy for her own anxiety, I could not have found this book at a better time. I want to buy a print copy to be able to complete the exercises and follow along. There were quite a few good exercises and tips that I hope to keep with me.

What Happened to Make You Anxious? by Jaime Castillo aims to help readers uncover and process the unresolved past little-t traumas that are fuelling their anxiety. It incorporates concepts from several therapeutic approaches, including internal family systems therapy (IFS) and the adaptive information processing model, which is the theoretical basis for eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). The book differentiates between anxiety that fits the facts and anxiety that doesn’t, and the focus is on the latter.

The author explains that anxiety’s purpose is to communicate about potential dangers that it’s trying to protect you from. “As you become aware of your own unresolved past experiences, you will gain insight into the ways in which your anxiety is trying to protect you... You will acknowledge that you and your anxiety share a common goal, and you don’t actually want it to stop doing its job. Rather than trying to terminate it, you can work with your anxiety to modify its job description in a way that makes life easier for you both.”

Before getting into where the anxiety is coming from, there’s a chapter on skills to help with state change (being able to move from an anxious to a less anxious state) and dual awareness (being able to recall memories while remaining connected to the present where you’re safe), which will help to keep you within your window of tolerance. Readers are encouraged to practice these skills and get comfortable before moving on to the exercises in subsequent chapters.

There’s a chapter on befriending anxiety, which includes experiencing it as a separate entity from the self, with its own motives, thoughts, opinions, and voice. The author explains, “When you can give it space to share its perspective, when you listen to it nonjudgmentally, you will be much more effective at figuring it out than when you try to decide for it.”

This chapter includes an exercise on consciously connecting with your anxiety to help deepen your understanding of what it’s trying to do for you. The goal is to “achieve mutual compassion for one another”, but that often takes time to achieve, as "it makes sense for anxiety to lack trust in you or to feel any other emotion that an ignored person might feel. ” In another exercise in this chapter, you tell your anxiety that "you know it’s doing an important job, and you want to understand more about that job it’s doing for you. Don’t respond just yet. Just listen.”

Francine Shapiro’s adaptive information processing model is used to explain how big-t and little-t trauma memories are stuck in different memory networks rather than being integrated. Little-t traumas are conceptualized as boulders on the mountain of life that you remain tethered to, and the reader is guided through exercises to allow anxiety to lead you back to those boulders so you and it can work together on untethering yourself. “It’s important to maintain trust between you and your anxiety, and if you push yourself too hard, it can cause a tear in the relationship, only reinforcing the perceived need to avoid this work in the future.”

After addressing past traumas, the book shifts to how you can move forward in your relationship with anxiety, which includes establishing a communication plan. “To do this, it is best to go inside and listen for information and answers from your anxiety rather than trying to figure out the answers with your logical mind.” The book also addresses the issue of feeling anxious about not feeling anxious, and needing to negotiate with your anxiety to come up with a new job description for it. "Invite anxiety to assume its new role, and agree to check in with it in a week or two to see how it feels about its new job. Reassure your anxiety that you can always make modifications to its job description as needed."

I can definitely see the internal family systems element in the way that anxiety is anthropomorphized in the book. The whole idea of it feels weird to me just because it’s not a good fit for how my mind works. That’s not to say that it’s a bad thing, though; that’s why I’ve included a lot of quotes so you can get a feel for whether it’s a good fit with how your own mind works. I’m sure that for some people, this approach will be an excellent fit.

One thing I found mildly irritating was all the talk about doing “the work”, but again, that’s a personal idiosyncrasy (I’m not a fan of therapist-speak) rather than being a problem with the book itself.

It’s hard for me to remove my own idiosyncrasies from my overall impression of the book, but I do think it was well written, the key concepts were explained effectively, and the exercises were clearly laid out. The author’s tone was supportive, and she validated the discomfort that people are likely to feel while working through the book. She pointed out the limitations in what can be accomplished with self-help work and encouraged readers to seek support from a therapist if they run up against any of those limitations. I think the biggest determining factor in whether this book will be a good fit for you is if this way of relating to anxiety sounds compatible with your inner world. It’s a different approach from other books on anxiety that I’ve read, and I think that means it can reach people that other books aren’t reaching.


I received a reviewer copy from the publisher through Netgalley.

Listen up all us suffering with anxiety disorders…. This book will help you to change your relationship to anxiety and live life according to your true values. Jaime helps you to explore not just your anxiety symptoms, but also the underlying function of your anxiety

Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC! I really loved the reflection sections in this book. While I wasn't able to actually implement all of the teachings in this book, the exercises, concrete explanations and reflections really helped a lot in my own journey with anxiety. I am looking forward to implementing some of these steps and utilizing these reflections with my own therapist and in my journey.

3.5 stars

If you're one of the many people who battle anxiety (especially over the past few years), this could be a helpful book to check out. There are some interesting points to consider, though not everything is a unique concept. This book may help the reader find the root cause of their anxiety, thus having a better chance to eliminate it. Suggestions seem easy to implement.

This book is amazing. It tells us to befriend our anxiety and to embrace it. To find the moment that gave us our anxiety and meet with it and understand why it is there.

When you’re feeling that unwelcome rush of anxiety, rather than try to hide and get through that moment- accept it- find the cause.

It seems doable, so let’s see what happens!

This was an interesting rainy afternoon read. Some very interesting concepts were presented that would require more than an afternoon to work through. I was able to identify some patterns that I think will be helpful in the future. I think many will find this book useful with everything that has transpired in the last couple of years.