Episode 45: Phil Lane, LCSW
Phil Lane, LCSW: Manifests in a fear based on something we feel physically and then sort of a, um, almost a chasing of an answer, chasing of what is this that's happening to me.
Jessica Fowler: Welcome back to What Your Therapist is Reading. I'm your host, Jessica Fowler. On today's episode, we are speaking with Phil Lane. Phil is a licensed clinical social worker in New Jersey and Pennsylvania and psychotherapist in private practice. He specializes in the treatment of anxiety, panic, adjustment disorders, and men's issues. He is the author of Understanding and Coping with Illness Anxiety. He also has two forthcoming books, the Narrative Therapy Workbook for Self Esteem and Overcoming Panic and Panic Attacks, both due to publish next year.
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Welcome Phil.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Hi Jessica. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. I appreciate it.
Phil Lane, LCSW: It's my pleasure. It's always nice to talk to a fellow social worker.
Jessica Fowler: It is. I do. I get a lot out of these interviews and meeting people all over the world. It's really cool.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yes, definitely.
Jessica Fowler: So I like to start with the question of, can you share about a memory of how reading has impacted you?
Phil Lane, LCSW: Um, sure, well, I've always loved to read, um, from childhood on. I actually, uh, was an English major, uh, in my undergrad in college. So, I spent, um, many years in the education field, uh, before I transitioned over to being a, a clinical social worker. So, I've always loved reading. One specific memory is when I was really struggling with anxiety and with panic attacks um, I read a book by Rollo May. It was called, um, The Meaning of Anxiety. It's an old psychology book. It's maybe from the 1950s, but it opened the door for me to understanding anxiety, understanding it from a psychological perspective. So that really kind of turned on a light bulb for me that I could learn about what I was going through. So that's a specific memory of how reading really helped me with my mental health.
Jessica Fowler: So it sounds like this is something that you've struggled with.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yes, absolutely. Um, anxiety, panic attacks, illness, anxiety, um, really any kind of anxiety I've probably struggled with.
Jessica Fowler: And so what is the hope when your, um, readers read this book? What is your hope that their takeaway is or how they are impacted?
Phil Lane, LCSW: Uh, more than anything else, I want them to feel hopeful. Um, I want them to feel that being anxious or experiencing panic is not something that you cannot come back from. It's not something that, uh, you cannot heal from. So, I really want them to not only understand why we experience these types of things, but how we can heal from them, how we can get through them.
Jessica Fowler: Absolutely. And I'll share, I mean, well, I won't share the whole story, but this stuff, this has happened to me after one of my children were born and going along with postpartum anxiety and how it was related to illness. And it's definitely something that people can overcome and work through.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yes. Absolutely.
Jessica Fowler: So let's just talk about defining illness anxiety.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Sure. A simple definition would be it's an anxious fixation on our bodies and on our state of physical well being and health. It's where we really fixate, focus, almost hyper focus on being worried that something's wrong with us.
Jessica Fowler: Absolutely. And so when your readers open up this book, what are they getting?
Phil Lane, LCSW: Absolutely. Absolutely. They're getting a couple things. They're getting psychoeducation, um, fancy way to say they're going to get kind of the nuts and bolts of what illness anxiety is. They're going to understand it from a diagnostic and clinical perspective. Um, then they're going to understand how this affects us and how it affects all different people, all different age groups, um, all different backgrounds, etc. They're also going to get some practical exercises from cognitive behavioral therapy. Um, dialectical behavioral therapy, mindfulness, so the idea is that once you understand it, um, then you can sort of normalize it and then you can learn how to cope with it.
Jessica Fowler: Can you share a little bit about, um, DBT, just so for our listeners who may not know what that is? Dialectical Behavioral Therapy.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Sure, DBT, um, uh, essentially the idea that we have a couple different parts of our mind. Uh, we have a rational part of our mind and we have an emotional part of our mind. DBT encourages us to find the overlap, what they call the wise mind. Um, in DBT, the idea is not to be ruled only by emotion or only by logic. Um, it's like a healthy middle ground, and it's a really important place to be when we deal with anxiety.
Jessica Fowler: So, can you give some examples of how illness anxiety might show up so someone would know, oh, maybe that's actually what I'm dealing with?
Phil Lane, LCSW: Sure, I'll use, uh, I'll use a personal example, if that's okay. Um, there were many times in my life where I would end up in the emergency room, thinking and being completely convinced that I was undergoing something catastrophic. A heart attack, an aneurysm, appendicitis, you name it. Only to go through batteries of tests, uh, be admitted to the hospital, and to find out that, uh, everything looks good.
So, it manifests in a fear based on something we feel physically and then sort of a, um, almost a chasing of an answer, chasing of what is this that's happening to me? Uh, so that with clients I've dealt with, with illness, anxiety, pain, depression, that's often the case. They'll tell me, you know, I have four doctor's appointments this week, or I was in the emergency room, um, or I think I should go to urgent care. So, that's one way that illness anxiety manifests. We feel something, we don't know what it is, it frightens us, we draw a conclusion, and then we go looking for confirmation of that anxious conclusion.
Jessica Fowler: And I know for me, I've seen it more in the last couple of years. Is that true for you too?
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yes. Yeah, I believe so. I think that COVID didn't help. Um, that was a public health emergency, obviously. It was very real. But at the same time, I think it made many of us feel very, very vulnerable, blatantly vulnerable, in a way that perhaps we didn't feel before. If you remember back in spring 2020, there was fear, and legitimate fear, that you could get COVID and die. Um, so I think that that has kind of brought it to the forefront. The positive side of that is that it's helped us to understand the mental health impact of physical illness or disease. But yeah, I think in the last four years or so, it's definitely become more prevalent. I also think that people are a little bit less, uh, filled with shame about talking about it. There was a time when it was seen as hypochondria, and it was seen as neurosis. It is not that at all. It is a, a fear and an anxiety.
Jessica Fowler: Yeah, definitely. And, you know, thinking about it is just, or I guess maybe some education for our listeners is how much time it takes up for you. The thinking about it and the worrying about it, the doctor's appointments, the missing of work or school, like it takes a significant amount of time in your life when you're struggling with this.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Sure. Something I mentioned in the book is the impact on what we in psychology and social work called daily functioning, daily functioning and activities of daily living. Simple things, uh, hygiene, sleep, uh, appetite, all of these things are affected. If you are spending an inordinate amount of time, going to doctor's appointments. And by the way, you can do this from the comfort of your home because you can be on Google looking these things up. You know, you're calling out of work, you're not present with your family, you're missing out on experiences that you typically really enjoy. So it has a significant impact on day to day life.
Jessica Fowler: Absolutely. I work with a lot of perinatal clients and I call it the spiral when you start to spiral and you go down Google and you know, just kind of constantly looking things up, worrying either about yourself or the baby. That's how it can, that's one way that it can show up and look like.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Sure, absolutely. It's, you know, we need to look at it as really cyberchondria. It's another form of this really anxious fixation and can almost lead us to becoming phobic in a kind of way. Um, there's good information out there and then there's really, really frightening information out there. So, it goes back to that wise mind idea of finding the middle ground. I have a checklist in the book about whether or not internet research is helping me. You know, is it helping me or is it causing me more anxiety? That's something we really need to check in with ourselves on. It's normal to want to understand things, but sometimes we can almost like over understand things. We can over investigate. So we have to be really mindful of that.
Jessica Fowler: Absolutely. I ask that question all the time. Is it helping you or not helping you? Do you feel more distressed after or do you feel less distressed? Right? Do you feel calmer? Those are because you need to know that.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Sure. And if you're more distressed after then it's counterproductive. It's doing the exact opposite of what you had intended this to do, which is provide you comfort.
Jessica Fowler: Right. Which is what anxiety does. It makes us. You know, we have to know the answer. We have to know the answer. We keep going and going, but when we get it. We don't necessarily feel calm. And then we keep looking.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yeah. Yeah. I have a post on my Instagram today about how anxiety is so anticlimactic. You know, it builds, it builds, it builds, it builds. And it tells you this thing's going to happen. That's going to happen. And you wait for it to happen. which is not a good thing and then it doesn't happen and in a way you're sort of exhausted by all the energy you've spent. It's like a hyped up movie that you watch and you go, that movie sucked.
Jessica Fowler: Mm hmm.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yeah, it takes up some of my time watching that.
Jessica Fowler: Yeah, it takes up a lot of energy. And, you know, in this book, you kind of go through, you do a lot of education, you have some client stories in there. And then you have some tools at the end in different forms of therapy, too. So you talked about cognitive behavioral, you talked about dialectical behavioral therapy, narrative therapy, nine mindfulness. So, there's a whole range of different tools in there for people to apply on their own. Um, and then if they need to, I would say with a therapist.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yeah, the idea of the exercises is to, again, give a framework and, and to instill some hope that there are ways to change, uh, our cognitive patterns around these things. You know, when I was really struggling with illness, anxiety, I was constantly checking, myself constantly, constantly, you know, does this feel different than it did? Is my heart beating faster than it was? Is my respiration more pressured? So, mindfulness was very helpful to me. Little things like being able to walk my dog and just pay attention to the walk. And I'm not paying attention so much to what's happening inside my body. So, understanding those concepts is really important. But yes, to your point, add a therapist who's really well skilled in helping with cognitive behavioral therapy or anxiety or illness anxiety. Um, so that's the idea of the exercises, is that we have some tools that we can use.
Jessica Fowler: What made you decide to write the book?
Phil Lane, LCSW: I wrote it for me. I thought back to, geez, when I was going through this, if only there had been something that was specific to this kind of anxiety. Um, I read a lot about anxiety as a general concept, all of which was very, very helpful. But I don't think, looking back, and I really, I was really experiencing this maybe 15 years ago or so. At that time, I don't know that there were any titles on illness, anxiety, or hypochondria. Um, so I just started to kind of jot things down and it started to build and morph into a manuscript and I thought this could be really helpful to people. So, off I went to see if somebody would publish it. That my particular publisher was very interested in it, thought it would be a very interesting title and something that people would need.
Jessica Fowler: Yeah, this is the first book I've ever read that's specific for illness anxiety.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yeah, I think there'll be more. Um, there are a couple other ones out there, um, but not many.
Jessica Fowler: What are one or two takeaways you would like your readers to walk away with?
Phil Lane, LCSW: As I said at the beginning, more than anything, I want readers to know that there is hope. Um, we can feel very hopeless when we are in the throes of anxiety and panic, but there is a way out. Um, and I want readers to also know that there's a way to understand what's happening. Anxiety can feel like it just makes no sense, and you are absolutely at its mercy. You can begin to make sense of it. You can begin to understand where it comes from and why it happens and how it affects us. So, there, this is something that does not have to be a mystery. And it's also something that you absolutely can heal from. And you can restore daily functioning. You can come back to a place where you are experiencing your life. And you're not, not experiencing your life because you're only experiencing anxiety.
Jessica Fowler: Absolutely. I hope that is a takeaway for listeners just in general that, you know, something, well, really anything that you're dealing with, but anxiety and specifically in this case, one I think psychoeducation is super important with anxiety, but yeah, that it's, this is something that you can work on and can get better.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yeah, and I think one other thing, recognizing that you're not alone, um, I don't know about you, Jessica, but for me, I think 90 percent of my clients list anxiety as at least one of the things they like to work on in therapy. This is a commonly, commonly experienced phenomenon. So, to not feel that you're somehow broken or there's something wrong with you for feeling this, the world is chaotic, life is complicated. So, therefore anxiety is normal and it's important that we treat ourselves with some grace rather than shame when we feel anxious or we feel panicked.
Jessica Fowler: Absolutely. Having compassion for ourselves and grace. Yes. I wanted to add to just because this didn't come up yet is that this is actually a really short book. It's a focus book by the publisher. And so it's only like 80 pages. Um, something like that. I think you said, and it's, it's a quick read. It's not a long read at all for people.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Yes, and, you know, when you're struggling with anxiety, you kind of want something a little bit quicker. Um, you don't really have the capacity to read 400 pages about what you're going through. So, um, I know for me, that was very important in my healing. I needed things that were accessible, that made sense, and that I didn't have to essentially devote all kinds of time to, but they would quickly resonate. So that was what I was going for in writing this book. If somebody's really, really struggling with illness anxiety, might be able to read through this book in an hour and feel like, you know what, I have some understanding. I have some answers now.
Jessica Fowler: Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for coming on today. I appreciate it.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Thank you so much, Jessica. It was so nice to talk to you.
Jessica Fowler: What is one way our listeners can connect with you?
Phil Lane, LCSW: Instagram is probably the best. I'm on Instagram at therapist underscore Phil. I try to, uh, put some stuff up there pretty much on a daily basis. Um, anxiety, uh, related, uh, stuff and some other things as well. So please follow me there. And also my website, phil-lane.com.
Jessica Fowler: Excellent.
Phil Lane, LCSW: Thank you, Jessica.
Jessica Fowler: Thank you for listening to this week's episode of what your therapist is reading. Make sure you head on over to the website or social media. To find out about the latest giveaway.
The information provided in this program is for educational and informational purposes only. And although I'm a social worker licensed in the state of New York, this program is not intended to provide mental health treatment and does not constitute a patient th