Understanding and taming anxiety: a relational task

This dissertation examines how to understand the experience of anxiety or anxiousness from a relational perspective. Through eight interviews with adolescents and an Emotional Autoethnographic approach towards the researcher, the research closes in on how adolescents placed on a Danish Boarding school experience and tame anxiety when they feel it. Via a Grounded Theory based analysis and the onto-epistemological stance of New Materialisms three core themes arose: Control and Uncontrollability, Alienation and Reconnection and Human and Non-human relations. These core themes are discussed using especially the sociologist theories of Hartmut Rosa, the psychological theory of Ian Burkitt and the Double Bind theory of Gregory Bateson. The research suggests that adolescents finding themselves experiencing anxiety are entangled in a society where they experience a strong dichotomy between being pathological and non-pathological. They experience strong desires towards belonging and succeeding in life, and at the same time they experience this getting harder and harder. They try to control their surroundings and themselves, mentally and physically, in a world that possibly gets harder and harder to control. At the same time, they experience a world that connects with them either sick or well, and not as struggling with existential problems. The outside world can be seen as relating to the adolescents from a point of aggression. The dissertation points to professionals being aware of these processes and trying to mirror them in the professional work around the adolescents.