If you've always been super nice, a people pleaser, afraid of conflict, afraid of expressing your feelings, or have always been the "good child," then you should seriously consider reading about David Burns' Hidden Emotion Technique.

The gist is that really nice people are generally people pleasers and avoid expressing their feelings so they don't upset anyone. They sweep their feelings or problems with others under the rug which get unleashed indirectly as an anxiety disorder, but they're not aware they're doing this. They're so used to not expressing their feelings that they lose sight of the problem that's bugging them in the first place and spend all their time instead on trying to test their anxiety symptoms. Once you bring to conscious awareness what the problem is that's really bugging you, the anxiety will usually go away when you express your feelings and deal with the problem in your life.

He writes about it here: https://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog/details/576/getting-to-the-hidden-cause-of-anxiety

&gt;At first, I thought that Margaret’s case was just an isolated example, but over time, I began to notice the same pattern with more and more anxious patients who seemed stuck. I started asking them if there was something going on in their lives that they hadn’t told me about—something that was bothering them. At first, they’d all deny it, but after a few sessions, a hidden emotion or problem would emerge. It seemed that these patients were trying to teach me something important about the deeper causes of anxiety, something that wasn’t a part of my CBT training. They were giving me a new tool I decided to call the Hidden Emotion Technique.

&gt;The vast majority of these patients were exceptionally nice individuals who felt a strong urge to please others. In fact, most of them seemed to exhibit---beneath their panic attacks, anxieties, and fears—phobias about conflict, anger, or negative emotions of any kind. They seemed to experience a kind of emotional perfectionism, the belief that they should always be happy, pleasant, calm, and totally in control of their feelings, even at the expense of their own desires and emotional needs.

&gt;In other words, when anxiety-prone individuals get feelings or urges that don’t seem “proper” or “acceptable,” they sweep them under the rug without realizing they’re doing this. Then they suddenly develop a phobia, a panic attack, or OCD symptoms and completely lose sight of the hidden problem or feeling that triggered the anxiety in the first place.

&gt;From my work with large numbers of clients with every conceivable type of anxiety, I’ve learned more about the nature of the hidden problems that trigger the symptoms. Anxiety is a kind of creative poetry that the brain automatically generates, much like dreaming. As a therapist, you have to “listen” to the poem to detect the symbolic meaning.

He gives an example in his book on anxiety When Panic Attacks about a woman who has constant worrying (GAD) that something terrible will happen to her sons and husband. She can't stop imagining that some terrible hiking accident will injure and kill her sons while she worries her husband will have a heart attack. She insists that they all have great relationships, but it's later revealed that she dislikes the women that her sons are engaged to and never told them, and that her and her husband have never once argued despite her harboring some resentment towards him. Her treatment is then to have a discussion with all of them and express how she really feels, which she does and her worrying completely vanishes for the first time in decades. The caveat of the treatment is that you'll have to make sure to not let anger or worry build up and make sure you're expressing yourself.

Also note how she had unexpressed conflicts with her sons and husband, and in her worrying fantasies she was harming them or killing them. Usually the nature of your anxiety will provide insight into what the problem that's bothering you is. It all sounds very Freudian but I've noticed similar patterns in myself and Dr. Burns claims to see this pattern of hidden emotions in about 75 percent of his anxious patients. So if you're anxious, ask yourself if there's something that's really bothering you that you're not dealing with!