Helping others combat anxiety

Anneliese Kellner-Joyce is a survivor. After hitting her lowest ebb just over three years ago, the 23 year-old Easton-based actor, performance poet and dancer took an overdose and ended up fighting for her life in the Bristol Royal Infirmary.

Plagued throughout her life by deep-rooted insecurities and chronic feelings of low self-esteem, she reached her breaking point in 2005.

But after such a horrendous experience she has turned her life around thanks, in part, to a mentor who helped build her confidence through one-on-one personal development coaching. Now she is sharing that knowledge with a cross-section of the community.

When I meet up with the vibrant red-head, I'm keen to understand how her background may have led to her breakdown, as well as her recovery.

"My background is full of insecurity and instability, " says Anneliese. "My mother is an artist and an escape artist, and from the age of zero I moved around to loads of different houses and loads of different countries, including Dublin, Galway, Germany, Bath, London – that really affected me.

"I was insecure and unhappy. That's not to say I had it worse than anybody else and it was nobody's fault. There is no blame, it was just how I felt.

"The years between zero and eight are the most important years of anyone's life and they form the bulk of our personality, they form our outlook on people, places and things, our relationship with ourselves. I developed low self-worth."

Anneliese is understandably reluctant to discuss the specifics of her breakdown, but she is able to put her troubles into context in order to explain how they were overcome.

She says: "As a result of my own personal experiences, which came to a head a few years ago, I had to learn to practice new techniques in order to combat stuff.

"For me, these techniques came into my life when I started to work with Barry Baker, an ex-Royal Shakespeare Company director. He coached me on a vocal, theatrical and emotional level. My training was 18 months of full-time one-on-one sessions. It wasn't just about acting coaching, it was also life coaching.

"Since then I've been working on and focusing on my own creativity and not on exterior things. One always tends to grasp on to the exterior things in order to feel better about life. But those feelings are fleeting and transient, and there is no lasting satisfaction in them. That all comes from a stable inner-core. Only then can you give to yourself and to other people."

As I sit talking to this positive, self-assured young woman, it's hard to imagine that she ever sank to the depths that she's describing. But Anneliese is living proof that people can turn their lives around, and the tools that she learned in order to do this are something she wants to share with others. The performance artist has set up drama workshops at the Victoria Methodist Centre and will be working with groups at the City of Bristol's Hartcliffe campus and schools in the Whitchurch area. Here, she explains what she has learned on her voyage of self-discovery and how she can use it to help others.

"The workshops are drama-based and focus on personal development and confidence-building," says Anneliese.

"All of us, as a result of past experiences, learn to adopt a certain physicality. If we bear in mind that 80 per cent of our internal nature is displayed through body language – how we sit, how we stand, tone, note, diction, loudness of voice – we can see how those past experiences are going to affect both the physical and the vocal.

"Let's say, for example, you're four years old and you're starting to get picked on, bullied or abused. These exterior words or actions from people outside of the self will register in the brain. The brain will then send that knowledge to the body.

"So those negative words and actions won't just effect that person in an emotional or psychological way – it will effect the entire physicality of the person.

"Repetition of these actions will have a very detrimental effect on the mind and body. So, we learn to lower the eye contact, lower the shoulders, place the feet inwards. A lot of people are not aware of how they are holding themselves and how this is affecting how they feel.

"If I sit here with my shoulders hunched, looking down, I'm not feeling any fearlessness or any spontaneity. I feel downtrodden, I feel like a victim. It also affects voice, so what we say and how we say it. We need to change that. It's simple – all we have to do is physically do it. That's what I work on in my workshops – positive vocal and physical actions.

"We start with the breath and move on to centring our bodies, learning how to say your name without diverting eye contact, straightening the body, speaking out.

"I want people to have fun, to get into another character, to be completely fearless and spontaneous. So in the first hour we do lots of improvisation, lots of movement, plenty of singing and dancing. That gets us ready for the second hour when we are ready to take on the world. We improvise and make total fools of ourselves without feeling self-conscious. We shed anxiety, self-consciousness and nervousness. That's what it's all about."

I ask her how her various sessions have been going – and from her reaction it's clear that they are achieving the desired effect, even if her subjects sometimes find it difficult to open up and face their demons.

"I do adult workshops on Tuesday evenings and kids on Tuesday afternoons. I've had good interest in the workshops, which is great.

"They find it difficult initially. It takes immense courage to do this. They are really facing their own fears.

"It's like you're living in the quagmire of darkness and you attempt to break away from that prison-like place. That's really scary.

"The light starts to come and you want to change, but you are so used to being in the dark that any kind of change or light (however much you know it's going to benefit you) is new and scary.

"But it will and does benefit you. You can overcome social anxiety, nervousness, fear, depression, self-consciousness, low self-esteem. It takes hard work, but it also takes fun. That's what we achieve in the workshops."

Anneliese says she finds the workshops rewarding, but the energetic, feisty performer also has a number of other successful projects on the go.

She says: "A year and a half ago I was in a Gothic romance film called Kiss Of The Moon. The director, Simon Lewis, sent it off to a couple of film festivals and it was shortlisted for the Los Angeles film festival. It was such a surprise because it was this little, low-budget film.

"Currently, I am working on a multi-media project filled with mind-bending dance routines fused with poetry and backing music. It's completely innovative and I'm loving it.

"My life is very busy and very exciting – and that's how I like it."

To find out more about the workshops, contact Anneliese on 07758 257 803 or email eseelenna@hotmail.com