Anxiety Therapy
Do You Feel Like You Can’t Catch A Break?
Are feelings of overwhelming fear and worry constant companions in your life? Is anxiety making it difficult to get through your day? Does it feel impossible to achieve a healthy work-life balance?
When you’re dealing with anxiety, you may feel like you can never catch a break. Even when you have down time, you’re either ruminating on the past or worrying about the future. You may feel guilty when you relax. Perhaps you’re so overwhelmed that you become angry, irritable, and impatient with others. You might overeat, undereat, or drink too much alcohol. You probably wish you had someone supportive and trusting you could talk to, but no one seems to understand what you’re going through.
Anxiety Can Affect Your Physical Health, Relationships, And Every Aspect Of Your Life
Constant stress and anxiety don’t just live in the mind—they can show up in the body, too. You may suffer from headaches, indigestion, exhaustion, and panic attacks. Perhaps you struggle to fall asleep at night because of how worried you are. You might experience muscle aches and tension in the body. These physical ailments are often signs of anxiety and can affect your life just as much as the emotional symptoms.
Oftentimes, the worst part of anxiety is how it sabotages your relationships and causes you to withdraw from others. If you suffer from social anxiety, your fear of rejection and lack of self-confidence may prevent you from going out and making friends. The more you isolate, the more anxious you become—and vice versa.
If you wish you had someone to talk to who understood your struggles with anxiety symptoms, I would be honored to be that person. I want to help you reclaim your sense of control, achieve greater harmony between your emotions, and experience peace of mind.
Our Stressful, Workaholic Culture Makes It Hard To Find Time For Self-Care
It’s no secret that anxiety is the most common mental health issue in America today. Roughly 40 million adults suffer from an anxiety disorder (1). When you consider how many people are undiagnosed, that number is probably even higher. There’s also a huge overlap between anxiety and other mental health conditions—almost half of anxiety sufferers struggle with depression (2).
Why are people so anxious? In recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has put undue stress on our society, forcing many people who already had anxiety to deal with new concerns about health, safety, finances and job security. Additionally, we are exposed to constant bad news in the media and polarities in politics. We also live in a very workaholic culture where many people struggle to find life-work balance, and are often expected to juggle too many responsibilities at once in order to feel successful at work and in their personal lives.
(1) https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/facts-statistics
(2) https://adaa.org/understanding-anxiety/facts-statistics
Quick Fixes And Surface Solutions Can Only Do So Much To Help With Anxiety
If you’re reading this page, there’s a good chance that you’ve already tried different strategies for combating anxiety. You may have used a meditation app, tried exercising more, or picked up a new hobby. While all of these activities can certainly help you cope with anxiety in the moment, they don’t address the root cause of your struggles. This is why it’s important to seek treatment.
Therapy is a chance to go deeper—to look beyond quick fixes and surface solutions and achieve real, lasting peace in your life. I want to help you explore your anxiety on a deeper level and heal the emotional wounds driving your stress.
Anxiety Treatment Can Help You Live With More Clarity And Confidence
Because of how busy life is, it’s not always easy to notice when you’re struggling with anxiety. You may be so preoccupied with other things that you don’t realize how anxious you are. Therapy with me is a time to tune out the pressures of the outside world and tune in to your thoughts and feelings, noticing your anxiety in real time. Working together, we will explore why your anxiety persists, how it affects you, and what you would like to accomplish through treatment.
At first, the idea of therapy may seem intimidating, especially if you suffer from social anxiety. The good news is that my approach goes deeper than mere conversation. I want to help you experience healing in the mind and the body, and this means doing more than just talk therapy. Together, you and I will explore how anxiety shows up in your embodied experience and manifests in physical symptoms as well as emotions. This way, you will receive the most comprehensive treatment possible.
What To Expect In Sessions
As counterintuitive as it sounds, the first step to overcoming anxiety is befriending it. Instead of trying to suppress or eliminate anxiety, I want to help you build a relationship with it. After all, anxiety serves a protective function—it is a survival instinct designed to keep you safe. The question is: What is your anxiety trying to protect you from?
You and I will explore this question together. Maybe there is past trauma that caused you to be anxious from a young age. Or perhaps anxiety runs in your family and fits the category of inherited, Legacy Trauma. Or maybe prolonged stress in your life has turned into daily overwhelm and worry. No matter the situation, the goal is to figure out why your anxiety arose and use that knowledge to learn new ways to relate to your emotions and achieve a more harmonious existence.
Tailoring Your Treatment Plan
I aim to approach anxiety from both the top down (brain) and bottom up (body), using talk therapy to help you address negative thoughts and somatic techniques to ease anxiety’s effect on your body. Combining both talk and body-based interventions is the most effective way to treat anxiety, since doing so utilizes all the brain’s processing capabilities to promote neural change.
Examples of body-based interventions I use include body scans, mindful movement, and yoga-inspired breathing. These strategies can help you increase your awareness of how anxiety manifests in your body and allow you to shift the way it impacts your nervous system.
My treatment approach is also informed by Internal Family Systems (IFS), which is all about identifying the “parts” of yourself that drive your anxiety. For instance, maybe there is a part of you that learned to expect the worst-case scenario in every situation. IFS can help you pay more attention to this part, understand how it affects your actions, and help the part heal.
By tuning in to your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and bodily sensations, I believe you can learn to see your anxiety in a different light and live with more clarity and confidence.
You May Have Some Concerns About Anxiety Treatment…
Why should I bother with anxiety treatment? Can’t I just talk to a friend?
If you have friends you can talk to about your anxiety, that’s great! There’s nothing wrong with leaning on friends for emotional support. At the same time, however, friends tend to go into “fix it” mode when it comes to mental health issues. They may encourage you to look for a new job, break up with a partner, or take up a new hobby. A counselor can help you look beyond these quick fixes and explore the deeper issues fueling your anxiety.
I don’t think I have time for therapy.
Time is at a premium and I don’t want you to end up with too much on your plate. That said, you’ve probably already spent a great deal of time worrying and trying to combat anxiety. Counseling can help you cut down on the time you spend feeling anxious. What’s more, all of my sessions are online, ensuring that you don’t have to worry about commutes or waiting rooms.
What if counseling just makes me more anxious?
Therapy isn’t all smooth sailing. It takes courage to confront your anxiety and work through it. The good news is that my approach involves more than talk therapy. I know that discussing your anxiety can make it worse—that’s why I’m trained in multiple somatic techniques that can help you mediate your stress levels and calm your nervous system. You can also apply these calming strategies to your own life in between sessions.
Let Me Help You Experience Peace Of Mind
If you’re tired of living under constant stress, I am here to help. To get started, visit the Contact page to fill out a contact form or text or call me at 831-759-5055.
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