Anxiety Therapy
Afraid Of What Your Anxiety Is Telling You?
Are you tired of always being worried and fearful? Has your anxiety intensified to the point of becoming physical—manifesting as discomfort, hypervigilance, and panic attacks? When you zoom out to look at the big picture of your life, you may notice that avoidance has become a common theme. Regularly making decisions from a place of fear, you probably avoid certain feelings, situations, or relationships. It’s not that you don’t want to engage; you just have a hard time feeling safe and present.
Anxiety affects us all at some point or another, whether we’re preparing for a big presentation or responding to a potentially dangerous situation with heightened awareness. After all, anxiety is a survival mechanism. But when it becomes ingrained to the point that we experience panic attacks, fear “normal” everyday situations, and feel the impact of anxiety in every area of our lives, it’s important to seek treatment.
Therapy offers you a chance to develop more trust in yourself and your decisions so you can live with more ease. A therapist can give you specific tools to manage how you physically feel when anxiety arises, ultimately allowing you to make decisions based in confidence and awareness—rather than fear. Through this process, you can re-establish a healthy, secure connection to yourself, your relationships, and the world around you.
Where Does Anxiety Come From And Why Is It So Hard To Manage?
Just as there are many different types and experiences of anxiety, there are many factors that can contribute to the onset of anxiety in individuals. Family history and unhealed trauma can play a big role, as can more situational, subjective factors like social media use, work-specific stressors, and periods of change and transition. At the end of the day, anxiety is defined and experienced somewhat broadly: anything in the world that makes us consciously—or unconsciously—feel that we are at risk of danger.
It’s hard to manage a mechanism that exists to keep us safe! The mind and body can be scary to think about, especially on our own, without guidance and perspective. Instead of tuning into these feelings, it’s natural for many of us to turn to screen time, work, substances, or other distractions to keep us from meaningfully facing our fears.
The goal of treatment is not necessarily to eliminate anxiety entirely but to help you understand and manage its impact. I will offer you an opportunity to practice engaging with those uncomfortable feelings so they become less scary and triggering over time. By learning to lean into your anxiety in therapy, you can free up the emotional and mental energy it’s taken from you.
Counseling Through Mindful Self Therapy Targets Anxiety At Every Level
From my perspective as a therapist, anxiety is something that is felt. Approaching your feelings with curiosity—rather than avoidance—will help us better understand and manage those feelings. And we will use your body’s cues in therapy to help us figure out what is going on beneath the surface.
What To Expect
Once we’ve brought awareness to the body through mindfulness and visualization, we will have a better idea of where your anxiety is being stored. I will help you understand why your nervous system responds this way and teach you strategies for regulating your emotions. Breathing techniques and other grounding exercises will be beneficial for achieving a sense of calm and control when activated, giving you the confidence to alleviate symptoms in real time.
From there, I will likely draw from methods like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) to address the ways that anxiety affects your thinking process. These approaches effectively neutralize anxious thought patterns and promote intentional, value-based decision-making. Instead of perpetuating the negative belief cycle that comes from feeling incapable of eliminating anxious thoughts, these counseling techniques help you learn to tolerate anxiety.
Finally, we will use our time in therapy to uncover some of the reasons your anxiety exists in the first place. I find that clients with high anxiety are often protecting something deeper—an inner part of themselves that’s wounded and unresolved. Parts work (as it relates to Internal Family Systems or IFS therapy) can offer insight into what those deeper emotions tell us, while Brainspotting is useful for healing core traumas.
Avoidance is what gives your anxiety power, but my goal for treatment is to give the power back to you. Building awareness is the key to reconnecting to yourself in a way that will cast positive ripples into every part of your life.
Your body will lead the way in therapy—the more you listen to what it’s trying to tell you, the better you will feel.
Common Concerns About Therapy For Anxiety
I am too afraid to “be” in my feelings/face the anxiety.
This is an incredibly normal fear to have! The body can be a scary place—especially when it’s filled with anxious thoughts and feelings. My treatment approach moves at your pace, taking the time needed to get you to a place that feels safe and manageable.
Grounding skills and breathing techniques will be used to guide you through the discomfort. And when you’re ready, we can begin to focus some of our sessions on tolerating difficult feelings and letting the discomfort in, which is essential to resolving it. However, this process is always done with the utmost care and with your full permission to “go there” together.
I’ve tried CBT and ACT for anxiety in the past, but it didn’t help—how would counseling with you be any different?
Shifting thoughts is a great skill to have, but it will only take us so far in treatment. My approach uses behavioral techniques and bodywork to change the way anxiety is felt. As a therapist, I recognize that the body stores so much more information than what verbal language could ever access, which is why I use a range of body-based methods—including visualizations and Brainspotting—when treating anxiety.
My unique approach actually seeks to activate the anxiety in our sessions together so that you can safely practice skills for alleviating symptoms in real time.
I feel so disconnected from myself and others all the time—maybe I’m just doomed to not feel anything.
It sounds like your body is living in shutdown mode, which is very common for people who experience chronic anxiety. You have become so overwhelmed by your stress response that you’ve withdrawn or detached out of a need to protect yourself. Therapy can help you name and identify these feelings as you practice becoming aware. Through this, you will gradually build a connection back to yourself and your body.
Just like conditioning any muscle, this practice takes time, but it’s worth it!
Your Anxiety Is Talking; It’s Time To Listen
As a therapist specializing in anxiety, I work with clients affected by chronic fear, overwhelm, and panic attacks in treatment. Collaborating on solutions together, you can move from feeling avoidant and distrustful to being confident in yourself and your decisions.
To find out more about my approach to therapy for anxiety, contact me.