Therapy for anxiety
Anxiety affects everyone differently, but it can be debilitating and limiting your life.
Anxiety disorders are the most prevalent mental health issue in the United States, affecting over 40 million adults, or 19.1% of the population. Your anxiety may show up in hypervigilance, an elevated state of constantly assessing potential threats around you. This may look like persistent and relentless thoughts about your surroundings, what your friends are thinking about you, everyone’s (negative) responses to what you just said or did, or other worst case scenario thought loops. Anxiety tends to trap you in these patterns and takes over your view of the world. It pushes our bodies into constant Fight or Flight responses to perceived threats which can affect our bodies in different ways: dissociatiation, difficulty sleeping, muscle tension, constant nausea or dizziness, restlessness, and so much more.
Anxiety is a natural tool to communicate important information to us that trauma can highjack and keep us in a perpetually elevated state. Therapy can help.
Sources: National Alliance on Mental Illness
Mind Body Connection
Anxiety does not give us the chance to slow down. The foundation of our work is noticing the small signals our body is sending to us and responding differently than we are used to. This may be with EMDR tools, IFS meditations, or somatic exercises. We turn our attention to our breathe, our bodies, and the parts that need our attention to find safety. To ease anxiety means to find new ways to feel safe in our own bodies. This is a practice both in and out of session. We can challenge beliefs all day long to work against anxiety, but a more useful approach is to work with the anxiety to understand it’s fears, goals, and job. Adding in new practices and habits in our day to day lives that create more safety where we may be missing it can help lower our anxiety. When we are stuck in our heads, we must build our connection to the body.
Why am I like this?
Anxiety serves a purpose. It may be rooted in an unpredictable childhood, perfectionistic tendencies, trauma, the unpredictable future, or existential anxiety. Befriending our anxiety may sound odd, but it’s actually more effective than pushing it away. If we can get to know where it’s coming from, we can grow compassion for how it shows up in our life. In turn, we may find that we aren’t broken or damaged, we just haven’t learned how to work with our own unique system yet. You deserve more understanding, patience, and compassion, something we’ll build together.
How can therapy help?
Every session, my first responsibility is to bring a grounded and relaxed nervous system. Mirror neurons are a really amazing breakthrough in neuroscience research which shows that your nervous system will find safety in response to mine. Collaborating together, we’ll build coping skills, regulation resources, and new responses to our anxiety. There is no quick fix, but there are ways to reimagine life working with anxiety instead of against it. Therapy can turn our most painful parts into our biggest strengths. We will build your capacity to not only tolerate anxiety, but actively build practices to ground and center us to learn what it’s like to not feel anxious. I will help you find your most authentic self buried underneath years of anxiety.
