Anxiety Therapy
Is Anxiety Catching Up To You?
After years of avoiding or trying to quiet your worries, are you finally experiencing the effects of unaddressed anxiety?
Have new symptoms—including poor sleep and digestion, high blood pressure, and chronic pain—made you want to tackle your mental health once and for all?
Have other interventions, including self-medication or psychiatric prescriptions, lacked the positive outcomes you’ve hoped for?
Many of the men and women I work with come to me after years of attempting to keep their anxiety at bay. Exhausted from constantly managing symptoms, they often develop the belief that they are doomed to live in anxious fear and worry forever. Their coping strategies have become less effective over the years, and they are starting to experience new, worrisome symptoms that impact their ability to relax, remain present, and feel hopeful.
Beyond anxious, ruminating thoughts, poor sleep is usually the biggest indicator that my clients suffer from anxiety. When you’re kept awake at night or unable to stay asleep due to incessant worry, you quickly lose energy. This can lead to frustration, agitation, and a flare in your temper, likely creating friction with your partner and/or children.
You May Feel Frustrated, Especially If You’ve Already Tried To Treat Your Anxiety
Despite understanding that you need to create more boundaries in your life, you might not know how. Instead, you feel directionless, as if you are living your life with blinders on and constantly in panic mode. And while you may have tried new self-care techniques, anti-anxiety medication, or counseling in the past, you may not have seen the results you were looking for.
My approach to therapy for anxiety has the potential to make a meaningful difference in your life. By learning to become more aware of your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, you can slow down and adjust your stress response.
Anxiety Creates A Lot Of Noise And Commotion, Distracting Us From What Really Matters
Anxiety is a normal part of being human. Our brains are built to seek patterns and solve problems, and anxiety is the body’s biological alarm that is designed to keep us safe. When confronted with a problem, our brains work overtime to develop a suitable solution—but sometimes, this takes time. Even if we rationally understand we won’t have an answer immediately, our brains will latch onto that problem and keep us from doing anything else, including sleeping, until the problem is resolved.
I often conceptualize the brain’s anxiety patterns as a juggler with too many balls in the air. We want to be sure of each ball’s trajectory, but keeping our eyes on everything at once is impossible. As soon as the first ball gets dropped, the issue is likely to snowball until we aren’t keeping anything in the air.
Where Does Anxiety Come From?
Worrying is a behavior that is modeled to us throughout our lives, especially as children. We pick up on certain expectations created by parents, teachers, and other influential adults, forcing us to juggle a lot from a young age. Add this to a culture that is driven by success and productivity, and our worries intensify as we internalize the message that failure is not an option.
Many of us are taught that we will succeed if, and only if, we work hard enough. This “if/then” thinking puts us in a bind and often results in viewing our problems as black-and-white with no room for negotiation. Instead of valuing a balance of work, recreation, and relationships, our success is often defined by how much of ourselves we’ve sacrificed in the process.
A therapist is a consistent, supportive figure who will work with your needs and temperament specifically to reduce the effects that anxiety has had on your life. Through treatment at Inner Voice Counseling, you can clear some of the noise anxiety has created and learn to listen to what you really want.
Therapy For Anxiety At Inner Voice Counseling
The counseling process is tailored to address your unique anxiety symptoms and goals for treatment. Using your presenting concerns as a guide in therapy, we will uncover the root of your worries, explore new coping strategies, and arm you with a stronger understanding of how to manage your anxiety in an effective, lasting way.
My Approach To Anxiety Treatment
As a therapist, I don’t view my job as “fixing” clients—rather, I follow their lead in the process of decoding what their anxiety is telling them. Sometimes all it takes is voicing your experience to an outside observer to help you gain perspective on your situation. Anxiety treatment is an exercise in following your unique moral compass and charting new territory together.
Mindfulness is essential to this process. Exercises like breathing techniques and visualizations allow you to slow down emotional reactions so that you can modify your behaviors and respond accordingly. By learning to become a nonjudgmental observer of your experiences, you can find direction, experience newfound control over your emotions, and finally escape the spinning momentum of your thought process. While often considered a spiritual practice, mindfulness is actually quite secular and practical.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is another tool we will use in anxiety treatment. ACT helps clients understand the relationship between thinking behaviors and outcomes. With the insights you gain using ACT and Mindfulness, you can see how certain coping mechanisms are either helping or hindering the healing process.
There are a lot of meaningful, actionable steps we can take together to reduce the amount of anxiety you feel on a daily basis. As you begin practicing new, healthier strategies, you can chart a path to a much more manageable experience where sleep is better and nagging worries are minimal or eradicated entirely. Even if one of your goals is to taper down or go off medication, therapeutic treatment can help you accomplish that. Together in therapy for anxiety, we can develop a plan that fits your life.
Perhaps You’re Not Sure If Therapy Can Help You…
Will I need to be in anxiety treatment for the rest of my life?
Absolutely not! Counseling will probably take several weeks of committed work, but as you become increasingly resourced with new tactics and strategies, you will likely feel more in control of your emotions and stress level. Ideally, we will begin with weekly sessions (if that works with your budget and schedule) but eventually taper down to biweekly or monthly sessions.
Do I need to stay on anxiety medication even if I attend therapy?
The answer to this question depends on many factors, including your medical history and the severity of your condition. As a therapist who is not licensed to prescribe or adjust medications, I will ultimately leave that discussion up to you and your doctor.
That said, counseling can certainly be a valuable tool in the tapering process. By building your skills in coping and emotional resilience, you will be able to handle stressors more effectively and not necessarily with the aid of medication.
Mindfulness sounds like a spiritual practice, and I am looking for evidence-based anxiety therapy.
Though mindfulness has roots in Eastern philosophies, today’s application of mindfulness is secular and evidence-based. Rather than being a therapy itself, mindfulness is a tool that supports the therapeutic process by teaching you how to be aware of your thoughts and feelings. Research shows that mindfulness can be extremely useful in the treatment of anxiety disorders.
I can’t afford therapy.
As a therapist, I am committed to providing effective, affordable anxiety treatment to the women I work with. I keep a set number of openings for clients who require treatment at a reduced cost, and I will put you on a waiting list if those have filled up for the time being. It typically doesn’t take very long for a reduced rate opening to become available.
You Can Learn To View Yourself And Your Worries Differently
If you are tired of living with the noise of anxiety, therapy through Inner Voice Counseling can quiet the worries to make room for new, affirming experiences. To schedule an appointment or find out more about how I can help, contact me. Both in-person and virtual sessions are available.
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