Anxiety Therapy
Overthinking everything, feeling panic creep up unexpectedly, or experiencing a sense of doom?
Anxiety shows up in different ways for different people.
Sometimes we may notice it in our mind as random thoughts, worry, or stress. Other times our body has an overwhelming response – hot flashes, sweaty palms, racing heart.
When anxiety takes over your days, hijacks you with what-ifs, has you expecting the worst-case scenario and leaves you feeling like you aren’t enough, it’s time for a change.
Struggling with anxiety can make you terrified to connect to others, hyper-aware of what others are thinking or doing, and create comparisons with everyone around you. It’s exhausting.
The Fight-or-Flight Reaction
Anxiety turns into fight-or-flight in the brain. Many of us have sensitive fight-or-flight triggers due to past trauma, adversity, anxious family members, etc. Your therapist will teach you how to move out of fight-or-flight and into a more calm and settled place so you can deal with whatever is in the here and now.
We understand that being anxious is not just something you “stop worrying about.” It is much deeper than that. With your Empowerment Within therapist, you’ll be in a space where you are heard, seen, and validated. You deserve a person sitting across from you who knows how to support you in not only coping with your anxiety but decreasing it.
Anxiety Diagnoses
Anxiety therapy can lead to a diagnosis and sometimes doesn’t require one. Some common diagnoses are:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) – Excessive worry and anxiety about everyday events and activities.
Panic Disorder – Sudden and unexpected panic attacks that cause physical symptoms, such as rapid heartbeat, sweating, and shaking.
Social Anxiety Disorder – Intense fear and anxiety in social situations.
Specific Phobias – Intense fear and anxiety related to a specific object or situation, such as heights, spiders, or flying.
Therapy for Anxiety Involves Two Steps
Step 1: Learning how to cope and calm the body when we are feeling anxious. When we get stuck in our head when anxious, it makes our anxiety worse. When we learn to calm the body, the mind follows.
Step 2: Digging into the roots of your anxiety. We often find that direct and indirect messaging that we were given as a child directly impacts how safe we feel in the world. If we didn’t learn about emotions and were told we were too much or too sensitive we can easily be put on edge. Fearing that others are judging us, or seeing many things as unsafe. Digging into the roots is what helps anxiety lessen on a day-to-day basis.
Sometimes our parents are not emotionally able to support our sensitivity. We feel pressure to perform growing up whether that was in sports or academics, or even taking in societal conditioning of who you are “supposed” to be can create these roots. You do not need to know what the roots are, this is a big part of the exploration in therapy.
When you work on both steps of your treatment, you will get relief faster by knowing how to manage your anxiety on a day-to-day basis and your baseline of constant anxiety or anxiety hijacking decreases.
