Anxiety Therapy
Anxiety is a normal stress response to hard siutations. However, when anxiety takes over our days, continues to hijack us with what if’s, has us catastrophize the worst case scenario and leaves us feeling like we aren’t enough, it’s time for a change. Therapy for anxiety can involve a lot of different things.
When we struggle with anxiety it can make us terrified to connect to other people, hyper aware of what other people are thinking or doing and creates comparisons with everyone all around us. It’s exhausting.
Going to therapy for anxiety sometimes means a diagonsis and sometimes doesn’t require one. Some common diagnosis 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 can involve two steps. Learning how to cope and calm the body when we are feelings 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. The other piece of therapy involves digging into the anxiety. You don’t have to have trauma to have roots of what cause your anxiousness.
Sometimes our parents not emotionally being able to support our sensitivity, feeling 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 cause create these roots. You do not need to know what the roots are, this is a big part of the exploration in therapy.
When we have people work on both pieces of treatment, it means they get relief faster in knowing how to manage their anxiety on a day to day basis and their baseline of constant anxiety or anxiety hijacking decreases.
Anxiety turns on our fight vs flight in our brain. Many of us have sensitive fight or flight triggers due to past trauma, adversity, anxious family members, etc. We teach you how to move out of the 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. You deserve a space where you are heard, seen and validated. You deserve a person sitting across from you that knows how to support you in not only coping with your anxiety but actually decreasing it.
To Read more here are some recent blog posts on Anxiety:
– Art Therapy and Anxiety
– Anxiety & Kids
– Why Avoding Anxiety Doesn’t Work
– Calm Down Quickly