Anxiety Therapy

You can get so used to it that you stop recognizing it for what it is. It shows up as worry that keeps you from the decisions you know you want to make, or as fear in certain situations, palms sweaty, heart racing, a mind that won’t stop or one that goes blank. Sometimes it’s the tightness in your chest every time you get in the car because the drivers out there feel so dangerous, and you’ve carried that so long you never named it. Then sometimes it gets loud enough that you can’t ignore it, a panic attack, or not being able to get to work because the symptoms are so intense.

Anxiety therapy is where you learn to do it differently. It works over video or in person and it usually moves along two tracks at once. One track contains the practical tools for the moment the symptoms hit. The other goes deeper, tracing the anxiety back to where it started.

1. Worry thoughts that keep them stuck on decisions
2. Heart racing with shortness of breath, or chest tightness in specific situations
3. Panic attacks that come out of nowhere
4. Driving anxiety after a bad accident
5. Unnaturally strong fears of something specific: people, animals, leaving home, death
6. Trouble getting to work, or getting through a day, because the symptoms are that intense
7. Anxiety they’ve lived with so long it just feels like who they are
8. If you’re not sure it’s bad enough to bother with, that’s worth a conversation on its own. Most people wait longer than they needed to.

And there’s no set number of sessions. It usually looks something like this:

We start with a free consult. We talk, you get a feel for us, and you decide whether there’s a real risk, no commitment, nobody sizing you up.

Then we help you get your footing. First, learning tools you can use in the moment. When you notice the shortness of breath or the tightness, you recognize that as anxiety and you have a choice, because now you have something that brings it back down before it climbs. Breathing, redirecting the thought, something soothing. Going to the root.

For a lot of people, real relief comes from looking at what started this in the first place. Trace it back and there are often core experiences that shaped the belief and the feeling in your body. Ease the impact of what happened earlier and the anxiety today can drop, sometimes disappear, so you’re not managing it every hour of every day.

Then we help build skills around living it forward. Think of a weed. Spray the top and it grows back, because the roots are still there, and that’s what leaning on skills alone can feel like. Pull it up by the root and it doesn’t come back the same way. You might still remember it was there. It’s a whole lot easier to live with.

Sessions run in person or by telehealth.

We all live with some, the world’s a scary place. Recovery is anxiety moving out of the driver’s seat. You might get a blip here and there, but you’re not working at it all the time.

Take someone with severe driving anxiety, which is common. We trace it back, sometimes with EMDR, to a bad accident in high school and another in college, and here they are in their thirties, terrified to drive. We process those earlier accidents so they settle fully in the brain and stop firing that fear in the body. Now this person drives without white-knuckling it. They might still clock a dangerous intersection and watch that corner. It isn’t happening all over again. That kind of recovery is real, and it happens more often than people think.

Several of our clinicians work this way, trained in EMDR specifically because of how quickly it can lift the weight people carry.