Anxiety Therapy
Is Fearful Thinking Impacting Your Ability To Feel Confident In Your Choices?
Have you identified as a perfectionist who feels uncomfortable delegating tasks to others? Do elements like apprehension, urgency, or fear seem to drive your decisions? Is anxious thinking leading to self-criticism or impatience with yourself and others?
You may feel so distracted by various stressors, that you are unable to focus on your relationships or the things that bring you joy. Or perhaps your anxiety is leading to an increase in self-doubt because you lack confidence in yourself and your decisions.
In addition to emotional and relational consequences, anxiety can have physical ones. Shortness of breath, intense discomfort, and even the onset of panic attacks have the potential to interrupt your daily life. In fact, anxiety has such a tremendous impact on physical health, that it can often act as a predictor for numerous medical conditions, including irritable bowel syndrome, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease.
The fact is that anxiety knows no bounds and creates a cycle of fearful thinking. More often than not, anxiety revolves around something in the future that creates a feeling of uncertainty—something that might happen in five seconds, five days, or five years. However, therapy can allow you to process and reduce anxiety so that you may begin to find the full extent of satisfaction in yourself and your life.
The Desire For Self-Improvement Can Often Result In Anxious Thinking
Anxiety and stress go hand in hand, and all of us will encounter both during the course of our lives. While stress-coping mechanisms will vary from person to person, we all face disappointments, upsets, and sometimes traumas that must be reconciled. To use the instance of the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, most of us have been presented with a fear or a worry that has likely resulted in anxious thinking. This example is just one of many that demonstrates how both collective and individual anxieties worsen the cycles of self-doubt and distress that keep us from achieving peace of mind.
Even during the most harmonious of times, we are subject to the turmoil caused by anxiety. When we’re struggling to juggle the demands of a stressful job or a busy family life, it is easy for us to criticize ourselves for any deficits and end up working overtime to perfect perceived blunders. This inevitably creates a damaging need for perfection in ourself, an unhealthy competition with others, and a pressing sense of urgency that makes it nearly impossible to enjoy life. And even when we do make strides or accomplish goals, the voice of anxiety remains, telling us to do more.
If you identify as this kind of success-driven or high achieving person, you may feel as though you should be able to navigate your anxiety alone and rely on yourself entirely to problem-solve. Yet it is not a sign of failure or a flaw to recognize that you are too deep in your anxious thinking to see clearly. In fact, you are likely to find more success in the long term if you can cope with and manage stress before you get swept up in the current of anxiety.
Let me help you find the clarity and relief that you seek.
Treatment For Anxiety Can Help You To Manage Stress
Therapy will give you a chance to gain perspective and insight into what your anxiety is telling you. While it may be presenting with what seem like surface-level symptoms, your anxiety is likely an indicator of deeper, unresolved issues.
The mechanisms you have used to cope in the past and the ways in which you were conditioned to handle stress can provide really helpful information about how your anxiety works and the effect it has on you. Using those insights and bringing me up to speed on what stressors you currently face will help me to develop a tailored and emotionally focused treatment plan to tackle your anxiety.
Together, we will strategize mechanisms for decompressing and recovering from stress. Whether it’s engaging in more practice of mindful behaviors—like using meditation, yoga, or other means—or working to determine what triggers your anxiety, I will help you to learn how to live a more balanced life. We will create goals for therapy and check in consistently throughout the process to determine what techniques are effective and how they can be applied beyond the context of the therapeutic setting.
In understanding how you respond to stress you will gain a better understanding of how to cope with it as well. Using a combination of emotionally focused therapy and other behavioral methods, we will work to get you the mental, emotional, and physical results you seek in finding relief from your anxiety.
With counseling, you will gain more clarity about how you are responding to your surroundings, how you are interacting with others, and what is happening internally that is contributing to your sense of unease. During our sessions, you will be empowered to locate the control in your life and use that control to reduce stress rather than exacerbate it. And therapy is the ideal setting in which to gain objective feedback from a person whose only intention and investment is to help you achieve your goals.
Feelings of overwhelm can make the prospect of confronting your anxiety too much to bear, but I assure you that by simply considering treatment you are already making progress. And by the time you step into my office, you will be ready to begin the process of transformation and newfound self-awareness.
I know from both my profession and my personal life that there is always room for hope. As long as you are motivated and willing to make meaningful change in your life, anything is possible!
You may be considering counseling for anxiety but still have some questions…
I am not used to going to others for help. How can my anxiety possibly get better if I’m not capable of helping myself?
People hire professionals for all sorts of things, and there is no stigma around wanting to improve yourself. Therapy offers the objective point-of-view of an expert who can help you to find clarity and relief from your anxiety. Having that outside perspective can also help you to gain the self-awareness and self-understanding you need to feel better and more functional in your life.
I am worried that treatment for anxiety will only make me feel worse.
In allowing yourself to really feel the depth of your feelings, you are creating the space you need to explore and process your anxiety so that you can better manage your stress in the long term. In fact, the more you repress or push away your feelings, the more your anxiety will persist and cause problems. But even beginning the process of treatment will help those urgent feelings to subside, and you might find that it doesn’t take as much effort as you think to confront your anxiety and relieve yourself of it.
How long will the process of anxiety treatment take?
The process of treatment will vary from person to person and is dependent on the severity of your anxiety. Emotionally focused therapy can take anywhere from 16 to 20 sessions, although my treatment plan is always tailored to fit the needs of each individual client. I assure you I am invested in your success and in achieving effective solutions to help you manage your anxiety in the long term, extending beyond our time together.
Newfound Confidence And Self-Awareness Are Within Your Reach
If worry and fear are dictating your life and impacting your ability to feel confident in your decisions, anxiety treatment can help. To schedule a session, please call (860) 906-7062 today.
Have Any Questions? Send A Message Below!