Skilled Therapy Support for Anxiety Management
Are you feeling worried all the time? Do you feel on edge or easily agitated? Have you had a panic attacks in the past? Do you feel a restlessness that often makes it hard to sleep? According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, approximately 18.1% of adults are affected by anxiety disorders per year. While the ADAA considers anxiety to be highly treatable, they report that less than 40% of folks who may benefit from treatment actually pursue it.
Anxiety is a very common issue. There is no reason to be ashamed if you find yourself having chronic anxiety, worry, or panic attacks. In my approach to therapy I help clients develop insight into the emotional processes that often contribute to anxiety. I find that often, folk’s anxiety improves by learning some very easy-to-learn skills and having the space to talk it out in therapy.
How I Work With Anxiety
Although different from depression, anxiety has some overlapping qualities. In treating anxiety, I like to frame therapy as a process that will help you develop skills in order to manage anxiety. Our goal is to help you feel confident that you will be able to manage your anxiety as you learn new skills and practice them in and outside of therapy. In many cases this confidence can actually reduce your anxiety over time.
Working with anxiety can be paradoxical. In order to help reduce its intensity, we actually need to accept it, be curious with it. Studies demonstrate that rejecting anxiety actually makes it worse. In trying to avoid the anxiety itself, we continue to tag both the anxiety and the situation triggering it as threatening. Cumulatively, this actually reduces our tolerance for this feeling state and amplifies it’s intensity.
I like to give clients the analogy of Pressure = Force x Area. I am not a scientist that studies physics, but I think this is a helpful analogy for working with anxiety. Here, the force is the actual felt-experience of anxiety, what clinically we call “affect.” The area is the amount of space we can allow this felt-experience to occupy in our bodies (not speaking of the amount of time we ruminate on something). The less space we can give to the embodied experience, the more it shows up like a pressure on our nervous system. The more pressure, the more tense we get. The more tense, the more likely we are to ruminate - because part of us is trying to get us out of a perceived threat.
When we can’t metabolize that psychophysical experience, we just remain stuck in repeating patterns of tension, rumination, fear. Suppressing the anxiety only prolongs this pattern.
I do not think it is realistic for most people to live a life completely free anxiety. It is part of our survival system, our evolutionary heritage, and often serves as an important messenger. Anxiety let’s us know what other emotions we might be feeling, and what else we might be needing to do in order to take care of ourselves.
Changing our relationship to anxiety itself, we can develop more tolerance of it and it simply will bother us less. We can know how to respond to it, cultivate softness in our nervous system. We can learn to understand it as a signal sometimes calling us to action, sometimes letting us know we need support.
This is very doable in the process of therapy. It takes time and effort, however anxiety is something that is very treatable and typically responds well to treatment.
Do I Really Need Therapy For Anxiety?
If your anxiety is impacting your ability to live the life you want to live, then it is highly likely you could benefit from therapy. It’s possible that you can learn to manage your anxiety without therapy, however having the guidance of a trained professional can help you make progress that is hard to make on our own.
I May Need Help, But Therapy Is Expensive…
I may be biased, but in my book learning the skills to be more at ease, happier, and to experience more emotional well-being are worth it. Trust me, I get it. A huge part of being a therapist (to me) is that I have also received a substantial amount of therapy for myself. I know the cost may seem restrictive, however I might ask you to think about the big picture— and your long-term well-being. What might your future self say about your investment? Please contact me below if you have any questions about this.
How Long Will This Take?
As a therapist it would that be unethical for me to guarantee anything, and the truth is each case is different. In my experience we should know within the first few months or so if therapy is helping for those who experience anxiety on the milder end. Folks with longer standing or more pervasive anxiety issues may need more time in therapy. Think of it like this: our mental patterns are active most of every day. The more often we experience one pattern, the more likely it is to repeat. So in order to learn new patterns and start to undo old ones, we need to repeat the new patterns consistently over time in order to achieve sustainable change.
This is part of why it is so important to set concrete goals at the beginning of therapy. This is what helps us determine your progress. I will monitor your progress with you and check in about what seems to be working best as we go along. Whether it is with me, or another therapist, please know that HELP IS AVAILABLE! Things can get better.