🌿 Understanding Anxiety

Anxiety can show up in many ways, some obvious, others more subtle. You might recognize it in your thoughts, sleep patterns, or physical health. It can be persistent, exhausting, and difficult to explain. But you’re not alone—and therapy can help.

Difficulty relaxing

Insomnia, bad dreams, early waking

Avoidance of people, places, things

Headaches, gastro issues, change in appetite

A sense of dread

Low concentration or focus

Irritability, anger. rage

Self criticism

Anxiety is deeply uncomfortable—an internal alarm or signal we can be hard  to turn down. The precise trigger of anxiety can be hard to see. But unlike people, places and things that we don’t have control over, we can get control of our internal reactions to stressors.

Therapy helps by talking about it, in order to understand more about it.  In the process your anxiety can be harnessed, tamed so that you can come to gain greater control over it.

Moderate to high anxiety gets our attention. But when it strong and goes on too long or often, it overwhelms our mental, emotional and physical coping.  Attending to an alarm in ones head too often can take a toll on thinking, learning and decision making. It also can throw a wedge between you and your relationships, opportunities and your capacity for joy.

Over time, this avoidance reinforces the anxiety. It becomes a loop. Therapy helps interrupt that cycle by creating space to explore your reactions and reconnect with clarity, self-trust, and choice.

Anxiety is one of the most common mental health concerns, affecting millions of people every year. You are not weak or broken for feeling overwhelmed—you’re human.

While medication can offer symptom relief, therapy helps build lasting internal tools and understanding. Together, we can explore your unique experience and develop ways of responding that work for you.

Not all anxiety is harmful. “Good” anxiety helps us prepare for big moments—giving a talk, making a change, starting something new.

Harmful anxiety can lead to hiding, avoidance and inhibition.  It shrinks life limits our range of motion, movement, growth and change. Therapy for anxiety is a process to:

• Understand how your anxiety functions

• Identify and transform avoidant patterns

• Support a shift from fear to forward movement

Chronic anxiety can begin in childhood experiences when dependency needs are greatest. Therapy supports you to explore the roots to anxiety, not to dwell on the past, but in order to provide care and free you to live in the present.  Resolving and working through past experience allows room for new way, different choices and greater self-trust.

Anxiety doesn’t have to run your life. With warmth, reflection, and a steady therapeutic relationship,  it’s possible to gain control over anxiety.

Please Note: This is a fictional example for illustration purposes only.

A bright accomplished woman sought help after she began noticing how difficult it was for her to grow and sustain a romantic relationship. In the process of her therapy, it became clearer to her how her close relationship to her father in childhood caused her distress. Her mother suffered a depression and it seemed to play a role in her father becoming emotionally distant from her mother. In her adolescence she recalled being devastated when her parents divorced.

Though she consciously knew she wasn’t responsible for her parents divorce, there remained a hidden belief that she caused it.  This underlying guilt that remained unresolved in her, influenced the quality of her adult romantic relationships. Each time a romantic relationship grew close she’d have a spike of anxiety which would cause her to push love away.

Through therapy, her relationship patterns could be explored and worked through, so her anxiety diminished and she could tolerate closeness and sustain the romantic relationship she wanted.

If you’re ready to take the first step toward working with your anxiety in a new way, I offer a free 20-minute consultation.

Call 415-820-3930 to schedule. I typically return messages the same day or the next business day. I look forward to connecting with you.