Anxiety Therapy

Are You Tired Of Anxiety Controlling Your Life?

Do you feel like you’re on-edge all the time? Have you experienced difficulty concentrating whenever you’re feeling stressed out or anxious? Is a sense of impending doom getting in the way of living your life with joy, curiosity, and fun?

Living with anxiety can be exhausting. Rather than settling into the present moment, your churning thoughts keep you preoccupied with the past or future. Perhaps you’re often restless or irritable and find it challenging to finish what you start. As much as you try to maintain focus at work, you may find your mind goes blank or your concentration is easily broken by excessive worry.

Maybe you fear new experiences and avoid social situations, preferring instead to withdraw from others. This tendency strains your relationships, diminishing your ability to feel close to people. Sadly, your isolation serves to further fuel your anxiety as you worry about the impact retreating from life is having on you.

You’re Unable To Shake The Physical Symptoms Of Anxiety

Your anxious feelings might manifest in your body, giving way to heart palpitations, sweaty palms, and shortness of breath. At times, you may experience stomach or headaches, muscle tension, tunnel vision, or even panic attacks. You might have difficulty falling—or staying—asleep or disruptions with your appetite. And even though you know these physical symptoms are related to anxiety, you don’t know what to do about them.

What If You Could Learn To Slow Down Your Thoughts And Stop Worrying About Everything?

Fortunately, therapy offers evidence-based treatment that can help you learn how to integrate your mind and body to reduce the symptoms of anxiety. Whether you suffer from panic attacks or social anxiety, overcoming these challenges is possible with proper therapy.

Although Worry Is A Normal Human Response, Too Much Anxiety Can Be Harmful

For most of us, anxiety is a normal response to stressful situations we experience now and then, such as loss or trauma. We may sometimes become anxious when anticipating a challenge or conflict, like taking a test or having a difficult conversation with a loved one.

However, when our worry or fear persists after the stressful event is over, it might indicate we have an anxiety disorder. Anxiety begins to interfere with everyday life once our reaction is no longer the appropriate response to our current circumstances, but, rather, an anxious reaction to something that’s already happened, or what we worry might happen.

Anxiety Therapy Can Help You Integrate Body And Mind

You may have tried to control your anxiety by thinking it away, only to find this approach often made it worse. However, making lasting change requires integrating mind, body, and spirit. Working collaboratively with your therapist, you will examine the current problems you are experiencing and discover the root causes of your anxiety.

Learning solutions to restore your nervous system along with other stress management skills can help improve your day-to-day functioning. Once you understand why you are experiencing anxiety and what you can do about it, you will be empowered to live differently.

What To Expect In Sessions

During your pre-screening, you will be matched with a therapist who will be a good fit based on your specific concerns. At your first session, you will get the opportunity to share what your experience with anxiety has been as well as what your goals for therapy are.

In ongoing sessions, we will examine how experiences from childhood may currently be setting off a chain reaction of anxiety within you. If you experienced trauma, it may have set up your nervous system to be more easily triggered into a hypervigilant state that now has a harder time soothing itself.

In these instances, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) has been shown to heal chronic anxiety and improve the nervous system pathways to seek calmer more grounded ways of processing life's experiences.

How we learn to connect and attach to others throughout our lives can also be a source of our anxiety. Once we identify what your patterns of attachment have been, we can help you learn healthier ways of attaching that no longer trigger anxiety.

The Modalities We Use

In addition to EMDR, we find Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and HeartMath to be particularly effective in treating anxiety. CBT can help change negative thoughts and behaviors that contribute to anxiety. Learning to think differently about your life situations with (CBT) skills can enhance your growth towards more peace and calm and reduce anxiety symptoms.

HeartMath explores the physiological connection between mind and body. Your heart is constantly sending signals to your brain. When these signals are coherent, all is well, but when they become erratic or inconsistent, this disordered pattern can affect cognitive function. Learning to recognize incoherent patterns and regulate your heart rate will help you get back in flow and restore emotional balance. “Evidence-based therapys like HeartMath, have been shown to heal chronic anxiety and improve the nervous system pathways to seek calmer more grounded ways of processing life's experiences.”

Utilizing these skills, you will learn to notice when your anxiety is about to be triggered and be able to intervene with breathing, movement, and other skills to manage your response in the moment. You will also be shown how to prepare for potentially anxiety-provoking future events so you can approach them with greater confidence and ease.

You have suffered in silence long enough. Together with your therapist, you can learn to heal, grow, and enjoy your life in new ways.

But You May Wonder Whether Anxiety Therapy Is Right For You…

I’ve tried therapy before and it didn’t help my anxiety.

Perhaps you’ve had a negative experience in therapy previously, but that doesn’t mean you should give up on the help anxiety therapy offers. The licensed counselors at Coherence Associates believe that good therapy is a collaborative effort—you and your therapist will work together to explore what causes anxiety.

Additionally, the education you receive will help you remain empowered to grow long after therapy. The power to heal from anxiety resides within you, and your therapist will facilitate this healing by utilizing their extensive training and experience.

Isn’t anxiety counseling expensive and time-consuming?

If finding the time for anxiety therapy is a concern, our counselors offer telehealth or a hybrid model of in-person and online treatment. And therapy is often more affordable than you think. In addition to accepting some forms of insurance, we also encourage you to check your out-of-network coverage and potential Health Spending Account (HSA) benefits. Please contact us for more information.

I’m afraid anxiety therapy will make me feel judged.

When we believe that others may judge us as weak or not trying hard enough to overcome anxiety, these thoughts and feelings often prevent us from reaching out for help. However, anxiety is not a matter of weakness—it occurs when your nervous system gets triggered and sets off a chain reaction of symptoms that seemingly take over.

Fortunately, there are evidence-based therapys that can set you free from anxiety. After implementing what they learned in therapy, clients report their anxiety is no longer triggered by previous stressors.

Take The First Step Toward Healing

Learning to love and care for yourself will promote a calmer and more grounded way of living. For more information about anxiety therapy, please call our office at 760-942-8663 to speak to our intake coordinator or visit our contact us page.