ANXIETY THERAPY
Are You Looking For A Way To Make Peace With Anxiety?
When you’re always in your head, battling intrusive thoughts and negative beliefs about yourself, it doesn’t leave much space for happiness and connection. Instead, you spend all your time worrying and preparing for the worst that could happen. You might be isolating yourself by avoiding situations or activities that could be triggering, leading to loneliness and feeling like you’re missing out.
A harsh inner critic or a general sense of low self-worth may be pushing you to overwork at the expense of your own self-care. As a result, you may feel more agitated, stressed out, and moody, which is straining your relationships and making anxiety therapy look increasingly attractive.
Anxiety Doesn’t Just Affect You On An Emotional Level
It can also have a powerful impact in other areas of your life. Oftentimes, symptoms manifest as:
Racing heart, shaky hands, or upset stomach
Insomnia, stress dreams, or night terrors
Perfectionism and procrastination
Challenges with listening and communication
Difficulty concentrating or making decisions
Embrace inner healing and find relief from anxiety
The truth is that fear and worry can wreak havoc on everything from your career and finances to interpersonal relationships and your physical well-being. By far, the most debilitating and insidious byproduct of anxiety is its tendency to diminish your capacity for living a fulfilled life.
Sarita Redalia Psychotherapy can offer you the unique opportunity to make peace with your anxiety and live your best life. By gaining support to turn the volume down on your inner critic and talk back to negative thoughts, you can feel calmer, more confident, and more fulfilled in your life.
Why Is Anxiety Such A Common Mental Health Issue?
Anxiety is a part of being human and a part of life. A certain amount of anxiety can be useful. For instance, it can motivate you to accomplish certain tasks or change harmful behaviors. There is an adaptive side to anxiety, in that when you are conscious of your fears, you can harness them to take necessary actions like paying your taxes or getting to work on time.
However, we live in tumultuous and uncertain times where that intrinsic survival mechanism can get stuck in overdrive. Modern life is rife with ever-present wars, pandemics, political violence, climate change, and many other uncertainties. These stressors may compel you to run through catastrophic “What if?” scenarios in the hopes of not being blindsided when everything goes to pieces.
Anxiety Is Often Triggered In Response To Unconscious, Negative Thought Patterns
Unfortunately, that means catastrophizing actually creates anxiety instead of guarding against it. Obsessive thoughts about what could happen grow to the point where they become all-consuming and even panic-inducing.
That’s because the brain is constantly on the lookout for danger, which reinforces the negative thought patterns creating anxiety. This pattern can become a vicious cycle where you may start to feel anxious about your own anxiety, which then becomes the proverbial “snake eating its own tail.”
However, anxiety therapy supports you to recognize catastrophic thinking and confront negative thought patterns while asserting more positive beliefs. Instead of fighting it, turning to a specialist teaches you how to work with an anxiety disorder so you can reduce symptoms and live with greater ease.
Therapy Teaches You How To Accept And Work With Your Anxiety
It is important to accept anxiety as a part of life in order to work with it. Rather than trying to dampen anxiety, the key to anxiety treatment is often learning how to embrace uncertainty and “not knowing.” A core tenet of my approach to anxiety therapy is this idea of learning to simply observe and sit with your thoughts and feelings.
Psychotherapy can offer you access to deep reservoirs of empathy that can help you to feel understood and validated, perhaps for the first time. In this way, the therapeutic relationship itself plays a vital role in the treatment of anxiety by encouraging your capacity for self-compassion and self-acceptance.
By providing you with a safe and trusting relationship to explore your history, your thoughts, and your feelings, you gain a unique opportunity to heal past relational wounds that often contribute to anxiety. At the same time, anxiety treatment can provide you with the insight and coping strategies to help you reduce even the most severe symptoms, including panic attacks.
“Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”
— Kahlil Gibran
If Eliminating Anxiety Hasn’t Worked, Maybe It’s Time To Try Something New
My approach to anxiety therapy focuses on illuminating the unconscious mind and its influence on your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. By exploring past experiences, particularly during childhood, together we can bring awareness to the underlying causes of your anxiety.
Examining these early experiences and beliefs can shed light on how they may contribute to your anxiety today. By making the connection between your personal history and your current anxiety, you can grasp the underlying root causes of your anxiety, paving the way for lasting relief.
Perhaps You’re Considering Anxiety Therapy But Still Have Concerns…
I worry that I’ll find myself in anxiety treatment forever.
Although working with a therapist requires a commitment of time, it is my job to unlock the hold anxiety has on you so you don’t need my help any longer. However, as with any kind of healing process, how long it takes to recover is dependent upon your situation, needs, and desires.
You may benefit from a brief time period of a few months working together, or you may prefer the support of a more long-term therapeutic relationship. It’s about finding what works best for you.
How Do My Anxiety Treatment Sessions Work?
When we first meet, I’ll invite you to update me on anything that may have transpired since we initially spoke during our phone consultation. As we talk, I’ll encourage our conversation to unfold organically, taking shape as an expression of the concerns you’re bringing to therapy.
Because I believe that you are the expert on your experience with anxiety, I’ll ask you to share a bit about your history with the condition. We can look at precursors to anxious episodes, physical cues of your anxiety symptoms, and the ways you’ve tried (either successfully or unsuccessfully) to find relief. Then, we can explore treatment options and define any benchmarks for measuring your progress.
How Does Therapy Change Your Relationship With Anxiety?
I believe that it is impossible to be both a witness to and the subject of your anxiety, which means you can start to free yourself from the tyranny of fear by learning to observe it. To help bring awareness to your thoughts and feelings without reacting to them, I utilize a combination of anxiety treatment methods:
Mindfulness for Anxiety can help you get in touch with your inner witness and cultivate some detachment from your thoughts. This can support you to notice your thoughts and make conscious decisions about how to respond to those that cause anxiety. Mindfulness also supports you to notice when you’re catastrophizing in the face of uncertainty. Learning to embrace “not knowing” is a much more adaptive response to life’s uncertainties.
Techniques from Somatic Therapy for Anxiety can teach you to recognize physical cues and how anxiety manifests in your body. Becoming conscious of these signals reinforces the understanding of the connection between your body and your emotions. This in turn allows you to respond to anxiety more effectively and ultimately feel more content and at peace.
Journaling can support you to call out catastrophic thinking and precursors to anxiety, helping you understand how your thoughts inform your feelings. Journaling also reinforces observing and tracking your emotional experience. It can help you develop your awareness so as to no longer be controlled by unconscious beliefs and motivations.
What kinds of practical things will we work on in anxiety treatment?
Anxiety therapy involves more than just talking. For instance, we can work on supporting you to engage in regular exercise, improve sleep hygiene, and limit your caffeine, alcohol, and sugar intake. If anxiety derails your appetite, we can look at some more appealing, emotionally grounding, and nutritious food options. We can explore compiling a mental toolbox complete with a mantra, calming visuals, somatic exercises to reduce anxiety, or helpful reminders to support you in navigating anxiety-provoking situations in the future.
What can I do outside of treatment sessions to lessen my anxiety?
You can start by engaging in your life more than in your thoughts. Any activity that gets you out of your head and into your body will also likely help to reduce your anxiety symptoms. Going on a walk, hiking, dancing, working out, swimming, doing yoga, or gardening can all be effective toward this end. Sometimes, simply spending time in nature and changing your outer landscape can help shift your inner landscape, as well.
Let Me Help You Make Peace With Anxiety
If you’re committed to transforming your relationship with anxiety, you can find relief from needless suffering. By collaborating with a skilled anxiety disorder specialist to gain the tools and insight you need, living with a sense of peace, contentedness, and inner calm is within your grasp.
Whether you’re struggling with generalized anxiety, panic attacks, or just too much stress, my relational and mindfulness-informed approach to therapy can offer you hope. Please leave me a confidential message on my office voicemail at: (415) 292-5888 or Contact Me to schedule a free, 20-minute phone consultation to see how anxiety therapy may be able to help you.
BOOK A PHONE CONSULT
If you have questions or would like more information, feel free to contact me to set up a free initial telephone consultation. Please provide your contact information and some times you’d be available for a 20-minute phone conversation. I look forward to hearing from you.
IMPORTANT INFO
You may call my office voicemail 24-hours a day and leave me a confidential message.
I am available to meet with you online or in-person at my Union Street office.
Appointments are generally 50-minutes in length and are scheduled on a weekly basis.
Longer or more frequent sessions are available for more intensive work.
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