Anxiety Treatment
Is Chronic Anxiety Impacting Your Quality Of Life?
Do you struggle with an overwhelming sense of dread?
Are you often fearful of social situations, new experiences, or activities that you used to enjoy?
Have the expectations you’re trying to reach simply become too much?
Anxiety is uncomfortable to live with. When looming worries and obsessive thoughts take over, our relationships, productivity, and everyday experience of life suffer. And though you may believe that nothing is “wrong” on the surface or that your successes don’t afford room for anxiety, you’re nevertheless struggling to feel at peace.
What Is Your Experience?
Though generally characterized by overwhelming, obsessive, or catastrophic thinking patterns, there are many different symptoms and experiences of anxiety. Physical and cognitive signs of anxiety might include:
Nausea
Chest discomfort
Sweating or feeling hot
Trouble concentrating or remembering conversations
Difficulty sleeping or sleeping too much
These symptoms will likely impact daily tasks, work performance, and relationships. Feeling preoccupied with worry and physical discomfort, social engagements and/or otherwise fun activities lose their appeal. In fact, social anxiety is a very common experience, especially following the isolation of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In addition to social anxiety, there are other more specific anxiety disorders, including:
Phobias – extreme fear of a particular object or situation
Panic attack disorder – ongoing physical episodes of intense fear
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) – patterns of unwanted thoughts that often lead to repetitive (compulsive) behaviors
Generalized anxiety affects all of us at some point or another, but these disorders—and any experience in which chronic anxiety impacts our quality of life—can only be managed with treatment.
As a psychotherapist and psychiatric nurse practitioner, I am passionate about helping patients explore, understand, and improve their mental health. In ongoing therapeutic treatment, we will work together to figure out what your anxiety comes from and solutions for managing it.
But Where Does Anxiety Originate?
While uncomfortable and often disruptive, anxiety is part of life. In fact, anxiety is part of our survival—without it, it would be harder to stay alert, perceive threats, or maintain motivation. But sometimes, our stress response goes haywire, often exacerbated by genetic and environmental factors.
For example, we are constantly inundated by comparisons. Between advertising, social media, and the fitness and fashion industries, among others, we are often given the message that we need to strive for more. This naturally impacts our relationship with ourselves and others, as we become preoccupied with reaching the standard of what it means to be accomplished, attractive, well-rounded—the “perfect” partner, parent, or friend.
So many of our anxieties stem from a relational place. When emotional injuries take place, we understand that healing needs to take place within a specific relationship. Developing a reparative, trusted relationship with a therapist is a meaningful opportunity to reduce anxiety in our relationships and other areas of life.
Anxiety Treatment Honors Your Unique Experience
With all of the responsibilities and expectations that life throws at you, you probably don’t get much time each week to get vulnerable and take up space. In therapy, the focus is on you so that you can explore and speak freely about the things in your life that are hard to discuss with others. It is my aim to help you feel seen, heard, and understood during our time together.
I welcome adults of all genders, professions, and cultural backgrounds. Whether you are struggling with generalized anxiety or more specific symptoms related to OCD, panic attacks, and ADHD, treatment can be a pathway to life-changing relief.
What To Expect
Your first treatment session will be a comprehensive psychiatric evaluation that will help me better understand your history, goals, and specific anxiety symptoms. Because a trusted, open clinician-patient relationship is essential to your healing, I view our early sessions as an opportunity to build rapport and get a sense of your needs. As such, the psychiatric evaluation is considered a consultation—if my treatment approach does not meet your needs or if you would benefit from working with another clinician, I will help you determine next steps to ensure you receive the most tailored care possible.
If we continue with ongoing anxiety treatment, you can expect to devote time in therapy exploring and identifying the patterns that negatively impact you. By exploring your temperament and early life experiences, we can unlock answers to your suffering. And as we shed light on root causes, true healing and transformation take place.
I take a psychodynamic approach to anxiety treatment, which means that we’ll dig deep to consider how certain thoughts, feelings, and behaviors outside of your awareness may be contributing to your stress. In addition, I think early relationship experiences are very valuable for understanding core issues. However, counseling is always individualized to meet the needs of each client. Regardless of the approach used, I want to empower you to guide our time together.
It’s likely you will find that by talking about your fears and worries in therapy, your anxiety will loosen its grip on your daily life. The process of counseling allows you to explore what is beneath your anxiety so that you can develop lasting solutions for reducing triggers and the overall distress you feel.
Anxiety Treatment And Medication
As a nurse practitioner, I am licensed to prescribe medication. Working together, we can figure out if anxiety medication would be a beneficial addition to your treatment, though I do require ongoing counseling if medication is prescribed (whether with me or another therapist). Medication is not always the best option for everyone, however, and I will not push you towards a prescription if you don’t want one.
No matter your experience of anxiety, there is hope for relief. Even if you’ve had trouble managing your symptoms for months, years, or most of your life, I am confident that there is a unique solution for your unique situation. With the skills, perspectives, and tools you develop in anxiety treatment, radical transformation is possible.
Common Concerns And Misconceptions About Therapy
It’s not worth the time and money of anxiety treatment—I can just improve daily habits like diet and sleep hygiene.
While things like improved diet and exercise, better sleep hygiene, and more time spent on enriching activities are encouraged alongside anxiety treatment, the degree of improvement in anxiety is a fraction of what is achieved through therapy. Counseling with a highly trained mental health clinician offers a meaningful opportunity to get to the core of your symptoms so that you can manage anxiety in a lasting, sustainable way. This transformation takes time, and a therapist can provide ongoing support, empowerment, and accountability.
If cost is a concern, think about it this way: what is the cost of being plagued by anxiety symptoms most—if not all—of the time? Working inside a safe, therapeutic relationship can bring about dramatic change and offer you lifelong perspectives to take with you long after the treatment period.
My family thinks that I just need to “get over” my anxiety and that treatment isn’t for people with my experience.
The mental health stigma is pervasive, so this is a common concern I receive from prospective patients. Keep in mind that your family is not in your mind and body, enduring all of the suffering that has led you to seek help. Because they may have their own way of perceiving and managing their mental health, they may not fully understand what would cause you to need help—and that’s okay.
Not everyone has to understand, but at least one person does. This is where anxiety treatment begins: inside of a healing therapeutic relationship that will allow you to feel understood, accepted, and supported.
I don’t have panic attack disorder or severe trauma—I am not a good candidate for anxiety treatment.
Just because you don’t have panic attacks or severe trauma, it doesn’t mean that your anxiety should be overlooked. In fact, the vast majority of my patients who struggle with debilitating anxiety don’t suffer from panic attacks.
Trauma exists on a spectrum, which means that traumatic experiences come in many forms beyond those considered dangerous or life-threatening. Interpersonal experiences like a lack of healthy attachment in childhood are incredibly common, often resulting in anxiety symptoms later in life. Whatever your experience of anxiety is, I welcome you to therapy with openness and investment in your healing.
You Can Adjust Your Relationship With Your Thoughts And Fears
Using a tailored combination of skills, therapeutic interventions, and medication (when applicable), treatment helps you to heal the wounds that cause your anxiety so you feel less anxious or even rarely anxious. Please call (719) 626 – 1338 to schedule a free consultation or find out more about my approach to therapy.