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  • Anxiety Treatment

    Do You Feel Too Stressed To Control Your Emotions?

    Are you struggling with obsessive thoughts, constant stress, or panic attacks? Do you feel like you’re always bracing yourself for something bad to happen? Maybe it seems as if the world is out to get you or like your life could fall apart at any moment. Perhaps merely socializing makes you anxious, and you have trouble connecting with others.

    When you’re dealing with anxiety, it can seem like you’re not in control of your own emotions. Your brain may feel like it’s moving at a thousand miles per hour, and no matter how hard you try, you’re too overwhelmed to slow it down. Physical symptoms such loss of breath, a racing heartbeat, and nausea are all very common. As a result of your anxiety, you may feel like the odd one out among your friends. When everyone else is having a good time, you may end up withdrawing into yourself or refusing to go out.

    Deep down, you probably wish you could control your emotions so that they don’t dominate your life. If this is the case, I encourage you to connect with us. By working together, we can help you correct negative thought patterns and overcome the stressors inhibiting your potential for growth.

    Anxiety Is The Most Common Mental Health Issue In The United States

    We’ve all experienced fear in our lives. In many ways, fear helps us regulate our own safety. It’s part of the evolutionary survival mechanism of fight-flight-or-freeze, designed to protect us from harm. Occasionally, however, fear becomes so dominant that it impacts nearly every decision we make. When this happens, it means we’re experiencing anxiety.

    Anxiety is the most common mental health issue in the United States. Over 30 percent of adults have experienced an anxiety disorder at some point in their lives. Although the condition is considered highly treatable, just 36.9 percent of people who need treatment receive it. This lack of support only compounds the stress that anxiety sufferers already deal with.

    Oftentimes, anxiety originates from experiencing an event that gets stored in the brain in a non-adaptive way. As a result, this causes the brain to associate certain situations with an expected negative outcome. In other words, since the brain couldn’t process the initial event in a healthy way, it continues to experience anxiety when a similar event crops up. In this way, anxiety locks the brain into a repetitive cycle of fear. Since so many people today live in a high-stress, anxiety-saturated environment, it’s hard for them to overcome this cycle on their own.

    The brain is capable of profound healing, and it’s possible to change the way it processes information, but it isn’t always possible alone. With help and support, you can learn to recognize the patterns that lead to anxiety and keep them from dominating your life.

    Anxiety Treatment Can Empower You To Face The Future With Ease And Confidence

    When you’re dealing with anxiety, you may experience intrusive thoughts that are embarrassing to talk about. In anxiety counseling, you have the chance to share your thoughts without any fear of judgment. This is a place where you can think out loud and feel validated for your suffering. Here, you have a chance to explore the feelings, sensations, and memories driving your anxiety with someone who is deeply sensitive to your needs.

    The intake process is very straightforward. In the beginning, we will review your needs, schedule, and finances and match you with the therapist we feel would be the best fit. We always like to leave a door open for other opportunities, however—if you feel like you’re not connecting with your therapist, we would be happy to assign you to a different one from our staff. For teenagers, we offer a teen support group program where they can meet like-minded peers who are coping with anxiety.

    Our practice takes a very strengths-based, holistically-minded approach to anxiety therapy. We believe that true healing only comes about by incorporating both the body and mind into the therapeutic process. To that end, we like to utilize breathing techniques, meditation, and any other grounding skills you find helpful. If your anxiety stems from trauma, these calming strategies can help you reach a more stable state of mind. When you are more grounded, you will be more equipped to desensitize painful memories and stay rooted in the present when they resurface.

    While each of our therapists brings a different approach to sessions, all of us draw heavily from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. (CBT). At its core, CBT aims to help you recognize thought patterns that provoke harmful physiological responses. Once you know how your thoughts cause emotional stress, you can gain control of your reactions and keep anxiety from dominating your life. CBT is also an effective form of panic attack treatment, since it helps you look for bodily patterns that cause anxiety, such as sweaty palms or a faster heartbeat.

    Many of our therapists also specialize in Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy. This is an approach for clients with trauma. Many people look at trauma as something catastrophic and immense, but there is often a difference between how you experienced an event versus how it actually happened. EMDR talks about trauma through the lens of both “Big T” trauma and “Little t” trauma, working on desensitizing painful memories so that you don’t have to live with anxiety anymore. Whereas other modes of treatment aim to help you merely cope with trauma, EMDR therapy seeks to help you fully heal. The goal is to help you process your memories in a healthy and adaptive way, so that you’re able to experience them without the same painful emotional impact as before. Once the memory is desensitized, the stressors associated with it won’t affect you as much.

    Anxiety can be debilitating, but it is also highly treatable. There are so many different evidence-based approaches available that I am confident we can help you. Whether your goal is to cope or heal, we want to give you the strength to challenge negative thought patterns and face the future with more ease and confidence.

    You may have some questions about anxiety treatment…

    I cannot see myself ever feeling differently. This is how I’ve been all my life.

    If I asked you to start brushing your teeth using the opposite hand of the one you normally use, it would take a lot of getting used to. Practicing a different way of doing something can be challenging, but when it is difficult, it’s a sign that change is happening. Sometimes, merely understanding where negative thought patterns come from can lead to serious growth in your life. Change isn’t always rocket science, and anyone is capable of it. After all, most people surprise themselves with their own ability to adapt.

    How can meditating or deep breathing change the way I think?

    When your brain is overloaded with fear, it becomes difficult to process information in an adaptive way. Anxiety makes the nervous system work faster than normal, which makes it hard to concentrate. By learning skills to regulate your brain physiologically, you can begin to think more clearly and rationally. The mind and body are intimately connected. This is why calming your body helps you stay emotionally balanced.

    If I do not feel anxious, I won’t be prepared when something bad happens.

    Fear has a protective function, but when it starts to control your life, it causes you to miss opportunities for growth. The key is to find the right balance. By learning skills to control your emotions, you can keep painful emotions from dictating how you live. The point is not to eradicate all fear, but simply to overcome the stressors that have kept you from growing as a person.

    Learn To Control Your Anxiety And Keep it From Controlling You

    If you feel like your life is dominated by a constant flood of emotions that you can’t stop no matter how hard you try, we encourage you to contact us. We have a vast array of treatment possibilities for anxiety and we are confident that we can help you. To get started, you can email us or call us at 561-571-1557 for a free, 10- to 15-minute phone consultation.

    Right now, because of COVID-19, all our anxiety treatment sessions are online or via phone.