ANXIETY THERAPY
Is Anxiety Sabotaging Your Potential And Holding You Back In Life?
Have you been feeling too stressed out to function well at work, in school, and in your relationships? Do you often find yourself:
Caught up in “what if” scenarios and imagining terrible outcomes?
Dwelling on times where you felt like you didn’t fit in?
Feeling panicky, on edge, or unable to manage your emotions?
Anxiety can overwhelm you and affect your physical, mental, and behavioral health. You may experience indecisiveness and have trouble concentrating on important tasks. Perhaps you feel a constant sense of impending doom—as soon as your head hits the pillow each night, the worry cycle begins and you start dreading what will go wrong tomorrow. As a result, maybe you’re thinking it’s time to talk to a therapist who treats anxiety.
The More You Run From Anxiety, The More It Can Overtake You
When anxiety is present, you might find yourself isolating or avoiding certain people and situations that trigger your stress. Maybe you turn to drugs, alcohol, or other unhealthy habits to numb your emotional pain. Yet in the end, all these behaviors do is reinforce the cycle of endless worry—as soon as a new stressor arises, the anxiety starts all over again.
Part of overcoming anxiety means learning to stop seeing it as the enemy. It means learning to deal with anxiety through healthy coping skills instead of trying to numb it or flee from it. This is easier said than done, however, and that’s why it’s so essential to see a counselor.
As therapists who specialize in helping people overcome anxiety, we believe that our approach to therapy can help you gain more agency over your emotional health and remove the roadblocks holding you back from your best life.
Anxiety Is A Natural Part Of The Human Experience
All humans experience stress at certain times in their lives. In some ways, stress can actually be helpful—it can move us into action so that we can accomplish our goals. Feeling stressed can increase our motivation before a big test, job interview, or athletic performance.
However, when we are constantly worried or obsessing over the same thing over and over, that’s a sign that we have crossed over into anxiety. Sadly, this is the case for roughly one in five Americans today.* Life is fast-paced and high-pressure in American society, and expectations to perform and produce are often unrealistic. For many, it can feel like a continual battle of keeping up with the Joneses, especially with the rise of social media and a toxic comparison culture. So it’s no wonder so many people struggle with chronic anxiety in America today.
Many People Try To Manage Anxiety On Their Own
Oftentimes, people tell themselves that they can push through anxiety alone. They try to “white knuckle” their way through the pain because that is what our success-crazed culture encourages them to do. Unfortunately, anxiety rarely disappears on its own. You can’t defeat it simply by trying to bury it or push it down. Left untreated, anxiety usually reaches a point where it’s so overwhelming that it starts to impair your functioning and relationships.
The key to releasing anxiety lies in exploring where it came from, why it affects you today, and how you can better manage it in day-to-day life. It’s about getting to know your anxiety and using that newfound self-awareness to create long-lasting change and healing.
Therapy Can Help You Heal The Emotional Wounds At The Root Of Your Anxiety
Anxiety is incredibly difficult, but the good news is that it’s highly treatable. At Dr. Ann Marie Semich Counseling Group, our therapists have lots of experience treating anxiety and we combine a compassionate, empathetic approach with evidence-based treatment methods. We specialize in giving children, teens, and adults the insight to understand anxiety on a deeper level and the skills to manage it more effectively. So whether you’re seeking therapy for you or your child, we’re confident that we can help.
What To Expect In Anxiety Counseling Sessions
When we work together, we will deeply explore your feelings of anxiety and the thought patterns that accompany them. Once we discover the origins of your anxiety and have a better understanding of why you’ve been feeling this way, we will collaborate on creating a path toward overcoming your symptoms.
There are so many ways to approach healing, so we want to be sure that our path is unique to you based on your temperament, goals, and circumstances. Since anxiety often has its roots in painful experiences such as betrayals, relationship losses, or difficult childhood events, our therapists take a trauma-informed approach to counseling. We will help you process any unresolved hurts or fears getting in the way of your ability to find peace, allowing you to live free from the pain of the past.
Tailoring Your Anxiety Treatment Plan
Our practice utilizes a wide range of therapeutic techniques to help clients manage anxiety more effectively. Mindfulness is at the core of our approach, as it has been shown to curtail anxiety through meditation, breathing techniques, and other somatic skills focused on fostering self-awareness and self-acceptance. In fact, a recent Harvard study indicates that mindfulness could be more effective than medication at treating anxiety (2).
In addition to mindfulness, our counselors use the following approaches to help with anxiety:
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)—The goal of CBT is to help you understand the connection between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. By shifting your perspective, you can reduce your stress and engage in healthier and more adaptive behaviors.
Internal Family Systems (IFS)—This transformational approach can help you heal the parts of yourself fueling anxiety and sabotaging your potential. By making peace with all of your parts, you can work toward a more coherent understanding of your whole self.
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR)—The goal of EMDR therapy is to process painful experiences and release the hold they have on your mind and body, empowering you to heal any trauma that’s at the root of your anxiety.
By the end of our therapy journey together, our hope is that your worrisome thoughts will no longer consume you, your hyper-anxious state will no longer hijack your emotions, and your relationships will feel fuller and healthier. Along the way, our therapists will be there to ensure that you feel safe, grounded, and supported unconditionally.
You May Have Some Questions About Anxiety Therapy…
What if I don’t have time for anxiety counseling?
Spending the time you have now to take care of yourself, heal from the past, and grow into the person you want to be can benefit your life for years to come. And for what it’s worth, our practice offers virtual counseling for clients who want to maximize their time and minimize the stress of commuting to an in-person office. We will help you fit therapy into your schedule so that you can reap the long-term rewards of being able to effectively manage your anxiety.
I’ve tried therapy before and it didn’t work. How will this be different?
If you’ve attended therapy before without great results, we encourage you not to give up. We offer a wide range of some of the most effective, well-researched therapy models available today. These approaches, combined with the decades of therapeutic experience our staff has, can help you get your anxiety symptoms under control and take the first steps toward reaching your goals.
Won’t talking about my anxiety just make me feel worse?
Because many of the approaches we use are nonverbal and somatically-oriented, you won’t have to worry about your anxiety increasing during sessions. Treatment methods like EMDR and IFS are focused on healing your pain on a deeper level, not reopening old wounds. What’s more, your counselor will always work at a pace that’s right for you, making sure you never feel in over your head.
From Anxious And Avoidant To Mindful And Grounded
At Dr. Ann Marie Semich Counseling Group, our specialists are well-versed in treating anxiety disorders and know how to help clients unlearn anxious behaviors at the root of their stress. To learn more about our unique approach, we encourage you to fill out our contact form. We look forward to working with you!
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/mindfulness-can-help-you-tame-fears-and-worries
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