Escape the internal struggle. Find peace, self-confidence, and joy.
Anxiety Therapy in Huntsville and across Alabama
SPECIALIZING IN TEENS 16+ AND ADULTS
Anxiety doesn’t have to control your life.
Have you been secretly struggling with a mind that wants to find every way that things can go wrong, and then worry about them all?
Maybe you have been voicing your anxiety over these possibilities your whole life with people telling you ‘you worry too much’.
It could be that you worry about just one area of your life, but with a deep intensity - worrying that your teenage children will have a car accident, that your mother is going to ask to come for Thanksgiving, or Christmas, that your husband is going to leave you (with absolutely no evidence that he might).
You might experience panic attacks - with no apparent trigger - and struggle to breathe, or break out in a sweat, or feel your heart beat so hard it feels like it’s going to take off.
Or maybe for you it’s just how you avoid things that make you nervous - never getting around to making that phone call, finishing that project, or getting out of the house.
However your anxiety manifests itself, it usually feels painful, and you wish you could ‘just not worry’. But you have looked for the ‘switch’ to get it to stop, and you haven’t been able to find one.
And with that constant companion of anxious energy, nervousness, or worry you realize it’s affecting your friendships as people struggle to understand, but often don’t. Maybe it’s making it hard for you to meet new people, interview for jobs, or go to the grocery store. Or maybe you’re always worried about something, and it’s exhausting - because as soon as you stop worrying about one thing, you find another. And it’s not that any of your worries are even unrealistic, it’s just that they consume you. You just can’t relax. And you don’t understand how everyone seems so at ease all the time. But you wish you could be like them.
Therapy tailored to you can help you unlock peace of mind.
How therapy works
You can wake up and:
NOT immediately start to worry.
Have the energy and willingness to engage with other people, and the world
Trust that you will be able to handle any unknowns that crop up in your day
Go to a party
Take that adventure
When you come in, we will sit down and together review the areas of your life affected by your anxiety, and in what way it is currently getting in the way of what you want for yourself and your life.
You and I will collaborate on prioritizing which area or symptom to tackle first, and explore that one in more depth. We will talk about how the brain produces the anxiety you experience. We will look for any hidden ways your mind or beliefs about yourself or the world are helping ignite your anxiety. If there are, we will discuss those thoughts, and explore if there are things that you haven’t yet explored that might help alter that thinking.
We may also delve into any family patterns that may have contributed to your anxiety. Sometimes there are things from childhood that you aren’t yet aware are driving your anxious thinking - and sometimes there are actual childhood experiences that we can process that will alleviate the intensity of your experience.
Over the course of our work, if these thought and family systems based approaches aren’t yielding a lot of results, I might suggest consulting with a doctor to see if medication might help take the edge off of how you experience anxiety to allow you to think more clearly in those moments of extreme anxiety, and establish healthier or more helpful thought patterns.
If it appears your anxiety is trauma based in a way that our work doesn’t seem to address, I might then refer you to also work with an EMDR therapist for that part of your treatment.
Throughout this process you are in the driver seat. You dictate how fast or slow we work. When and how deeply we look into your past’s contribution. And whether or not you decide to follow a suggestion to look into medication. There are many reasons to choose not to explore medication and that choice is always honored in my office.
Therapy for anxiety can help you…
Improve your confidence
Increase your energy
Develop deeper relationships
Trust yourself
Enjoy life again
Frequently asked questions about anxiety therapy
FAQs
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Sometimes when you feel very distressed by your anxiety it can be hard to implement the common suggestions for helping you reduce and cope with your anxiety. Here are two lists - one for attempting to get immediate relief, and one for longer term practice.
TRYING TO GET IMMEDIATE RELIEF:
Talk to a friend
Try to see if there are other (better) possibilities than the one you are worried about - write them down. Give them percentages of likelihood.
Try to just do a tiny piece of the task that is freaking you out - so if it’s an assignment in college, do a tiny bit, then breathe, and do another tiny bit.
Get out and move - swim, run, walk - to help your body feel that you are doing something about the anxiety.
Lie down flat, and take breaths deep into your belly, counting up to 4 for a breath in, and 6 for a breath out. Repeat for 5 breaths. This may help your body feel that it is safe, and ease panic.
LONGER TERM STRATEGIES:
Develop a mindfulness meditation practice - watching your breath can feel like watching the ocean, and can give your body a sense of safety and ease. Or look for guided meditations online that help you release stress and worry.
Start practicing CBT strategies to shift negatively focused thoughts you have regularly - looking for how much evidence you have for the thought, and how much evidence you have that the thought might be incorrect. Come up with a more balanced approach to whatever subject the thought is about. For example:
Original thought: I am so worried that they were in an accident!
Evidence: They have only had a fender bender in the past, and they have a lot more experience now than they did then. They haven’t been in an accident for years.
Reframed thought: Traffic accidents do happen, so there is a chance that could have occurred, but based on their current defensive driving ability it’s not very likely. In fact it’s a lot MORE likely that they have just stopped for gas, because they mentioned that they needed gas when they left the house.
Work on ways to help your body be at its best, because a healthier body is less prone to feeling more anxiety:
Exercise
Sleep - do the best you can to practice good sleep hygiene - including:
regular bedtimes
not using electronics an hour before bed,
not doing anything in your bed other than going to sleep
so your bed becomes a sleep cue for your body
Minimize caffeine - it can rev up your anxiety
Healthy diet in general
Consider working with a therapist to get personalized strategies for your particular anxiety patterns.
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The answer to this question is complex, and comes along with the phrase ‘it depends’.
As human beings we are designed to be good at “threat hunting” because that’s how we survived to pass on our genes. “Threat Hunting” when you are living in the Sahara and there are lions, and snakes, and dangerous fauna is about being alert. The more alert you are the more likely you are to survive.
Fast forward to the modern day, and we are still built that way. Only our environments, and lifestyles lend themselves to triggering that ‘be alert’ reaction in our brains for stressors that are not life threatening. Some of us have a more easily activated system than others. Depending on your biology, and traumas you may have experienced, your ‘be alert’ mode may be more easily triggered, stay on longer, and be harder to turn off..
BUT you can still modify how you think, some of your environment, some of how you treat your body, and become skilled at managing the anxiety responses you experience. You may not be able to eliminate ALL anxiety - but you are VERY likely to eliminate a great deal of it using a personalized approach that addresses your body, your thoughts, and possibly your past.
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The time for improvement is variable. Often people will experience some early success quickly, but longer-term results usually take time and practice. There are times when your underlying trauma and biology are complex enough that it can take months to really start to feel you have some solid reduction in symptoms.
Therapy for anxiety is often like peeling an onion. There may be things that you can easily identify as giving you anxiety. And once those are solved, you may still discover that you are having anxiety symptoms - which leads to uncovering deeper, longer term issues, often from childhood, or some traumatic event, and then these are worked on. Sometimes work on anxiety will take you into your beliefs about yourself and the world, and shifting those if you choose can take a good bit of time.