ANXIETY SPECIALISTS
CBT for AnxietyAnxiety disorders are the most common mental health complaints.
If you’re feeling nervous, worried, or on edge, please know that you’re not alone.
Today, however, many of the threats we encounter are less visible. We worry about things that might go wrong in the future. We fear failure at work or school, disappointing others, the safety of people and animals we love. And yet our bodies still respond with that same fight-flight-or-freeze response. It’s the right response but it’s happening at the wrong time because the threats are in our minds, not out there in the world. Those physical symptoms can’t help us battle those threats.
ANXIETY DISORDERS
There are several different anxiety disorders, including generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, specific phobias, and panic disorder and agoraphobia.
Anxiety disorders are characterized by symptoms like:
- uncontrollable worry
- feeling restless
- irritability
- difficulty sleeping
- stress
- feeling overwhelmed
- panic attacks
- overthinking
We use primarily Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) and exposure and response prevention interventions for working with anxiety.
CBT is based on the idea that thoughts (cognitions), behaviors, and emotions all work together. To decrease anxiety, we work with clients on several different strategies to change negative thoughts, including developing a more flexible, realistic mindset, mindfulness skills to slow down and become aware of the impact of negative thoughts, and learning to tolerate uncertainty. We also work with clients to set behavioral goals to gradually face feared situations and decrease avoidance with exposure therapy. This helps our clients to get unstuck and move forward in living a life they love.
It’s important that our work in therapy is collaborative. We know a lot about CBT in general, but you are the expert on your own anxiety. In our initial work, you’ll develop a treatment plan and a shared understanding of your symptoms with your therapist. By combining your knowledge, you and your therapist will take general principles and strategies and start to understand how they apply specifically to you.
CBT for anxiety is an active, skills based treatment. It’s meant to be a time-limited intervention so each of your sessions is productive and focused on helping you develop new skills and strategies for dealing with anxiety. There will be information, in session practice of new coping skills, and homework and worksheets between sessions where you’ll get a chance to put the ideas you talk about with your therapist into action. Our goal is to teach you as much as we can about CBT so you can work toward being your own therapist.