Therapy for Anxiety in Los Angeles, CA
You feel exhausted because every night it's the same -- you just can't get to sleep. Each time you try to wind down for the night you feel the tension in your body building and the worries creeping in. You try to brush it off, but you can feel a panic attack building as you think about all of the things you've pushed off to tomorrow and all of the unread messages sitting in your texts. You remember frantically Googling your symptoms the first time you had a panic attack, thinking you must be dying. Now you know what it is, and you've noticed a pattern where the anxiety tends to get more intense at night, but knowing both of those things doesn't seem to help. If anything, it feels like it's created a self-reinforcing cycle where thinking about your pattern of nighttime anxiety gives you more anxiety, just dreading the next time a panic attack strikes. So what now?
How does therapy help with anxiety?
So you know you have anxiety, but you don't know how to make it better. You've spent hours scouring the internet for strategies, or you've maybe even seen a therapist in the past to help with anxiety with not much success. You need something more, and you're hoping therapy can help.
My approach to anxiety therapy is based on the knowledge that anxiety thrives on seeking out certainty and attempting to quash doubts. If anxiety is a campfire, uncertainty and doubt make up the wood fueling the fire, and seeking certainty is the oxygen fanning the flames. When we are anxious, we are often convinced that just being sure will be what helps. If we just knew how that friend actually felt, if we just knew what was going to happen with our loved one's health, or if we just knew what was going to happen politically, we could ease the anxiety and figure out a way to move forward. But a lot of the time, seeking out certainty makes it worse. We Google a health condition and go down the WebMD rabbit hole, convinced it must mean death is imminent. Or we ask our friend or partner 15 times if they're "sure you're not mad at me", and now they've gone from empathetic to actually mad. These outcomes reinforce our anxiety and create a vicious cycle.
The problem is, sometimes even when the uncertainty and fear is valid, it is an inevitable part of life and we need to learn to manage it. And other times, the doubt and uncertainty may not even be reasonable or rooted in reality in the first place, in spite of feeling VERY real. So over the course of therapy, we identify triggers for anxiety and core doubts and uncertainties. We figure out the specific fuel sources for your anxiety fire, and then work to remove the fuel sources. We work to build distress tolerance strategies to help you tolerate anxiety and emotion regulation strategies to help you reduce anxiety. We also explore larger fears that underlie the development of new areas of anxiety, and identify what anxiety's function is for you that keeps you turning to it even when it doesn't feel like it's helpful. The goal is to address the root cause of the anxiety to reduce the impact of it on your life, and to leave with tools to better manage the anxieties that occasionally surface.
