Anxiety Therapy
Do you feel nervous, keyed up, and on edge at all times? Are you constantly worried about what other people think of you? Do you have trouble speaking up for yourself and advocating for your needs?
Maybe you’re dealing with social anxiety and you feel your heart race every time you’re around lots of people. Perhaps you’re afraid of going on dates, asking for a raise, or doing anything that takes you out of your comfort zone. Deep down, the fear of other people disliking you may hold you back from seizing new opportunities. You might work out excessively or go to great lengths to look good in order to hide your insecurities. Yet in the end, you know that you’re not living your best life. You know that you could be living a more vibrant and fulfilling life if your anxiety wasn’t so powerful.
Anxiety Often Goes Hand In Hand With Loneliness And Resentment
Eventually, chronic anxiety can reach a point where it makes your whole world feel small. The more you isolate and pass up new chances for growth, the more your loneliness grows. After a while this can lead to resentment. You might spiral into regret over missed opportunities and feel like you’re stuck on the sidelines of life while everyone else is thriving. And without anyone to help you keep perspective, you’ve probably found that it’s harder to control your anxious thoughts and talk yourself down from them.
Thankfully, you don’t have to keep living this way. At The Pursuit Counseling, our therapists specialize in helping people challenge negative thought patterns, cope with difficult emotions, and loosen the grip that anxiety has on their lives.
Is Anxiety Robbing You Of Opportunities For Growth?
Chronic Anxiety Has Become Commonplace In Our Stressful, Post-COVID World
Anxiety is a normal part of life. At its core, it’s a survival mechanism designed to protect us from danger. Yet for millions of people today, this protective mechanism has spun out of control and become a chronic mental health condition.
While anxiety has hit many populations hard, it’s arguably hit young adults the hardest. Many people in their 20s and 30s saw their career development change drastically in the wake of COVID-19. Social distancing also upended their social lives and hindered their ability to develop soft skills. As a result, many young people have struggled to get new career opportunities. Since the pandemic put so much of life on hold, there weren’t as many chances to learn and fail. And if you never get in situations where you can fail, it’s hard to grow your confidence and level up in life.
On Your Own, It’s Incredibly Hard To Talk Yourself Out Of Anxiety
Many people struggle to overcome anxiety because, over time, they come to believe the stories they tell themselves about their lives. These stories often involve them not being good enough and everyone disliking them—“My boss hates me,” “My friends secretly don’t like me,” “My partner will abandon me if I mess up,” etc.
Unless we have an outside source to confront these stories and help us challenge them, most of us will continue to believe them. The idea of questioning these stories won’t even occur to us—we’ll simply take them at face value and assume that we’re really unworthy or unlovable. Therapy is a chance to step back, look at the bigger picture, and understand that the narrative we tell ourselves doesn’t have to be the only one.
Part of learning to manage anxiety means accepting that you can’t win 100 percent of the time. You’re not going to get every date or land every job. Therapy can teach you to stop getting hung up on the things you can’t control and start focusing on the deeper emotional challenges fueling your anxiety. Working together, you and your therapist will identify the core issues and uncover the patterns that reinforce anxious thinking and behavior. Once you understand anxiety on a deeper level, it becomes much easier to accept the reality of failure, build on your successes, and live a more balanced life.
Our counselors provide treatment for everything from generalized anxiety to social anxiety to specific fears and phobias. Our approach is deeply holistic, looking at how anxiety impacts your physical, emotional, and relational well-being. We can even collaborate with psychiatrists and medical doctors if you want to make medication part of your treatment plan. We aim to be as comprehensive as possible since we believe that that’s the best way to tackle anxiety.
Therapy Can Help You Form A Healthier Relationship With Anxiety
At The Pursuit Counseling, we often use a narrative lens to help clients understand anxiety. Working together, we’ll explore the story you tell yourself about your life and assess whether or not that story accurately reflects your experiences. For instance, maybe you were turned down by a date and concluded, “No one wants to date me,” or didn’t get a promotion and thought, “I’ll never be successful in life.” The goal of narrative therapy is to challenge this kind of all-or-nothing thinking and understand that these situations do not define you. We’ll give you techniques from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) so that you can practice thought-stopping when unhealthy narratives arise.
Additionally, our practice often uses mindfulness exercises to help clients be more present in their lives and understand that anxious feelings do not have to be final. Mindfulness can teach you when to push the gas and when to apply the brakes. It can help you understand the difference between when anxiety is helpful (“This person is not safe and I shouldn’t be here”) and harmful (“This person is attractive and I’m too nervous to talk to them”).
In the end, our goal is to get to the root of your anxiety so that we’re treating the causes and not just the symptoms. This way, you can stop resorting to unhealthy behaviors to cope with stress and start living a more vibrant, fulfilling, and confident life.
What To Expect In Anxiety Therapy Sessions
What if talking about anxiety makes it worse?
Talking about your anxiety will not make it worse. The problem with anxiety is that the part of your brain where worry and stress live cannot work at the same time as the part of your brain where logical, task-driven areas live. By talking about anxiety, we can move it to the logical region of the brain so that it doesn’t hold such emotional power over you.
Will therapy be confidential?
Perhaps this concern is part of your anxiety. Maybe you’re worried that once you share your story, you won’t have “control” over it anymore. The good news is that therapy with us is always confidential and our systems are secure. While we encourage you to have a strong support system, you never have to discuss your time in therapy with anyone that you don’t want to.
What if I don’t have the time and money for therapy?
Therapy isn’t really an expense—it’s an investment in your future. Besides, it’s worth considering how much time and money you’ve already spent (or will continue to spend) trying to navigate anxiety. If you trust us with your time, we will help you spend it wisely. Investing in therapy can help you get rid of the expenses that anxiety has caused (e.g., online shopping to calm your nerves), thereby giving you more freedom with your time and finances.