1910 7th Street, Boulder CO 80302 | 600 S. Airport Rd, Longmont, CO 80503 | 720-515-4711 | Currently Providing In-Person and Online Sessions
Do you find yourself in a persistent state of stress and worry?
Do you find yourself in a persistent state of stress and worry? Do you avoid situations that have the potential of you being judged by others? Do you have trouble being able to relax, concentrate, or sleep because you can’t shut your mind off? Has COVID-19 made your anxiety even worse? Do you hold yourself to much higher standards than you do everyone else and beat yourself up inside when you don’t live up to them? If you answered yes to any of these questions, anxiety treatment can help.
Anxiety can cause you to avoid taking risks due to the fear of failing or humiliating yourself? When you have to make decisions, you first think of all the worse-case scenarios that could happen? Then, you may feel your heart racing, have sweaty palms, a sense of worry, and feelings of overwhelm. Have things gotten so bad that you are now having panic attacks?
You can spend a lot of time and energy trying to hide your anxiety. When you look at other people, life seems to be so easy for them. They don’t have the same fears that you do and it takes little effort for them to try new things. This can make you feel even worse about yourself. You feel alone in your suffering and long to feel normal.
The good news is you don’t have to suffer alone anymore. You can get the help you need to feel safe stepping out of your comfort zone and feeling more joy in your life.
Basically, anxiety can be defined as a heightened sense of feeling unsafe. Typically, everyone feels anxiety in certain situations. Like the first time you give a speech or go on a first date. When the speech is over or you are having a good time on the date, the anxiety dissipates and you can maintain a level of feeling grounded. But, if you have low self-esteem, experienced some form of trauma, or chronic stress in childhood, your nervous system has become hypersensitive and the anxious feelings have become chronic or are easily triggered making it difficult to get back to feeling safe and grounded.
With the help of an anxiety therapist, you can learn new strategies and coping skills to decrease your anxiety and provide you with relief so you can enjoy life more.
An estimated 40 million American adults are suffering from some form of anxiety, but only about a third seek treatment. Anxiety disorders are a group of related conditions, each having unique symptoms. However, all anxiety disorders have one thing in common: persistent, excessive fear or worry in situations that are not truly threatening. The perceived threat if you suffer from social anxiety may be the fear of humiliating yourself when you are with a group of people. You may experience the fear of messing up while giving a speech or the possibility of failing a test if you have performance anxiety. If your anxiety starts the moment you wake up and is present throughout your day regardless of how well the day is going, you may suffer from generalized anxiety. There’s good news, anxiety disorders are highly treatable.
Anxiety is experienced in the mind and the body. When you understand more about what is happening inside of you that triggers anxiety and have options to deal with it, you will feel more empowered. For the mind, I can help you to become more aware of the mental processes of anxiety and how to combat them. For instance, a common internal dialogue associated with anxiety is all the “what if” questions that come up. What if no one talks to me at the party? What if I can’t finish the project at work? What if I never get married?... The way you combat the “what if” thinking is with facts. Simple facts that are true about you that are evidence you are not a loser, or incompetent, or unlovable.
For the body, the heighten nervous feeling can be intense. The tendency is to try to make yourself calm down. But anxious and calm are on opposite ends of the emotion spectrum and can be pretty hard to do. Instead, learning how to go from anxious to excited is an easier transition. This is especially helpful for social or performance anxiety.
With more long-standing trauma related anxiety, talk therapy may not be enough. Fortunately, there are modalities available today that have been proven effective to treat deep seated anxiety. One of these modalities is Brainspotting. Brainspotting is a therapy designed to help people access and process negative emotions like anxiety and overcome past trauma experiences. There is increasing evidence that anxiety and trauma gets stuck in the body in a way that can alter the way the brain works. But once these past traumas are un-stuck, our body will no longer continue to react the same way. Brainspotting helps to rewire patterns of stress and anxiety. I am a trained Brainspotting therapist and many of my clients have had success with reducing their anxiety when using this approach.
I will create a safe compassionate space for you to be able to talk about what it is like to live with the internal struggles anxiety creates for you. What your fears are and what you want your life to be like. I have 20 years of experience helping clients with anxiety identify the distorted beliefs and fears that are at the root of their anxiety. I can teach you the neuroscience behind how the brain processes perceived threats and how to use this information so you are more in charge to keep your anxiety at a manageable level or prevent it from getting triggered at all.
Some people with anxiety choose to use medication to treat their symptoms. This can be a beneficial approach in certain situations. While medication can reduce the symptoms of anxiety. Therapy treats more than just the symptoms of the problem. Therapy focuses on each individual person’s challenge with anxiety and getting to the root causes. The goal for therapy is to explore your individual challenges with how anxiety shows up for you, learn how to recognize triggers, and support you in developing healthy strategies to cope so you have confidence to navigate stressors in your life.
The goal for anxiety therapy is to provide you with the relief you need. With some education about how the brain works under stress, how past events show up in your body, and how to use science to regulate your body sensations, you can learn to cope with stressful events with confidence and live the kind of life you want. It doesn’t take as long as you might think.
If you are ready to take the first step to take control over your anxiety at your pace, feel free to contact me for a free 20-minute phone consultation to see how anxiety treatment can help you.
I had tried counseling sessions several times before and couldn’t seem to make it past one session because I don’t think I ever felt truly safe. Darleen was the first therapist to get me to open up and not revert back to my old ways. I stayed with her for 4 years and am tremendously grateful.
L.W.
