ONLINE AND IN-PERSON COUNSELING IN PEORIA AND THROUGHOUT ILLINOIS
Help for Anxiety
Sometimes the only way out is through. I’ll show you the way and walk with you through it.
Change your relationship with your anxiety and fear.
Anxiety feels suffocating.
It presses in and makes it hard to breathe, hard to think, hard to move.
Your mind just tries to figure out what to do. It feels imperative you do something to fight it, to fix it, to NOT have anxiety. You try to avoid anxiety and anything that brings it on.
Your world get smaller and smaller while your anxiety grows and GROWS.
Whether it’s:
Generalized Anxiety—constant worry, rumination, and feeling anxious,
Health Anxiety—constant fear there’s something medically wrong—noticing, feeling afraid of, and trying to get reassurance about bodily sensations,
Panic Attacks—sudden rushes of fear and debilitating anxiety symptoms that seem to come out of nowhere and fear that this will happen again,
or
Phobias—specific intense fears that keep you from living the life you want,
There is effective treatment that can help you get your life back, face your fears, and do the things you want to be doing.
Learning about anxiety—
how it works,
how it is maintained,
and skills to cope with it
can help you get your life back.
Quick and dirty about anxiety and how CBT can help—
Anxiety itself is part of life. It serves a purpose and helps protect us when there are real threats to our safety.
Anxiety disorders are when we get stuck in anxiety, when the way we react to it fuels and maintains it—by making threats seem bigger, by making feared consequences seem more likely to happen and our ability to cope with them less likely.
The key to overcoming anxiety problems is
to learn to see anxiety as not a problem,
to face the things we avoid while having anxiety,
to learn we can handle anxiety.
That might sound hard or impossible when you are currently experiencing it—anxiety does make the threats seem scarier and tries to make you avoid the things you find threatening. When you learn about anxiety and it’s tricks, it becomes so much less scary and something you can learn to live with. (THEN—paradoxically—it often WILL decrease or go away.)
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy teaches you to work with your thoughts and with your behaviors. We will work on thinking and DOING in order to change how anxiety impacts you-and how you impact it.
Therapy with me is not about techniques for reducing anxiety. Yes, you read that right. Therapy with me is not about techniques for reducing anxiety, because for people who have an anxiety disorder, techniques meant to reduce anxiety often make the problem worse.
Therapy with me is about learning that the things we do to avoid, fight, counteract, distract from, or get relief from anxiety, ultimately backfire and maintain anxiety (and the resulting problems in our lives).
I can help you see anxiety and what it does to you through the lens of science and help you learn the strategies to cope and live WITH anxiety, to no longer be afraid of it or to let it ruin your life.
I can help you do the things that will give power to you
and take the power away from anxiety.
If you are ready to face your fears, I’m here to help.
If you’re not ready, I’m here to help you get ready.
I will never push, pressure, or coerce you. I’m here to meet you where you’re at with compassion, answer your questions honestly, help you explore your (normal) ambivalence, and find your own motivation to do this thing that will change your life.
Frequently Asked Questions
about CBT for anxiety:
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Yes, that’s usually exactly what people with anxiety are looking for. Unfortunately trying to get rid of or avoid anxiety backfires. It reinforces the belief that anxiety is dangerous or intolerable, and it intensifies the fear of fear. Anxiety disorders are very effectively treated with CBT, which helps people change the way they think about and feel about anxiety, often by being willing to experience anxiety and learning from those experiences. This is done in a collaborative, gradual, structured way at your pace.
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For most people—yes. Once people have an understanding of how anxiety is maintained (which is usually the first thing we work on in therapy), they are ready to do the most effective thing for changing how anxiety impacts their life, and that involves exposure to anxiety and its triggers. This will break the false association between feeling anxious and being unsafe.
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First, I want you to know that I’m not here to pressure or persuade you. Second, I want you to know it is okay to feel afraid. In fact, that’s part of the process of getting better, and I would love to teach you to not fear fear. People who have anxiety disorders are acutely sensitive to anxiety. They often don’t just feel fear—they fear fear. The work we do will help you become less sensitized to anxiety and fear. You will amaze yourself with what you can do and how good it feels to stand up to anxiety, rather than cowering before it. This is all done at your pace, with your consent and control, every step of the way.