Anxiety Therapy
Have Anxiety And Stress Become Overwhelming In Your Life?
Do you find yourself trying to avoid anxious thoughts or feelings daily, but, the more you try to ignore your stress and worries, the more they intensify? Is it difficult for those around you to understand what you’re going through, so you are left feeling unsupported?
Perhaps you’ve been dealing with periods of anxiety your whole life, and it’s impacted your success, happiness, and sense of resilience. It could be that chronic stress has worsened your existing anxiety, or it may have even contributed to it in the first place.
Has your anxiety reached unmanageable levels, and you’re wondering if therapy can help you?
The Manifestations Of Anxiety Are Wide-Ranging
You may experience intense physical tension with clenched muscles and tightness throughout your body. Mentally, you may feel preoccupied with certain intrusive or obsessive thoughts that seem impossible to get past.
Other symptoms of anxiety might include a chronic sense of fear, embarrassment, insecurity, and timidness in social settings, making new connections and interactions difficult. This could also include an intense preoccupation with rejection or abandonment.
Additionally, anxiety can create:
Fatigue from trying to navigate daily life with anxiety
Insomnia or feeling unrested even if you get regular sleep
Mental dissociation, including spacing out, losing track of time, having the inability to concentrate, forgetfulness, and numbing of emotions
Shame, self-blame, low sense of self-worth
Panic attacks with symptoms of a racing heartbeat, intense fear, and even difficulty catching your breath
You probably think if you could just let go, be yourself without fear, and say all that you have to say you’d be happy again.
Fortunately, we’re here to help you do just that. With the help of our anxiety specialists, you can finally learn how to let your guard down and be present with another person. You can enjoy a greater sense of security and love—and you can finally access all of the simple joys that anxiety has prevented you from experiencing.
Anxiety Is A Prevalent Part Of The Modern Human Experience
Research has shown at least 30 percent of the population in the US has experienced chronic anxiety.(1) This is understandable, as chronic stress and burnout can develop easily under the weight of jobs, finances, relationships, and even the uncertainties of life, such as unexpected medical diagnoses.
We live in a culture that unfortunately devalues vulnerability, pushing people toward fighting their emotions instead of learning how to harmonize with those parts of the self that are wounded or in conflict.
Periods of anxiety, fear, grief, and even brief times of depression are all natural parts of the human experience. Chronic anxiety, however, is in some ways an invisible ailment, and the people who experience it can often feel marginalized, weak, or inadequate in our culture.
We Are Wired For Community Support And Companionship
In Western culture, isolation is becoming more and more common due to modern social structures and trends that ultimately starve people of true emotional connection and companionship. We are mammals, after all, and wired for relationships and community.
When we don’t have a sense of connection or community, our neurocircuitry goes into action to find a solution. When we say, Why can’t I just calm down, we can sometimes struggle to calm ourselves on our own, as we are conditioned to move through fear states with the support of another person. Therapy can provide you with that: true connection, a relationship of trust, and healthy coping mechanisms to help regulate anxiety.
Therapy Can Provide A Sense Of Security and Support
Therapy is an opportunity to activate the social engagement your body needs to regulate your anxiety. It can be a safe and affirming space during the process of navigating anxiety and help you find ways to unlock your natural capacities to heal.
Our Connections With Others Aid Anxiety Regulation
Our highest form of emotional regulation, in terms of how we calm our bodies down from stress, is co-regulation through relationships and the social engagement system of the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is part of the nervous system that is activated when we connect with others – and not only just people; this could include our pets too. Being around others has the power to heal, like when a loved one tells us "Everything is going to be okay.”
Your therapist at Healing Connections can help you explore bottom-up regulation techniques that activate a sense of security in the body and soothe the overwhelmed anxiety response in the brain.
Counseling can enable underlying and core issues to come to the surface, including feelings of inadequacy, insecurities, and fear that all contribute to anxiety. While we are doing that deeper work of exploring those factors, your counselor will provide you with an environment in which to cultivate and practice effective strategies for mitigating current stressors, finding relief from anxiety symptoms, and experiencing a more joyful life.
Methods To Help You Process Anxiety And Heal
Anxiety is a natural part of human existence, although it can be challenging, overwhelming, and at times very exhausting. You have the power to restore calm and bring your mind back to a state where stress and worry are not in control, and therapy can help you learn to harness this ability.
The Polyvagal approach for anxiety treatment empowers you by building an understanding of your body’s natural responses to chronic stress, triggers, stressors, demands, etc. You will learn about the body's ability to rebuild, restore, and repair a chronically taxed and stressed nervous system.
Integrative parts work builds a sense of security in your relationship with yourself and your experiences of vulnerability. Parts work aims to identify which aspects of yourself are at odds with your overall sense of self and to allow these disparate aspects to find some unity and thus, balance in your self-perception.
Mindfulness practices assist in relating to your experience on a moment-to-moment level, and therapy can assist you in learning to handle your suffering through self-compassion, flexibility, and resilience.
Anxiety is often thought of as something to get rid of or push away, but often it is a lifelong phenomenon that ebbs and flows. Therapy can be a wonderful resource to activate healing in both the body and the mind. Counseling with Healing Connections is an invitation to learn to turn towards your anxiety, and handle it with care, kindness, openness, curiosity, and even humor.
You Might Still Have Concerns About Anxiety Therapy…
I've struggled with anxiety my whole life and can't seem to get rid of it. How can I overcome this?
A common misconception, or rather an instinct, is to resist, avoid, run away from, or try to get rid of anxiety, which usually ends up intensifying it. "What we resist persists," said renowned therapeutic pioneer Carl Rogers.(2) Neuroscience is showing that acceptance practice is the foundation for finding relief, security, and skillfulness in working with anxiety.(3)
I've tried so many things. Nothing seems to work. How would your practice be any different?
Many approaches for anxiety treatment focus on a top-down (mind over matter), cognitive approach. When we are experiencing high-level, chronic stress states, the overwhelmed part of the brain diverges from the higher thinking part of our brain, which makes rationalizing often ineffective.
At Healing Connections, we use both a top-down and a bottom-up approach to anxiety treatment, activating the social engagement system through the body. This can give you a sense of safety and security that facilitates self-regulation and provides relief. We have providers trained in a variety of modalities such as contemplative and mindfulness therapies, polyvagal theory, EMDR, somatic (body-based) therapy, and CBT and DBT to help clients develop new skills and tools to cope with and heal anxiety.
I don't have time or money. Is it worth it to try anxiety therapy?
Engaging in daily practice coupled with integrative therapy can help bring healing and resilience into your life. We work to make therapy more accessible through accepting a variety of insurances such as Colorado Medicaid, Aetna, Cigna, and other commercial insurances. Please feel free to reach out to our team today if you have any questions or concerns about the costs associated with therapy- often we find that insurance may cover the full cost of sessions.
Let Us Be Your Guide For Finding Anxiety Relief
Therapy with Healing Connections can provide you with a trusted guide to work through your challenges, difficulties, and experiences with anxiety. We offer a free, 15-minute phone consultation at (720) 739-8786 with any therapist you may be interested in so you can learn more about their approach and see if you’re a good fit for one another.
(1) https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/any-anxiety-disorder
(2) https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carl-Rogers
(3) https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/therapy-types/acceptance-and-commitment-therapy
