Working With Anxiety

The feelings are urgent, distressing, and often physically painful. Yet, underneath it all, your nervous system is simply trying to protect you from something it learned to fear long ago.

You can’t just “turn off” that alarm system. And the harder you try to push the anxiety away, the louder and more persistent it tends to get. Living with that constant internal bracing is incredibly exhausting.

What Anxiety Can Look Like

Anxiety manifests in many different ways across our minds, bodies, and behaviors:

• Chronic worry: A busy mind that jumps endlessly from one worst-case scenario to the next.
• Panic attacks: Sudden, overwhelming surges of intense physical fear (heart racing, shortness of breath, dizziness) that feel like an immediate emergency.
• Sleep disruption: An overactive mind that races at night, making it difficult to sleep.
• Somatic tension: Physical stress carrying as chronic headaches, jaw clenching, stomach issues, fatigue, or tight muscles.
• Avoidance: Quietly withdrawing from certain situations, social gatherings, career opportunities, or difficult decisions to keep the anxiety quiet.
• Perfectionism: The heavy expectation to get everything exactly right, often leading to procrastination or difficulty finishing tasks out of fear of failure.
• People-pleasing: Over-committing and struggling to set boundaries because saying “no” triggers intense relational anxiety.

How I Work With Anxiety

Anxiety is not simply a “thought problem”, it lives directly in your body, your muscles, and your nervous system.

My approach attends to both the somatic (bodily) and relational layers of anxiety. I help you understand where your anxiety came from—the experiences, past patterns, and protective beliefs that feed it—while also building your physical capacity to settle your nervous system and tolerate discomfort without being controlled by it.

I draw on a rich range of gentle, effective approaches tailored entirely to you:

• Somatic awareness: Tuning into the physical sensations of anxiety in the body to help regulate and discharge the fight-or-flight energy.
• Self-compassion and mindfulness: Learning to observe your anxiety without judgment, meeting the worried parts of yourself with kindness rather than frustration.
• Parts work (IFS): Understanding the critical or anxious voices within you as protective parts trying to keep you safe, allowing them to step back.
• Attachment-based exploration: Examining how early relational experiences shaped your sense of safety and how you navigate vulnerability today.

If you’re exhausted by the worry, reach out.