Many of my clients experience anxiety that impacts their life in a myriad of ways. Guidance around anxiety is often oriented towards talking a person out of how they are feeling, which can work on the surface, but can leave the person alone with those same anxious thoughts. While there can be utility in some of those strategies, I take a different approach. By exploring and identifying the needs and concerns that anxiety is trying to address, we can find more adaptive ways to meet those needs and/or identify where anxiety has become a habitual pattern or reflexive response that is no longer useful to you.

One of my areas of specialty is anxiety as a result of complex trauma. Complex trauma is a set of enduring conditions having to do with experiences in earlier life that deeply shapes how you respond to people and events in your current life. This can affect how you see yourself, and as a result, how you feel and interact with others. Those who have experienced complex trauma can feel out of control or act in ways that don’t fit how they want to be. My approach to trauma is to understand and then gently influence the way you respond to triggers, so that you can feel like the past has less of a hold on your present.

Another way that anxiety can show up is through anxious attachment, a pattern of feelings and behavior that can be disruptive to feelings of security and ability to form and maintain healthy relationships as an adult. This can originate from deeply stressful experiences as a child and also from relatively typical childhoods that featured some forms of inconsistency. I work extensively on issues related to attachment styles with both individuals and couples.