Anxiety Counseling

Will anxiety ever go away? Can Anxiety Counseling really help me?

When you’re anxious, you’re afraid it will never end. Maybe you’ve even had counseling before for it & you just never really stopped feeling anxious. You feel trapped with moments of relief that don’t last long enough. We understand anxiety is downright uncomfortable & can get in the way of the quality of your life. Anxiety can affect not only how you feel emotionally, but it creates unwanted physical sensations in your body. You aren’t alone with this. It’s probably the most common issue we see in our therapy practice. We have spent years helping people move out of this total discomfort into calm and peace. We find what works best for you.

Here’s just an example of how anxiety counseling can help:

We can get it backwards and think our feelings drive our thoughts, but it’s really our thoughts driving our feelings. We can get caught in an endless loop of thoughts and questions, or be taken down a path that leads to feeling just awful.

Using an approach based in different therapy models, we use cognitive behavioral therapy as our foundation and build your anxiety treatment plan from there. We not only take a look at your thoughts, where they’re coming from, what the first triggering thought was, and then challenging that thought.

For most of us, we don’t really think about what we’re thinking about!

During our anxiety counseling sessions, we can help you find out exactly where these negative thought patterns are coming from and teach you how to get rid of them in an effective, easy way.

One of the things that you can do, is to first be very aware of what you’re thinking. This does take some practice and work, it’s a skill, and just like riding a bicycle you can learn how to do it.

“I’ve tried counseling for anxiety before, and I still feel anxious most of the time.” Our Anxiety Counseling is different. Let us explain how.

There are also specific skills you can learn to use to treat an anxiety attack quickly & easily. Anxiety treatment doesn’t have to be hard! And with practice, you can squash the few anxiety attacks that do pop up relatively easily.

Here’s the thing - anxiety is normal. What isn’t normal is when it is creating a lot of distress or discomfort in your life.

Sometimes, we think anxiety can help us because it helps us prepare for the “worst case scenario”so we’re hesitant to give it up. Isn’t it normal to want to plan? To be prepared? The answer isn’t a simple "yes or no”.

Even in our worst case scenarios, things never happen EXACTLY like we think or plan.

And if they DO happen, it really doesn’t make it any easier to swallow, does it?

Now we’ve filled up this one moment when we could be peaceful, and instead, filled it up with anxiety and worry. It really doesn’t get us very far. And we didn't even have to try very hard - it just kind of “happened”. Anxiety counseling can break this cycle.

OR - Sometimes life can feel completely overwhelming. It throws things at us one thing after another, and even multiple things all at one time.

When we feel like we can’t keep up, we feel like we failed. Feeling like we failed just adds fuel to the thought of not being good enough…which by the way, we all carry.

No one, I don’t care who they are, no one can do multiple stressful things well all the time. No one.

It may look like it, it may feel like it, but that’s the illusion in our mind that somehow we are less than…

So, the question becomes: What do we do about it? There answer is - there are A LOT of things we can do about anxiety.

Will Anxiety Counseling make my anxiety worse? I get anxious just talking about it…

The short answer is no. Anxiety counseling won’t make your anxiety worse. It may be hard at first to talk about it. Some things may be uncomfortable to talk about. We understand that. We go at your pace. At your comfort.

Here’s the problem when you try and hide from it - or try not to talk about it. Often times, it gets worse. Anxiety counseling is about breaking that cycle of fear. The more you try to push it away, the stronger it can come back. The more you try to ignore it, the louder it can get. Anxiety counseling helps you figure out exactly what the triggers are so you can put them to rest once and for all. And we move out of that fear brings more fear cycle. Anxiety counseling is about stopping the fear before it even starts.

Yes, some anxiety is normal. But it isn’t supposed to run your life or ruin many of your days.

Anxiety counseling is about healing the triggers while learning ways to cope.

Anxiety is highly treatable - you don’t need to keep trying to tolerate its attacks!

If you’re ready to try, ready to feel better, ready to get rid of the cycle, you can meet with us for Anxiety counseling in our Point Pleasant, NJ office or do Online counseling with us.

You just need to click the button below & reach out to us.

Are you ready to feel better?

Anxiety may take any of these forms:

Social anxiety or social phobia

-fear of being around other people. People who suffer from this disorder always feel self-conscious around others.

Panic disorder

- a condition where a person has panic attacks without warning.

Generalized anxiety disorder

-quite common, and fills a person’s life with worry, anxiety, and fear. People who have this disorder are always thinking and dwelling on the “what ifs” of every situation. It feels like there is no way out of the vicious cycle of anxiety and worry.

Phobias

-fearing a specific object or situation.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)

-a system of ritualized behaviors or obsessions that are driven by anxious thoughts.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

- severe anxiety that is triggered by memories of a past traumatic experience.

Agoraphobia

-disabling fear that prevents one from leaving home or another safe place

Most people who suffer from anxiety disorders begin to feel better when they receive the proper treatment. It can be difficult to identify the correct treatment, however, because each person’s anxiety is caused by a unique set of factors. It can be frustrating for the client when treatment is not immediately successful or takes longer than hoped for. Some clients feel better after a few weeks or months of treatment, while others may need a year or more.

“I cannot always control what goes on outside. But I can always control what goes on inside”

— Wayne Dyer

There is no single correct approach which is why we use and combine a variety of modalities and techniques to make an individual plan tailored for you. Some of these modalities include:

Cognitive Therapy

You learn to identify and change unproductive thought patterns by observing your feelings and learning to separate realistic from unrealistic thoughts.

Mindfulness

Utilizing the skills taken from Dialectical Behavior Therapy, we can help reduce anxiety by teaching and building upon being more present-focused to help calm the “what if’s”.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

It’s very common for us to meet fear with fear – we can get into a vicious cycle of feeling anxious and then felling more anxious because we feel anxious. Fear feeds fear. ACT helps you develop skills and strategies to break free from this cycle and stop feeding the fear.

Behavior Therapy

This treatment helps you alter and control unwanted behavior. Systematic desensitization, a type of behavior therapy, is often used to help people with phobias and OCD. After ensuring you have solid coping strategies in place. You are very slowly exposed to anxiety-producing stimuli one small step at a time, gradually increasing your tolerance to situations that have produced disabling anxiety.