Anxiety is the number one problem that brings people into therapy. I help my clients   learn how to live with their anxiety.

 

Please note that I didn’t say “learn how to make their anxiety go away”.

 

There are two basic approaches to helping people with anxiety. The first is to help them learn the skills they need to cope with their anxiety when it activates their brain’s fight or flight response. 

 

The second is to develop the ability to learn how to live with their anxiety, accept it for what it is, in order to be able to lead the kind of life, they truly want to have for themselves.

 

If we consider the brain to be a super-computer, it is important to remember that there is no delete button in the brain. There are many things that we keep on our cerebral desktop for ready access, but there are also many things that are hidden away, out of sight on our brain's hard drive, forgotten for the most part.

 

Some forms of psychotherapy can spend years searching for lost or forgotten files on your hard drive, but what do you do with those files once you have found them. Because as painful as the past can be, it is the past and the only thing you can do about the painful elements in your past is to accept them and develop the ability to live in the present moment without the tyranny of the past controlling your life.

 

I offer my clients a two-pronged approach to learning how to live with their anxiety. Firstly, I will help you develop the tools to cope with the anxiety driven scenarios that tend to get in the way of living a normal day-to-day life. But more importantly we will work together as a team to help you develop the ability to learn how to live with your anxiety, keeping it from being in control of your life.

 

This doesn’t mean that we won’t talk about the past, it just means that we will be talking about the future, because realistically that is why you have decided to consider therapy.