Therapy for Anxiety

Maybe your life seems good on paper, but deep down you feel a pit in your stomach, like something bad is about to happen and you don’t know what or when. Whether you’ve experienced anxiety all of your life (and tried many ways to solve it), or it’s a new struggle born out of an overwhelmed schedule and societal pressures, an anxiety therapist can help you break free from negative thought patterns and find new ways of coping.

What does anxiety feel like?

Anxiety usually feels like dread that won’t tell you what it’s about.

For some women it’s mostly physical. A racing heart. A tight chest, a clenched jaw, trouble falling asleep even when you’re exhausted. For others it lives in the head. You replay a conversation from three days ago. You rehearse tomorrow’s meeting. You check the lock, or the symptom, or the baby, and the relief lasts about ten minutes before you need to check again.

Anxiety never takes a day off. It doesn’t matter if you’re at work, home with your kids, or out with friends. An anxious body doesn’t know when to trade fight-or-flight for calm. That makes it hard to be present with the people you love, and they often feel the tension even when you’re doing your best to hide it.

It’s also easy to miss in women. From the outside you look organized and on top of everything, so nobody sees what it takes to get there. The National Institute of Mental Health reports that 23.4% of women had an anxiety disorder in the past year, compared with 14.3% of men, and a lot of them are dealing with anxiety while everyone around them assumes they’re fine.

What causes anxiety?

There’s rarely one cause. It’s usually a mix of biology, timing, and patterns your brain has been practicing for years.

Hormones matter more than most women get told. Anxiety often shows up or worsens the week before your period, in the months after a baby, or during perimenopause. Estrogen and progesterone help regulate serotonin and GABA, the systems that keep your stress response in proportion, so when those hormones swing, anxiety can spike even when nothing in your life has changed.

Worry is also self-reinforcing. The more you worry about one area of your life, the more it spreads to other areas. And the more you worry, the more you begin to doubt yourself, so the cycle continues.

Family history, chronic stress, and past trauma all play a part too. Plenty of women hear that it’s just hormones, or just stress, and end up dealing with anxiety for years before anyone treats it properly.

Anxiety also takes different forms, and treatment works best when it’s matched to the one you actually have.

Therapy can help you manage your anxiety and live a more vibrant life.

Hustle culture tells us that we have to go, go, and go at all times. That we have to stay in the know, be everything to everyone, and struggle quietly (if at all). Counseling for anxiety is an opportunity to challenge this mindset and find strength and empowerment in letting go of cultural expectations. The goal is for you to slow things down, practice the art of self-compassion, and reconnect with your values so that you can live a more vibrant and authentic life.

Our therapists use an integrated approach that considers how anxiety overlaps with many other issues, including trauma, depression, and OCD. We know that anxiety manifests in many ways, and no two people struggling with it are alike. We know that anxiety can be especially hard to detect in women, since many women have high-functioning anxiety and don’t appear anxious on the outside. Our practice recognizes the subtler signs of anxiety and we understand how our society makes life especially hard on women and mothers.

We don’t believe in just sitting and nodding. We want you to feel seen, heard, and understood, but we also want you to walk away with tangible tools that you can use to manage anxiety on your own. Whether you’re seeking treatment for Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), social anxiety, postpartum anxiety, or any other way it presents itself, we’ll equip you with mindfulness strategies to help you cope, connect with your intuition, and learn to be more present in the moment.

These skills can help you gain the confidence and self-trust to slowly face your anxiety and eliminate the need to fall into avoidance behaviors (drinking, isolating, etc.). This way, your life can expand rather than continue to contract in the face of anxiety.

What kind of therapy is best for treating anxiety?

We’ll match you with a therapist who will tailor treatment to your own needs and draw from a wide variety of therapeutic approaches. Generally the best therapy for anxiety involves supporting you with one or more of these modalities:

COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (CBT) —The goal of CBT is to help you understand how negative thoughts and emotions are fueling your anxiety.

DIALECTICAL BEHAVIORAL THERAPY (DBT) —This approach is especially useful for managing severe anxiety and reducing panic attacks. It gives you skills for building up your distress tolerance and developing your resilience.

ACCEPTANCE AND COMMITMENT THERAPY (ACT) —By helping you connect with your values; ACT allows you to become more adaptive and flexible in your thinking. You can stop defaulting to automatic stress reactions and start responding to life more thoughtfully.

EMDR Therapy —  EMDR harnesses the brain’s natural healing abilities, allowing individuals to process and integrate traumatic memories in a way that significantly reduces their impact on us.

Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) — An evidence-based treatment that seeks to slowly and systematically expose you to your fears in a safe and controlled setting. ERP can help you build your confidence so that you can stop relying on your rituals and make different choices when you’re triggered.

No matter which approach suits you best, we believe that you can recover from anxiety and live life to the fullest again. You’ll find this same quality of care whether you book in-person therapy in Philadelphia or South Jersey, or online in one of the 43 states we serve.