Anxiety Therapy in Toronto
Anxiety can make simple tasks feel like insurmountable challenges.
What is Anxiety?
Although anxiety often includes emotions like fear, worry, and sadness, it is not an emotion.
Anxiety is a state, where you body is stuck in hyperarousal and hyper vigilence.
You might be experiencing some of the following:
Feeling overwhelmed, chronically stressed, or constantly on edge.
Doubting yourself, your instincts and your decision-making.
Stuck in a cycle of people-pleasing.
Making your needs small or feeling unclear about what they even are.
Feeling responsible for everyone and everything around you.
Having a constant feeling of guilt, like you have done something wrong.
Symptoms such as insomnia, GI issues, chronic pain/tension, panic attacks.
Sometimes anxiety is described as an overestimation of danger and an underestimation of our ability to handle things. In my experience, it can also arise from an internal imbalance - a polarization in our psyche between deep needs, desires, fears, etc. “One part of me wants to set a boundary and say ‘no’, another part of me worries I will be rejected if I say ‘no’.”
Anxiety can make even the simplest tasks feel like insurmountable challenges. If you’re struggling to manage, I’m here to offer you a safe space to explore and heal.
How does therapy for anxiety work?
Together, we’ll embark on a collaborative exploration of your inner world, strategically uncovering the root causes of your anxiety and people-pleasing. Utilizing a blend of therapeutic techniques, I tailor my approach to meet your specific needs.
Welcome to my unique approach of “strategic journeying.”
Therapy with me works to resolve the inner conflicts and past wounds that contribute to anxiety. It involves taking a deep dive into the psyche – not just for the sake of understanding (though the insight part can be helpful), but for the purpose of figuring out, on a deep level, what is driving the anxiety. What needs to be healed in your internal landscape in order to bring a sense of ease, a cohesive sense of self and a feeling of strength and resilience? This is what we explore together, then we do the deep healing that is needed to help you not just cope better with anxiety, but heal the core issues driving it in the first place.
Through our work together, I create a safe and supportive environment where we can delve deep into your psyche while maintaining a light-hearted perspective.
I believe in the power of laughter and warmth to facilitate healing, even when delving into the most challenging emotions. With me as your guide, you’ll navigate through the layers of anxiety, gaining insights and tools to reclaim control over your life.
“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
- Anais Nin
Therapy for anxiety can help you:
Rediscover your inner strength and badass self.
Cultivate a sense of peace and acceptance within yourself.
Begin to set boundaries without all the guilt.
Identify and communicate about your needs.
Learn practical strategies to manage anxiety symptoms in your daily life (but not need to use them as much!)
Address underlying patterns that may be impacting your connections with others.
Counselling for Anxiety FAQ:
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Fill out the form in the 'get in touch' section of my website. We will set up a time to connect and see if we are a good fit in working together!
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I often start where other therapists leave off. Meaning that we start by gaining clarity about where and why you are stuck and do a deep exploration of what work we need to do to shift things for you.
I go deep with folks to get at root causes of their difficulties to achieve lasting change.
I work in a more condensed format, so that you can get relief sooner. 90-minute sessions allows us to get into flow together and access the energy and focus that is often required for deep transformational change.
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This depends on how much you want to work on.
I am someone who likes to help folks achieve relief and growth as efficiently as possible, all while fostering a trusting relationship and going at a pace you are comfortable with.
With some folks we do one short-term focused piece of healing and they move on with their lives, while other folks want to work on a few different areas of their lives.
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Absolutely! Anxiety and people-pleasing often have some roots in deeply held core beliefs that EMDR can work well to shift. Sometimes anxiety and people-pleasing can be responses to traumatic, overwhelming or patterns of experiences that we have gone through earlier in life that get stuck in our nervous system. EMDR allows us to identify these experiences, heal them, and shift our nervous system and subsequent behaviours.
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If you are someone who is constantly stuck in overthinking, someone who is constantly worried about what others think, who experiences chronic feelings of guilt, who second guesses yourself, or who experiences symptoms like panic attacks, knots in your chest/stomach or chronic tension, then you are likely a good candidate!