Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Agoura Hills, CA.

it's normal to feel anxious or feel stress out sometimes. Everyone experiences anxiety differently. Some feel it in their bodies where others feel it emotionally (hard time breathing, shortness of breath, feeling overwhelmed, sweaty hands, muscle tension (headache, neck pain, back pain ), racing thoughts, and so on. In therapy, we will work together to find triggers to your worry and find ways to decrease symptoms. ​

Learning to overcome stress and anxieties can be a challenge. Therapy can help you learn tools to understand the cause of your anxieties and stressors, their roles in your life and ways to reduce their impact on your life. Tools can include meditation, art therapy and various other techniques to identify the root cause while learning what works and does not work for you.

Everyone can feel some level of anxiety once in a while. But overwhelming, recurring, or "out of nowhere" fear can deeply impact people. Sometimes anxiety can cause fatigue, irritability, difficulty focusing, sleep problems and muscle tension. When anxiety interferes like this, therapy can really help. Together, we will figure out the most troublesome issues, develop a treatment plan, and tackle the goals at a comfortable pace. I utilize cognitive-behavioral therapy, but also incorporate other modalities when helpful (i.e. exposure therapy, systematic desensitization, relaxation).

Anxiety is an inability to be fully relaxed. It is mental and physical tension. Many things cause it and many things perpetuate it. Not all anxiety is bad or needs to be extinguished. I work with the client to understand the meaning of their anxiety. I find sometimes people are not consciously aware of the real reasons they cannot feel relaxed. Enlisting the client's sense of curiosity about their own thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations I aim to identify their symptoms of anxiety and the origins of them. I utilize cognitive behavioral and mindfulness strategies to identify and replace unhelpful thoughts with more productive ones.