Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Altadena, CA.

Are you tired of feeling anxious and fearful? Do you have too much stress in your life? I am a psychologist that specializes in helping you decrease feelings of anxiety, fear, and stress. With empathy and compassion, I work collaboratively with you to gain understanding and insight into the situations that cause you anxiety so that you can finally thrive in your life rather than survive it!

Many people feel anxious from time to time. But when feelings of anxiety and stress occur regularly and begin to interfere with your relationships, your social life, your job or other aspects of your life, it is time to consider professional treatment. I help people better understand and manage the physical and psychological effects of stress and anxiety. We will together seek to identify, explore and understand the sources of your anxiety and the thoughts and feelings associated with it, revealing how together we can work to change and resolve the anxious feelings you are experiencing. This resolution will help you feel and function better as you move forward in life. Feel free to call.

Stress or anxiety don’t always get in the way, but sometimes they do. Learn to identify the sources, recognize how they stop you, and change the impact they have on you and your life. Learn how old patterns shape your self-image, self-esteem, and expectations, and discover new ways of dealing with that. Fear doesn’t have to stop you from having what you want in life. And, sometimes it’s a valuable asset, like knowing which is the lion and which is the lamb. Psychotherapy with me helps you to sort out when to listen to the fears and when they no longer apply. You’ll also learn coping strategies that can help when you’re caught up in the fear. Your fears don’t have to control you.

We all have stress and anxiety; the question is how we deal with them. Past traumatic experiences may heighten levels of stress and anxiety as well. Therapy which kindly and fearlessly helps pay attention to leftover emotion that may not have been attended to can help relieve suffering, isolation, fear and anger. A therapist may provide the safest place clients have ever had within which to be heard, seen and valued.

I work with clients using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mindfulness, Narrative Therapy, Expressive Arts, and psychoeducation to address anxiety and stress. Many folks are experiencing extreme stress as a result of all we have experienced in the last year. I'm able to work with clients experiencing burnout, increased anxiety, and higher stress relying on neuroscience as the guide.

We live in stressful times and many people struggle with anxiety that can range from simple daily worry to debilitating fear. Identifying the triggers underlying anxiety, big or small, can help you develop strategies for dealing with the thought patterns and fixed beliefs that are preventing you from living life to the fullest. As we begin to process your anxiety together, we may find that it is caused by past trauma or events in your family history. Developing skills to cope with immediate anxiety, while slowly working through past trauma or family issues can help to decrease the experience of anxiety in daily living, as well as in your life, overall.

I believe anxiety can be stalled by shame, miscommunication, and hidden thoughts. I will work with you to identify how this happens through your relationships-- and this can be any type of relationship; coworker, friend, boss, sibling, partner, child, and/or spouse. What often helps in this area is to practice mindfulness and a cognitive intervention and other techniques to create self awareness and foster relationships.

I begin by understanding how you experience anxiety/stress because how you experience them is unique for you. Then we begin to increase your tolerance for how you experience anxious/stressful thoughts, feelings, memories, and/or situations. This is necessary so the anxiety/stress stops being an overwhelming experience that interferes and gets in the way of your life. It's crucial to be able to become more comfortable when you experience anxiety/stress because they're a part life. The problem is the distressing and limiting to debilitating effect they have on you. As you learn to be able to do this, you will begin to experience more peacefulness, calm, hope, self-confidence and self-esteem.

In treating anxiety, the most impotant issues is interupting the cycle of worry, obessing over worry, fearing the return of worry, and allowing worry to spread to every aspect of your life. Discriminating realistic reasons to worry from irrational reasons can help clients with excessive stress to cope. Interupting and redirecting thoughts of anxiety to more productive thoughts and activities will interupt the cycle that creates habitual anxiety. We will look at times you may over-react to triggers (be it an upcoming social situation, or a stumbling block that creates more stress and predictions of failure). We will take this path together. You are not alone.

It is a given! The issue is not that we have anxiety, rather it is not being able to make sense out of what is making us anxious. Anxiety is a warning signal that something is wrong and we need to be alert to what we need to take care of ourselves. Anxiety changes when we can be in dialogue with someone who can help us understand what the surrounded issues are that need our attention. Being alone in our anxiety keeps us trapped. Being connected in our fear changes it. This is what good therapy does. It provides a space to no longer be alone in your anxious feelings. Being responded adequately in your fear allows confidence and peace to return.

Anxiety and Stress are both rampant in our modern society. It is my belief that relationships are both the root cause as well as the solution to struggles with anxiety. I take a family systems approach to address these issues by raising the functioning of the relationships in my clients' lives and allowing them to regulate and feel more peace day to day.

Anxiety can impact your life in many ways, from causing panic attacks to persistent worry to avoiding activities you once loved and enjoyed. Anxiety can hinder your quality of life and rob you of a fulfilling existence. Many of our clinicians at VOBH have extensive experience treating anxiety disorders so that you can stop worrying and start loving your life again.

Everyone experiences stress and anxiety at one time or another in their lives. Stress interferes in peoples lives at least moderately; however, chronic stress can affect your health, causing symptoms from headaches, high blood pressure, and chest pain to heart palpitations, skin rashes, and loss of sleep. Talk therapy has been proven to alleviate stress and in my practice I also use breathing, relaxation, and meditation techniques that help clients alleviate their stress symptoms.