Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Lakewood, CA.

Life can be overwhelming at times resulting in increased anxiety and stress. If you are experiencing difficulty sleeping, worrying constantly, and increased irritability, you can benefit from additional support. Talking about issues you are dealing with may be hard, but avoiding issues can be even more devastating. Lack of sleep and fearful thoughts often do not go away by themselves. Learning new techniques on how to cope with stress and anxiety can improve your relationships, your outlook on life, and your overall health and well being. Reaching out for help is not a weakness, it shows strength and willingness to learn skills to improve your life.

If you're struggling with anxious thoughts, you may find it hard to focus. The fight or flight alarm is going off in your brain, constantly sending you messages starting with "what if...." If worrying is keeping you trapped in a hamster wheel, tired, but unable to rest, you may find yourself turning to addictive substances or behaviours to cope. As an addiction counsellor, I help clients cope with the anxious thoughts keeping them trapped in addictive behaviours. By uncovering these underlying thoughts, I help you develop coping skills so you can gain a sense of focus, clarity, confidence, and freedom from constantly overthinking. Send me a message and I'll guide you through the next steps.

Living with stress and anxiety will rob you of joy, being present and out of control. While this can feel difficult to manage, you are not alone! I use cognitive behavioral therapy to help you address the thoughts that lead to anxiousness and stress. We will implement practical tools and strategies to work through some of these feeling and thoughts together.

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.

Much of anxiety and stress are related to the negative messages we send ourselves. We worry about what others think of us, what may happen in the future, and how we acted in the past; just to name a few. Because much of anxiety is based in our thoughts; a large portion of the work we do in this therapy is to challenge our thinking. By challenging our negative thoughts, we can experience a more positive shift in emotions and behaviors. We will also discuss and practice mindfulness strategies as a way to work on being more present in the moment and decrease the focus on negative repetitive thinking. Relief from anxiety is possible with effective skills.

Anxiety and stress are like an evil and corrosive thread that work their way through every aspect of a life. It can rob the joy that can make life worth living. I know from both personal and professional experience how anxiety and stress can take the joy out of life and also how to overcome these issues and put them in your past. With the aid of tools like EMDR CBT and guided visualizations I can help you overcome this issue and heal from the issues that drive it. Additionally, I can provide tools, coping skills, and other resources to help you manage this particular issue, and experience increased relief from these symptoms with each session.