Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Los Alamitos, CA.

We treat anxiety and stress by first helping you identify what may be causing it. Causes may include external stressors (like economic stress or marital stress), or internal stressors like being too hard on yourself, or not feeling fulfilled in life. depending on the cause, we then teach teach you find ways to perhaps think differently about the stressing situation, ways to change your life to reduce the stress, or techniques for stress inoculation such as relaxation training, meditation, or deep breathing exercises. If you have a panic disorder, we teach you specific coping techniques to deal with it in the future.

Anxiety can be debilitating, especially if you have panic attacks. It can feel like and assault on your senses and makes you want to flee to safety. I liken it to feeling as if a lion had walked into the room. Your brain tells you there is danger and you must fight or flee. For those who suffer from anxiety medication can help but there are also ways that you can learn to manage and control it. I try to help my patients to understand the universalized thoughts and feelings that feed the anxious beats and to learn techniques that will improve the quality of their lives.

Whether stress/anxiety results from pushing oneself too hard or needing to be too perfect, or from an over-active limbic system that just won't seem to turn off, or from current or past trauma(s), several approaches offer relief when they are used to effectively target the source of the problem: Voice Dialogue, EMDR, Cognitive-Behavior Therapy, Relaxation Training and self-soothing techniques, Assertion Training, Mindfulness, Neurofeedback. All or a combination of these can work to alleviate symptoms and heal the problem. Sometimes they are used in conjunction with short-term or longer-term medications. An exercise and nutritional program can also be extremely beneficial.

I have extensive training in phobias, panic attacks, obsessions, compulsions, rumination, worrying, withdrawal, avoidance, shame, guilt, self-hatred, suicidality, hopelessness, lack of motivation, and social disengagement. These are all behaviors that can result from life stressors and anxiety. Our minds are on overdrive when we are stressed, and our bodies are on high alert. I will teach you skills to quiet your mind, relax your body, and to face the fears you have that are stopping you from living the life you want.

I’d like to offer you 3 quick tips on managing the stress or anger in your life. Although I’ve written more extensively on this in other publications, this is just a quick, short list of three things you can do to tone things down a notch and improve your life. First, make sure that you are exercising regularly. While you exercise, become aware of what is bothering you. As you focus on your stressors, let the physiological energy generated by your anger or angst be burned off by your body. Let the exertion cleanse you… body, mind and soul. This is what I call Anger Work. Second, use “On-the-Spot Tension Tamers.” These are helpful when you are in the middle of a conflict or stressful meeting....

Research shows that therapy is the most effective option for treating anxiety and stress. As a Marriage & Family Therapist in Mission Viejo, CA I will work with you to help you to help you uncover the underlying causes of your stress, fears and anxieties; learn how to relax; look at situations in new, less frightening ways; and develop better coping and problem-solving skills. I will give you the tools to overcome anxiety and teach you how to use them. Since anxiety can differ from person to person, I will personalize your treatment to target your specific symptoms.

Conflict in relationships is inevitable and when couples cannot find resolution, anxiety builds. Often, this leads to shutting down or blowing up--both triggering behaviors that can drive a wedge between two people. As co-therapists, we help couples find ways to maintain differences while staying connected. Intimacy also triggers old unresolved issues that create stress. These old wounds have nothing to do with our partners. We help couples understand how these memories can interfere in the repairing with your partner.

Stress and anxiety are common feelings we experience. We often need help working through the anxiety producing events and sometimes we just avoid those events all together (which can create it's own stress and anxiety). Together we will confront the events that bring on the anxiety. Using easy to use tools from our therapeutic sessions, you can work on lowering the anxiety and stress and feel more comfortable with living your life to the fullest.

Stress and anxiety are normal feelings that accompany a loss or a major life change. As a grief and loss therapist I understand that stress and anxiety can leave you feeling paralyzed and unable to face the challenges in front of you. We will work together to reduce your stress and anxiety such that you feel more capable and able to handle the changes that often accompany a significant life transition.

We help clients define how they want their lives to be different and identify the steps that will help them reach their goals. We believe in the capacity of the individual to improve quality of life. Within the process of changing self-defeating beliefs and behaviors, we help individuals and families to find the insight to accept one’s own strengths and weaknesses and learn acceptance of ourselves and others.

The approach that I have found most helpful in working with people with anxiety and stress issues is helping them FIRST learn to slow down and relax. I have been trained and have worked for many years with victims of trauma who experience enormous amounts of stress. First, teaching coping skills and then exploring the underlying cause for the anxiety and/or stress. People with anxiety often report various symptoms ranging from having difficulty concentrating, being afraid to do things they used to do, having headaches, sweating a lot, having hypertension, fatigue, heart palpitations, and sexual dysfunction. Often, people with anxiety have limited support because they are embarrassed or....

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.

Stress is something we experience when our circumstances feel too demanding for our control. We can feel the symptoms of stress both emotionally and physically. Stress can cause us to feel anxious and out of control. Therapy can help to reduce the feelings of stress and anxiety by reframing these situations. It's a safe place to talk about the problems you are feeling anxious about and to work on different solutions to these problems. My framework is a problem solving approach but with a search for a deeper understanding as to why these situations may be causing anxiety and stress.