Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Newport Beach, CA.

I specialize in helping people who struggle with never feeling quite “enough" and want freedom from shame and anxiety. The torment of living with an inner critical voice is exhausting. Achieving more is not the answer. Looking better and trying harder are not the solutions. You deserve to trust yourself and feel comfortable in your own skin. I would like to help you discover self-acceptance and find liberation from anxiety.

How does anxiety and stress play out in your life? It is a vital aspect of our lives, important at very specific times. Yet when anxiety is the ruler and someone is helpless it becomes a life limiting function. Anxiety might also be an avenue to avoid more intense emotional feelings and thoughts. A valuable goal might be to respect and manage one's anxiety and stress in order to live a more free and productive life.

Most days, everyone experiences anxiety and stress on some level. The problem arises when the anxiety begins to interfere with normal functioning and you become paralyzed to be more productive. Anxiety can be a specific fear (worries about safety/security) or more generalized where you just constantly feel “anxious” and do not know why. When you are in that state, it is hard to recognize the triggers, or what thoughts/behaviors may be exacerbating your symptoms. Therapy helps to uncover those patterns while also offering techniques to stop them from being debilitating, so you can move forward with a more satisfying, productive everyday life.

Anxiety affects your whole being. Physiologically, you may experience rapid heart beat, muscle tension, queasiness, and sweating. Behaviorally, anxiety can sabotage your ability to deal with certain everyday situations. Psychologically, it can cause great apprehension, uneasiness, and fear. In our counseling sessions, we will address all of the way that anxiety is affecting you. I will teach you methods to reduce physical symptoms, eliminate avoidance behaviors, and change the "self talk" that helps to perpetuate the worry. Through the use of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), we will work towards changing the thought and behavior patterns that add to your distress.

I am a psychoanalytic therapist with a focus on anxiety and stress. Through my practice, I strive to create an empathetic, non-judgmental space where you can express your thoughts and feelings. I take a unique approach to therapy, exploring the underlying causes of your concerns and developing personalized solutions to help you move forward. My goal is to help my patients gain insight into their struggles and find inner peace.

Experiencing occasional anxiety is a normal part of life. However, anxiety disorders and ongoing chronic stress can appear as repeated episodes of worry & fear, or develop into sudden feelings of intense anxiety with physical sensations, known as panic attacks. Your anxiety may feel related to an event or thought, and other times appear to occur randomly and without cause. Anxiety can develop at any age, when left untreated it may develop into depression. In therapy we will explore how anxiety is affecting your life. You will learn how your physical, emotional and mental health are connected and together create an effective treatment plan specific to your goals to improve your well-being.

We hold our anxiety and stress in our body. We feel tension, gut problems, hot flashes, disrupted sleep and more. I work with anxiety and stress by helping individuals learn and develop tools to re-regulate their nervous system. When we have a coherent and fluid nervous system, we can do difficult things without feeling paralyzed by overwhelming fear.

The modern world we live in is full of amazing technological advancements and organizational wonders, but it is also more complex and demanding than ever before. The myriad competing demands of our lives, how busy we are, the continual pressure to do and be more creates enormous stress for all of us. This stress can escalate into anxiety and the added strain of these issues easily begins to short-circuit our ability to function at our best, to feel good, to maintain relationships and responsibilities. I can help you understand the internal and external forces creating these negative feelings, and together we can find strategies for minimizing stress and anxiety so you can feel better.

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.