Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Oceanside, CA.

You don't have to be anxious anymore! The biggest secret to being anxiety free, lies in understanding what anxiety really is. It is a generalized "fear" with no object. This means that the anxious person honestly answers the question, "What are you afraid of?" with "I don't know." When you come to therapy with me, I will teach how to answer the most important question that you can ask yourself, "What is behind the anxiety?" When you pay attention to the bodily sensations that exist "behind" your anxiety, the change process begins. In time, with successful treatment, you will experience a sense of peace. Calm confidence can become your usual or normal experience as the anxiety fades.

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 take over almost everything: a racing mind, a knot in your stomach, broken sleep, the feeling that you have to stay braced for something you can't even name. Persistent stress wears down your body and your patience until you barely feel like yourself. The good news is that this state is treatable, and you don't have to manage it alone. We'll begin by taking the edge off, then turn to the deeper question: what is your anxiety actually responding to? Worry rarely appears for no reason; it usually points to something underneath that deserves to be understood. I work in a depth-oriented way, helping you trace the unease back to its source so the relief holds permanently.

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.

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.

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.