Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Palos Verdes Estates, CA.

Anxiety and Stress is often a very physical experience. It greatly affects our nervous system. I use a deep processing method called brainspotting to help regulate the nervous system and bring people their minds and bodies into the present. Often after a stimulus, a person's nervous system may still be activated or depleted after it ends instead of being at homeostasis. You can learn to regulate your body after a stimulus shows up.

Anxiety and stress can feel overwhelming, leaving you drained, restless, and unable to focus. In therapy, I provide practical tools to calm the mind, regulate the body, and gain a sense of control. Together, we uncover triggers, challenge unhelpful thought patterns, and develop strategies that bring more peace and resilience into daily life. My approach blends compassion with evidence-based techniques, helping you find balance, reclaim confidence, and restore calm so you can move forward with clarity and strength.

Are your worries and fears overwhelming, preventing you from living your best life? Do you feel paralyzed by panic and doubts? If this sounds like you, and you want to make some changes, I’d like to help. The good news is that excessive worrying is a habit you can learn to break. We can work together to teach your brain to stay calm and collected and to look at life from a more realistic and positive perspective. Together we will decrease your preoccupation with ‘what ifs’ and ‘worse case scenarios.’ Through tailored relaxation techniques, and VERY SLOWLY exposing you to your fears, we can reduce your anxiety to a manageable level, so your fears are no longer interfering with your life.

Stress is a part of our everyday life, so much that living a life without stress seems surreal. Anxiety can be a result of the day to day stresses that are related to personal life, work life, and school life to name a few. A minimal amount of anxiety and stress in specific situations can be the motivation needed to complete tasks, power through exams and overcome the impossible. Learn how to calm and relax your mind by using visual techniques such as creating a safe place you can visit during times of intense stress and discover healthy and effective ways in which you can help relieve your mind and body of undesired anxiety and stress.

If you suffer from anxiety and stress, we can work together to understand the triggers of your stress and identify concrete, usable strategies to take into everyday life to manage it. Ancient stoic practices can be particularly effective in dealing with anxiety and I integrate these into my therapy sessions. Together, we can work to overcome the symptoms of anxiety and improve your daily experience of the world. With the right tools and support, you can start to live your life to the fullest again.

Big or small, anxiety has a way of effecting our lives. Anxiety not only effects those who struggle to do, but also, those who are already doing so much. We can minimize it, rationalize it, and tell ourselves it's circumstantial but the truth is anxiety is the very thing that keeps you from feeling connected to the moment and those around you. In our work together, I will help you cultivate techniques, strategies and mindsets unique to you that will help you to reclaim your life, allow you to be present to the moment, and create a feeling of wholeness. If you're ready to feel less stress and live in a more meaningful way I'd love to meet you and see how I can support you in your journey.

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.

How can therapy help with anxiety and stress? By making sure that your life style does not fuel anxiety… determining necessary changes by implementing relaxation techniques and daily lifestyle habits... exploring past experiences, emotional needs, ways of coping that you developed early on and how they impact everyday reactions (automatic thoughts, feelings, actions)… learning various techniques to take more control of your thoughts and feelings and respond more effectively to emotional triggers.

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.

Anxiety is an inability to be fully relaxed. It is mental and physical tension. Many things cause it and many things perpetuate it. Not all anxiety is bad or needs to be extinguished. I work with the client to understand the meaning of their anxiety. I find sometimes people are not consciously aware of the real reasons they cannot feel relaxed. Enlisting the client's sense of curiosity about their own thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations I aim to identify their symptoms of anxiety and the origins of them. I utilize cognitive behavioral and mindfulness strategies to identify and replace unhelpful thoughts with more productive ones.

Feeling overwhelmed by anxiety? My sessions provide a calming space to understand the root of your anxieties. We'll work together to identify triggers and develop practical tools to manage anxious thoughts and emotions. This might involve cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) to challenge negative thought patterns, relaxation techniques to manage physical symptoms, or mindfulness exercises to cultivate present-moment awareness. Together, we'll create a personalized plan to help you navigate anxiety effectively and build a sense of calm in your life.

Understanding the Role Of Stress In Just About Everything ScienceDaily (Jan. 11, 2008) — Stress, to put it bluntly, is bad for you. It can kill you, in fact. A study now reveals that stress causes deterioration in everything from your gums to your heart and can make you more susceptible to everything from the common cold to cancer. Thanks to new research crossing the disciplines of psychology, medicine, neuroscience, and genetics, the mechanisms underlying the connection are rapidly becoming understood. Dr. Sobo uses mindful techniques to teach patients skills for managing stress.

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....