Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Barrington Hills, IL.

Anxiety and Stress are one of my primary specialties. Anxiety and stress can affect all aspects of your life. My approach to counseling is down to earth, supportive, and informative. I will help you gain insights and teach you new coping skills. My goal is to provide you relief from your suffering. Counseling is a proven way to help manage anxiety and stress. Seeking a new therapist can be stressful and anxiety provoking. I strive to make the process as frustration free as possible. If you have any questions before making an appointment I would be more than happy to answer them.

Worry is a normal reaction to everyday stress and traumatic life events. Some ways of coping will reduce your discomfort. However, you may be one of the millions who experience anxiety to such a degree that it impairs your functioning at home, work or school. Left unchecked, anxiety will affect your overall quality of life. CBT, Mindfulness, and Exposure Therapy are proven methods for dealing social or performance anxiety, nightmares and sleep fears, intrusive negative thoughts, or OCD. Kari can assist you, your child or adolescent, in controlling anxiety and achieving relief from the mental and physical symptoms that can be debilitating.

Anxiety is what we feel when we worry too much about the future or overthink events from the past in the present moment. It's a physiological experience that can feel overwhelming, even frightening at times, it can prevent us from making good decisions or prevent us from making any decisions at all! Fortunately anxiety is treatable, in many case without medication. I will help you understand anxiety and provide you with tools and strategies you can use to begin to free your mind. Within a few sessions, most clients are able to think more clearly and make better decisions. They feel more at ease and relaxed to do the things they'd like to do to lead a happier life.

In anxiety and stress treatment, the first goal is to reduce your discomfort. Anxiety and Stress cause real physiological symptoms; a day of anxiety can result in feeling emotionally and physically exhausted. By addressing the events that trigger you, negative thoughts and reactive behaviors that are intertwined anxiety and stress, you can expect a quick reduction of symptoms while making pathways to new positive behaviors and reactions. Longer term, you'll learn to be aware of your triggers and stop anxiety before it starts; you'll work to achieve inner peace and reduce your stress with new self-care actions.

Anxiety and fear comes in many forms yet stems from living a life in the future not the present. Walking through what the fear might be helps the client become strong face what life in the present has in store for them. Focusing not he here and now eliminates many fears and anxieties. Understanding if brain chemistry is playing a significant role in the intense sometimes out of control emotions will need to be determined before effective psychotherapy can be utilized.

If you are experiencing stress and anxiety, I will help you learn strategies to manage the stress while helping you process and work through these experiences. It is my goal to fully understand you and grasp how this impacts your life; I work to integrate each biopsychosocial aspect of your experience when working through anxiety and stress. I will provide you guidance and support while empowering you to overcome these obstacles and helping you growing from them.

Similar in approach to the treatment of depression, I take a holistic approach to the treatment of anxiety and stress disorders. I seek to restore function and break the momentum cause by ineffective habits that were created as a knee-jerk way of responding to anxiety symptoms. The instinct to try to control our emotional experience is strong and understandable, but often creates difficulties that make anxiety symptoms more entrenched and difficult to treat. Learning techniques of relaxation and mindfulness are instrumental in the effective treatment of anxiety symptoms and regaining the kind of balance lost in the unrestrained experience of anxiety symptoms.

Anxiety and stress are a normal part of life, but are problematic when it interferes with your ability to function well. Therapy can provide psycho-education and an understanding of how you experience anxiety and stress in order to best manage it. Physical symptoms, emotional distress, and thought rumination are common aspects of anxiety and stress and we can begin to relieve and treat each of these through therapeutic approaches.

At times, we all think negatively; however, we are empowered because we can change the way we think in order to feel less anxiety and stress. In order to pursue optimal psychological health, one way to start is to begin to monitor our thinking regularly. The next step is to examine or question our thoughts and ask ourselves things like: Are our thoughts in proportion to what has happened? Is there any evidence that our beliefs are true? Cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective treatment approach for anxiety and stress especially if part of a comprehensive treatment plan.

Are you feeling overwhelmed by life’s demands? Does your body feel tense and stressed out? Is your heart racing quickly, are you unable to breath? Are you worried that you will never feel safe or calm again? Stress and anxiety present themselves differently to each person. We will help you understand your stress or anxiety, and determine the best course of action that will help you develop skills to manage both the physical and emotional symptoms of stress or anxiety. We not only help you calm yourself through cognitive behavioral approaches but also through our partnership with Nutritionists we can help assess your internal endocrine system and provide support through mediherbs.

Anxiety is a physiological response that occurs in several body systems. Stress may be one contributing cause. But there are so many others including undiscovered medical issues, unproductive thought processes, the use of stimulants, and co-occurring mental health issues. Once we identify anxiety's origin, we can draft a useful treatment plan and address the problem. And depending upon the anxiety's origin, our approach will vary. It's a cognitive-behavioral, reality based, solution-focused process that takes some time, but the results are worth the process.

I work with anxiety and stress using a cognitive behavioral approach. The goal is to help the client learn that they can manage their anxiety and stress. This is done through gaining insight into their perception and thinking around the circumstances causing them stress. We also work to help them reduce the anxiety through physical activity including exercise and relaxation. Combining the thought process with the physical component work well in reducing anxiety and stress.

I specialize in the treatment of Social Anxiety Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (Worry), Panic Disorder with or without Agoraphobia, Health Anxiety Disorder, Specific Phobias, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I would describe my therapeutic approach to be cognitive behavioral (CBT), with an emphasis on the behavioral. I also like to integrate other third wave mindfulness-based CBT approaches such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy when indicated.