Treatment for Anxiety, Fear, and Worry

• Excessive worrying or nervousness
• Panic attacks
• Obsessive thoughts
• Feeling tense, restless, or stressed
• Sleep difficulties and/or nightmares
• Phobias (e.g. fear of socializing or performing)

Possibly you’ve learned to manage your anxiety through avoiding the things that you fear, such as socializing, dating, or performing. Or perhaps by numbing your anxiety with alcohol, drugs, overeating, or other compulsive behaviors.
Specific ways that anxiety may be holding you back in your life include:

• Shyness or low self-esteem
• Job related anxiety
• Fear of public speaking
• Decreased confidence
• Test or performance anxiety
• Avoiding athletic or competitive activities

You may feel that your on-going anxiety serves no purpose and wish it would just go away. While this is understandable, it is helpful to realize that it is a very protective part of yourself that has become stuck in the mode of constantly warning you of any potential problems that you could face. But as this protective part tries to help you avoid re-experiencing painful situations from your past, it creates a lot of anxiety, fear, and worry for you in the present. The key to overcoming this anxiety, fear, and worry lies in resolving the old traumas that keep you connected to anxious and emotionally difficult situations from your past.

The term “trauma” refers to those emotionally painful experiences that you’ve endured in your past, which still create discomfort for you. Because traumatic experiences are overwhelming, the negative feelings, memories, and uncomfortable body sensations that occurred during the trauma tend to get “frozen” in your nervous system, and thus remain unprocessed. This is what accounts for the symptoms that get activated when your anxiety gets triggered, such as fear, worry, panic, and sleeplessness.

The types of traumas that cause anxiety can be severe or subtle. Clearly, severe trauma can cause intense anxiety. But more subtle traumas can have a major impact also. Examples of the types of traumas that can be at the source of your current anxiety, fear, and worry include:

• Experiencing the death of a loved one
• Family conflict or stress
• Feeling betrayed or rejected by a  significant other
• Physical, verbal, emotional, or sexual abuse
• Health problems, such as an injury or invasive medical procedures
• Role modeling by a highly anxious parent

Another contributing factor to anxiety is the role of negative beliefs. Your beliefs are shaped by past experiences. Positive experiences lead to positive, supportive beliefs. Negative, painful, traumatic experiences lead to negative, unsupportive beliefs. They typically operate outside of your awareness, yet wield enormous influence over how you think, feel, and behave.  Many of our negative beliefs – such as “I’ll never good enough.” – link up to anxiety, fear, and worry.

Or feelings of being trapped, hopeless, and discouraged – common symptoms of depression – can also lead to fear and worry about never feeling good again.
Fortunately, the emotional trauma and negative beliefs that keep your anxiety alive can be released and the present-day challenges that trigger your anxiety can be resolved.

New skills and resources include relaxation techniques, deep breathing, and learning how to effectively handle anxiety-provoking thoughts and worries will be learned. This also includes being more assertive, setting healthy boundaries, and learning how to problem solve instead of focusing on worries.
The goal  of treatment is to help you experience:

• Increased calmness
• More self-confidence
• A sense of empowerment
• Feeling in charge of yourself and your life
• Feeling comfortable in your own skin