Feeling Anxious?
What would happen if…? What did that person think of me? Did I say/do something stupid? I am worried something bad will happen. My body feels tense, tight, racing heart, sweaty palms, and my face is turning red. I don’t want to leave my house or engage in social activities.
Anxiety
Is something that most people struggle with at some point in their life. Anxiety can express itself in different ways. Some of these can be in physical symptoms (stomach ache, headaches, muscle aches, etc), cognitive (obsessive thoughts), behaviorally (compulsive behaviors, checking, isolating, etc), or relational (difficulty expressing yourself in your relationship). Multiple therapy techniques and skills can help to ease these symptoms. Together, we will develop a treatment plan to pick the best methods to decrease symptoms of anxiety and allow you to feel more confident. Some of these skills can include relaxation skills, mindfulness, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT), Acceptance Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Internal Family Systems (IFS). Don’t worry… I’ll explain what these skills look like and we can collaborate to find the most effective treatment for you.
Trauma Treatment
What is Trauma?
You have experienced a traumatic event if you have felt that your life, or the life of someone you love, was in danger. A misconception around trauma is that it is an event that you had to experience. Unfortunately, our bodies do not discriminate between “actual” or “feared” events. Our bodies respond rather the threat is real or imagined. So a traumatic experience can occur because you thought/felt you weren’t safe in a situation. Our central nervous system becomes active in a fight, flight, freeze state in order to prepare us to cope with the traumatic situation. It becomes irrelevant if the feared event occurs because our body has already started preparing.
Trauma can be a single incident (i.e. car accident) or multiple incidents (i.e. growing up in a home with domestic violence, abuse, etc) or within the context of relationships (i.e. relational trauma if a person who is supposed to love us inures us physically or emotionally).
Treatment Approach
The most important part of doing trauma work is feeling safe. I use a collaborative approach to help you figure out how you want to process your trauma. I tend to rely on Internal Family Systems (IFS) to help you approach the part of you that experienced the trauma in a compassionate and curious way. This allows your adult self to nurture the traumatized parts. The first step of doing this is establishing that the parts of you that help you to feel safe (we call them protectors) are comfortable with us speaking to the traumatized part(s). The goal is to allow those traumatized parts to no longer need to hold onto the trauma and be able to release it, so that the part can find a new way to support you. In addition to IFS, I utilize other trauma treatments such as somatic work (connecting with how our body feels), narrative (creating a new “story” around your trauma), cognitive behavioral therapy (identifying and replacing irrational thoughts around the trauma), and relational (learning how to trust yourself and others).