Anxiety Therapy in Portland, OR
Ahh my dear friend anxiety. Anxiety and I have spent a long chunk of time getting to know each other over the years. A huge light bulb moment came to me that radically shifted the way I treat anxiety and how I approach it with clients. In my early years, I tried everything to “control” my anxiety. Distract myself, tell myself “I am fine” and seek validations from others. Over time, I quickly found the more I tried to run from my anxiety, the more it became a bigger and bigger part of my life. Socially, generally, and in performance, anxiety was finding its way in. I finally came to the understanding that what would it look like to instead of pushing my anxiety away, instead learn to sit with it. Now, I know that idea for people (myself included) feels impossible. Won’t anxiety take over? The answer is not if you have the tools to know how to hang out with it.
My aim is to help people learn how to “hang” with their anxiety. First, we identify the areas in one’s life that anxiety has gotten in the way of. Is it going for that new job? Talking to that new person? Making a needed change? We then learn the “signs” of what anxiety is and how we relate to it. For example, anxiety for me shows up as a tightness in the chest and a rush of thoughts. Next, we learn skills of how to “relate to the anxiety differently”. This is the “hanging out” part mentioned. It’s like, “I might not like you, but I am willing to get to know you a bit better.” I compare it to that person that you had a negative first impression of, but once you got to know them, they were not nearly as bad. That is often the experience with anxiety.
So to summarize, the issue that we run into with anxiety is that we often deem it as a “problem” that needs fixing. However, anxiety is a normal human process that the sooner we come to realize that is it ok to exist, the more resources we have to spend on doing the things in life that actually matter.
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Learn to Hang With Anxiety
Take the first step toward understanding and managing your anxiety. Develop the tools to relate to it differently and focus on what truly matters in your life.