Therapy
Anxiety
is rarely
just
fear.
It can look like responsibility.
Preparation.
Perfectionism.
Replaying a conversation until you are certain you understand what happened.
Trying to anticipate what someone needs before they have to ask.
Trying to make the right decision—and then trying to determine whether it really was the right decision.
Trying to prevent a mistake, disappointment, conflict, embarrassment, loss, or uncertainty before it happens.
Some of these qualities may have served you very well.
They may be part of what has made you conscientious, perceptive, dependable, and successful.
The difficulty is that anxiety can gradually recruit those strengths into its service.
Preparation becomes endless preparation.
Reflection becomes rumination.
Responsibility becomes responsibility for what you cannot control.
Doing something well becomes needing to prevent anything painful from following.
Escape
Anything
but this.
When anxiety becomes intense, most people don't think:
I would like to practice tolerating this experience.
They think:
Make it stop.
I can't feel this.
I have to figure this out.
I need to know.
Anything but this.
Of course you try to get away.
Fear feels terrible. Uncertainty can feel unbearable. Shame can make you want to disappear from your own experience.
So you do what human beings naturally do when something feels dangerous: you look for an exit.
Sometimes the exit is obvious. You avoid the situation.
Sometimes it is harder to recognize: you analyze, check, rehearse, seek reassurance.
You explain, apologize, prepare more, distract yourself, or keep thinking until certainty feels close enough.
And sometimes it works.
For a little while.
The trap
What works for five minutes can keep anxiety going for years.
That temporary relief matters.
If checking makes you feel safer, even briefly, your mind learns to check again.
If reassurance quiets the fear, your mind learns to seek reassurance the next time.
If avoiding something reduces your anxiety, avoidance begins to feel protective.
If analyzing produces even a momentary sense that you have finally figured things out, thinking harder begins to seem like the solution.
These responses are not foolish.
They make sense.
But over time they can teach you something you never intended to learn:
I cannot handle this feeling unless I escape it.
And because thoughts, feelings, memories, uncertainty, and bodily sensations arise inside you, there is ultimately nowhere far enough to go. The effort to get away can begin organizing more and more of your life.
Shame
And then shame enters the cycle.
Anxiety is painful enough on its own.
But when you are also fighting desperately not to feel it, not to think it, or not to respond the way you responded last time, another layer of suffering can develop.
And when all that effort doesn't work—or doesn't work for very long—the aftermath is often shame.
Now you are no longer only anxious.
You are ashamed of being anxious.
Ashamed of how hard you tried to make the anxiety stop.
Ashamed that reassurance didn't last.
Ashamed that you avoided again.
Ashamed that you needed anything in the first place.
And shame gives you one more internal experience to escape.
The cycle tightens.
Understanding
Sometimes relief begins when the struggle becomes part of what we understand.
Not just the anxiety itself.
What happens when fear appears?
What does your mind immediately tell you must happen next?
What do you do to make the feeling smaller, the uncertainty disappear, or the feared outcome less possible?
How well does that work in the moment?
And what does it cost you afterward?
Understanding this is not about finding another reason to criticize yourself.
Quite the opposite.
The attempt to escape usually had a logic. It was trying to help. It may have helped once. It may still help briefly.
Part of therapy is learning to understand that pattern well enough that it stops looking like evidence of personal failure and starts becoming something we can work with.
Sometimes one of the first moments of relief is simply:
Oh.
There is a reason I do this.
The first change
The first change is not fearlessness.
It is often something much smaller.
Staying.
Not forever.
Not heroically.
Just long enough to notice what is happening before automatically doing what anxiety demands.
Can we stay with the uncertainty for another moment before finding reassurance?
Can we notice the thought without immediately solving it?
Can we allow the feeling to be present without treating its presence as proof that something is wrong?
Can we notice the urge to escape before deciding whether escape is actually what we want to do?
At first, even a small pause can be difficult.
But that pause matters.
have to
can't
Something else begins to appear.
A little room.
Choice
Then
comes
choice.
Choice does not mean always choosing perfectly.
It doesn't mean ignoring fear.
It doesn't mean deciding that nothing matters.
It means becoming increasingly able to notice fear without automatically handing it the decision.
Sometimes that means doing the thing anxiety says to avoid.
Sometimes it means not checking one more time.
Sometimes it means letting someone misunderstand you.
Sometimes it means making the best decision you can without waiting for certainty that cannot come.
Sometimes it means discovering that you can feel afraid, embarrassed, uncertain, disappointed, or imperfect—and remain present for what happens next.
and stay here.
this right now.
not knowing.
isn't a fact.
a choice.
The work
Therapy involves understanding.
It also involves experience.
My work is grounded in humanistic/person-centered psychology and informed by cognitive behavioral and acceptance-based approaches.
I am interested in understanding how your particular experience developed, what it means to you, and what has kept it going.
But insight alone does not always create change.
Sometimes we will experiment.
We may look carefully at a belief you have treated as fact.
We may notice what happens in your body when anxiety rises.
We may practice responding differently to uncertainty, reassurance-seeking, avoidance, perfectionism, or self-criticism.
We may discover where a strategy that once protected you is now limiting you.
And we will pay attention to what you learn from your own experience—not simply what I tell you should be true.
There is no prize for doing any of this quickly.
We begin where you are.
The goal
The goal is not to never be afraid again.
Fear is part of being alive.
So are uncertainty, disappointment, grief, embarrassment, vulnerability, and mistakes.
Therapy cannot—and should not—make you invulnerable to them.
The goal is something different.
To recognize what you feel without immediately becoming trapped in the effort not to feel it.
To understand your mind without believing everything it says.
To care about people without assuming responsibility for everything they experience.
To prepare without needing to prepare for every possibility.
To make decisions without putting yourself on trial afterward.
To experience fear without allowing fear to determine the boundaries of your life.
More room to pause.
More room to choose.
And perhaps, eventually, more freedom to discover what matters to you when anxiety is no longer making quite so many of the decisions.
Focus
What I work
with.
My practice focuses on adults experiencing chronic worry, overthinking, generalized anxiety, perfectionism, self-doubt, and the relentless self-criticism that often accompanies them.
The concerns that bring people to therapy are rarely simple or isolated from the rest of their lives. Our work may also involve relationships, grief, identity, transitions, trauma, responsibility, loss, or other experiences that have become intertwined with the anxiety.
I have a particular interest in working with thoughtful, conscientious women, although I work with adults of any gender when my experience and approach are a good fit for what brings them to therapy.
I provide individual psychotherapy through secure telehealth to adults located in Washington and Oregon.
Beginning
We begin where you are.
If you have spent a long time trying to get rid of anxiety, the idea of turning toward any part of it may sound like the last thing you want to do.
That makes sense.
We don't begin by demanding that you welcome what frightens you.
We begin by becoming interested in what is happening.
Then, little by little, we find out what becomes possible when the only available answer is no longer:
Anything but this.
Get in touch