Anxiety Therapy for Vancouver Island, Southern Ontario, and Halifax.
What is anxiety?
Your stomach is in knots. You feel like you are vibrating with nervous energy, and your mind is racing at a million miles per hour. You simultaneously can’t sit still, but can’t figure out what you want to do to help yourself either. Talking it out seems to help temporarily, until you are alone again where you feel on edge and unable to relax. You may feel like you want to run away from it all, or feel ready to burst out in frustration at the next person who irritates you. You may or may not be aware of why this feeling is taking over - maybe something major is happening in your life, or maybe this is a baseline feeling you have learned to live with. Either way, if you’ve experienced symptoms like this, you have experienced anxiety.
Having experienced and worked through severe anxiety myself, I can tell you with certainty that it is possible to feel better. If you are ready for a change, I am ready to meet you. Get started now by clicking the link below.
What is the difference between normal anxiety and an anxiety disorder?
Learn more about the symptoms of anxiety with this informative TED Talk by Dr. Jen Gunter.
Benefits of Anxiety Therapy
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Build closer relationships.
Improve your communication skills, rediscover your sense of adventure, and feel more confident in social situations.
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Know what to do.
Develop healthy coping skills for anxiety and learn how to look at situations in a more balanced, less frightening way.
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Feel better about you.
Increase your self-confidence, understand your triggers, and heal the underlying issues that keep you stuck in anxiety.
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Find more joy everyday.
Experience more calm, learn how to naturally find more positives day to day, get better sleep, and regain a sense of control in your life.
How Anxiety Therapy Works
There are many different approaches to treating anxiety. At Illuminate Therapy, I use an individualized treatment plan which may draw from different types of therapies, taking the best techniques that suit your distinct needs. Two empirically validated methods which I typically work with are Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). Each of these therapies focuses on helping you understand the difference between normal anxiety and suffering, while also helping you get to know your own specific triggers. Both therapies provide ample skills focused on emotion regulation, mindfulness, and crisis tolerance, so that you can feel equipped to handle anxiety triggers on your own outside of therapy.
In the interest of healing anxiety long-term, I may also use EMDR Therapy to help you process past events that have become stuck in your mind and continue to fuel your anxiety. While EMDR Therapy is typically associated with healing trauma and PTSD, it is empirically proven to be effective at helping clients to release the grip that any past painful experiences may have on them. In doing so, clients often report feeling lighter, and like they are able to fully move forward in their lives without the powerful influence that anxiety has had on them in the past.
FAQs
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“Living with anxiety” is a phrase that seems to be thrown around a lot on the internet these days (I’m looking at you, TikTok). Whenever I see this phrase, a part of me dies a little inside. It has become normalized to suffer through anxiety every day, trying everything you know just to survive, never feeling fully content.
The truth is, life doesn’t have to be this way. In fact, feeling constant anxiety is not a normal state to live in. Take it from someone who has struggled with anxiety throughout her life: there are ways to tell the difference between normal anxiety, and needless daily suffering.
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To know the difference, it is crucial to understand a little bit more about why anxiety exists in the first place.
In therapy, one of the first things I teach my clients is that all emotions exist for a reason. Yes, this even includes the emotions we don’t particularly like feeling, such as anxiety. Fortunately, this is great news because it means we don’t feel painful emotions for no reason - hooray!
So, why do we feel anxiety? One way to think of anxiety is like your brain’s alarm system. Anxiety is on the lookout for any potential threats to well being, whether those be physical or emotional threats. If your alarm system detects a potential upcoming threat, the emotion is meant to trigger an appropriate response from you to prepare accordingly.
In certain situations, this works really well. Let’s say you have an important exam coming up, but you’ve barely touched your books. In this instance, you’d likely feel anxiety every time you thought about that exam. This is what’s known as adaptive anxiety. The emotion is pushing you prepare for the exam more, an appropriate response for an upcoming exam that you’ve barely studied for.
However, let’s say a different student has studied day in and day out for the same exam. There’s nothing more they could possibly due to prepare for the exam, and every time they test themselves, they prove that they know their stuff. Yet, they still feel a crippling amount of anxiety just thinking about it, causing them to overwork themselves. This is known as maladaptive anxiety. In other words, this person’s alarm system is sensing an upcoming threat where there is none. This is a common experience that causes unnecessary suffering in many people’s lives.
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In the first session, I will spend time getting to know you. I will ask you about your history with anxiety, what it is like in present day, who the important people in your life are, and what your day-to-day life looks like. We will also set goals for therapy. You will have the opportunity to ask me questions about myself, and/or the therapy process overall. If there is something you are not quite ready to talk about in the first session, don’t worry. I know I am still a stranger to you and trust building takes time! I will never pressure you to talk about something before you are ready.
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Yes, it is not only possible - I’ve helped multiple clients do it! There are usually other underlying factors causing a person’s anxiety to spike unnecessarily throughout the day. While anxiety is necessary at times, it is not necessary to live with on a constant basis for the rest of your life. The underlying factors that cause pervasive anxiety are unique to each individual, the good news is that therapy with a skilled practitioner can help you discover and heal the root causes. At Illuminate Therapy, I can help you learn to recognize the difference between normal anxiety and needless suffering, develop emotion regulation skills, and heal the fundamental reasons anxiety developed in the first place. Before you resign yourself to living this way, I encourage you to ask yourself - when did you decide that living with anxiety was good enough for you?