Are you tired of feeling overwhelmed by anxiety?
Anxiety has many faces. Perhaps your mind can’t stop racing and your thoughts keep you up at night. Maybe you keep rehearsing in your head situations that will happen in the future, anticipating everything that might go wrong, or trying to predict every scenario. Or you might be repeating conversations that happened in the past, feeling burdened by doubt, regret, or guilt.
You may feel constantly afraid of being judged by others, or worried about what they will think when they see your flaws and insecurities. You might feel trapped in relationships or perhaps you’re afraid you will be hurt, abandoned, rejected, or unloved by those you care about. Or you feel be constantly guarded or in high alert, unable to relax, lower your defenses, and just be.
At times like this, it might seem impossible to feel grounded or to think clearly. Instead, we feel fragmented, scattered, disoriented, restless, and at times terrified. While anxiety is a normal human feeling, sometimes it can be overwhelming and draining. Here is when anxiety counseling can help.
How can anxiety therapy help?
Anxiety in itself is a useful response to potential danger, risks, or threats. It can help us take action and focus on specific tasks. However, it can also be debilitating and get in the way of our life and relationships. Sometimes we have an idea of what is making us anxious: a specific upcoming event, a recent situation, or a specific worry or concern. At other times, it is hard to understand why we are feeling this way, in fear or panic.
Anxiety therapy can help not only manage the feelings of anxiety but understand the underlying fears. Anxiety might be engrained in our personality, not just be a passing feeling we can separate from. Our anxiety therapists in Chicago can help you increase awareness and understanding of your own experience, including the identification of triggers and unconscious fears behind your reactions so that you can live life without this constant weight on your shoulders.
What is anxiety?
Anxiety can be defined as an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes. More broadly, we can think of anxiety as fear in the absence of obvious danger.
This definition focuses both on the symptoms of anxiety and on the experience underlying these anxiety symptoms. Both of them need to be addressed during anxiety therapy in order to get to the root of your experience.
Anxiety is not intrinsically a “disorder,” but a normal human experience and a natural reaction to conscious or unconscious danger. We all experience anxiety to a greater or lesser degree, whether it is based on the stories we tell ourselves in our heads, what we learned to anticipate in relationships, the pressures and crises of the external world, or a mix of all of the above. Anxiety rarely comes alone: it can be accompanied by depression, irritability, guilt, shame, or relationship issues.
However, anxiety can sometimes be very draining and debilitating, getting in the way of functioning, relating to others, and living authentically. Working with a skilled anxiety therapist can help you uncover the causes of anxiety, which can be very personal, complex, and run deep into our histories and our early relationships.
We sometimes know our triggers and why they cause anxiety. Other times we may feel confused about the intensity of our emotional reaction - we may not even know what is making us feel this way. This is where psychodynamic therapy for anxiety, a form of anxiety treatment that gets to the root of the issues you’re dealing with, can help. Along with your therapist, you will be able to increase your awareness, make sense of your anxiety experiences, address its root causes, and find new ways to deal with challenges and stressors.
Symptoms of Anxiety
While everyone’s experience is different, some common symptoms of anxiety include:
Disruptions in our emotions, irritability, withdrawal, mood swings, or feeling on edge
Body-based symptoms like migraines, fatigue, restlessness, or accelerated heart rate
Intense and ongoing worry about past, present, or future events
Difficulty concentrating, as our minds are racing through the anticipation of catastrophic scenarios.
Better handling these symptoms is part of the process of anxiety treatment. However, these symptoms usually have meaning and they’re trying to communicate something to us, whether it is a deep seated fear, worry, or sense of unsafety. In the process of anxiety therapy, working together with a specialized anxiety counselor, you will start to understand what these symptoms are trying to say, listening to them in a different way in order to change from within.
Feel grounded in yourself again.
Sources of Anxiety
Anxiety is usually triggered by worries about things that take place in the future. These triggers are associated with specific contexts, such as social anxiety, performance anxiety, attachment anxiety, or sexual anxiety. Our fast-paced world and the pressures we experience at school, work, and society can also be important triggers.
However, triggers and sources are not the same, and anxiety counseling can help you differentiate them. The sources of anxiety can be defined by the fears underlying our anxiety. Working with a skilled anxiety therapist can help you recognize a number of different fears that may have deep roots:
Fears of abandonment, loneliness, and not belonging, which can create an uncertain and unknown future that might feel overwhelming.
Fears of rejection, leading to feelings of unworthiness and of being unlovable. Our sense of self might feel threatened, as we carry the fear that “if they really knew me, they wouldn’t want me.”
Fears about our physical safety and our ability to function. It includes the experience of being “trapped,” even if not in a literal sense, limiting our sense of agency or control over our life.
Fear of self-judgment or of not living up to our own standards, which might lead to feelings of low self-esteem, guilt, and shame based on our past actions or the stories we tell ourselves about our self-worth.
Fears of losing control of our own feelings, thoughts, behaviors, or body sensations, of feeling uncontained and uncontainable.
Fear for our physical, emotional, or psychological existence or survival. This form of “annihilation anxiety” is often unconscious, and It involves fears of being overwhelmed, trapped, invaded, fragmented, or of losing our personhood and sense of self.
Psychodynamic anxiety therapy is aimed at understanding the deep roots of your anxiety, including the awareness, recognition, and working through of these underlying fears.
Beyond “anxiety management”
Treatment for anxiety sometimes involves working with an anxiety therapist to acquire coping skills to manage symptoms. This can be important to feel more grounded and find ways to handle our emotional experience, but it’s often not enough as it may not get to the root.
Ongoing or chronic anxiety can be an expression of childhood experiences of unresponsiveness, misattunement, neglect, rejection, abandonment, or abuse. This process can create insecurity in our relationships, questions about our self-worth, doubts about the importance of our needs, and mistrust in others.
These questions might turn into ongoing fears that lead to ongoing feelings of anxiety. Anxiety therapy that understands you and your experience in-depth becomes even more important when childhood experiences become part of where our fears come from.
How can our Chicago anxiety therapists help?
There are several anxiety treatment options, including taking medication to manage our symptoms, and a number of options for anxiety therapy in Chicago. Some anxiety counseling approaches focus on thought patterns and their impact on our emotions. While these approaches can be valuable in some circumstances, they usually do not address the complexity, depth, and meaning of our experiences.
Therapy for anxiety with at Fermata Psychotherapy will allow you to increase your self-awareness and understanding of the origin and meaning of your anxiety. This will help you confront and process the fears and feelings at the root of your anxiety symptoms. You will do this in a safe and non-judgmental environment. You and your therapist will explore your experiences, recognize patterns that anxiety has created in your life, identify deep-seated fears, and develop a sense of self-acceptance and compassion.
Therapy for anxiety can help you find new ways to relate to yourself, reclaim a sense of agency and hope, improve your relationships, and take steps toward living a more authentic, centered, and fulfilling life. Our anxiety therapists in Chicago can support you through this journey in person or via telehealth
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Banner photo credit: Uday Mittal