Anxiety
We all experience anxiety from time to time. Some of us may even experience the occasional moment of panic due to a current or impending event. These experiences may be quite normal. But when anxiety or panic begins to interfere with social obligations, previously enjoyable social plans, or day-to-day living in general: therapy can help. This includes assessments to determine if anxiety is due to an underlying medical or psychiatric condition.
Clients often indicate that anxiety distracts them from either joyful or more traumatic emotional experiences, leaving them with nothing more than increasing levels of anxiety over time. While every individual is different, anxiety tends to follow a set of rules which allow clinicians to determine how problems capture our minds, take us out of the present moment, with consistent disorienting results. We’ll gladly map the problems tied to anxiety to figure out the alternative options to better navigate life.
Anxiety Therapy in Los Angeles: What the Work Looks Like
Anxiety is rarely reported as a thought at first. It is reported as a body: sleep that breaks at four in the morning, a jaw that aches by noon, a stomach that will not settle, shallow breathing that goes unnoticed until someone points it out. Many people see a physician first, are told the results are normal, and arrive here still carrying the symptom.
Avoidance is what makes the world smaller
Avoidance is what turns anxiety from an unpleasant feeling into a smaller life. A freeway becomes a route to plan around. A meeting becomes a reason to reschedule. A party becomes a decision made two days in advance. Each avoidance works in the short term, which is exactly why it repeats. Part of the work is naming what has quietly been dropped, and deciding in what order you want it back.
Panic, understood mechanically
Panic responds to being understood mechanically rather than morally. Panic is not a character failure and it is not dangerous in itself; it is a set of physical responses arriving in the wrong order, at the wrong volume. Once the sequence is familiar, it stops being an ambush.
When anxiety is standing in for something else
Anxiety is also the most commonly borrowed diagnosis in adult mental health. It frequently sits on top of something else: undiagnosed adult ADHD, unprocessed grief, a relationship in which the same conflict keeps repeating, or a medical or psychiatric condition that belongs in a physician’s hands. Treating the anxiety alone can lower the volume while leaving the cause running. Assessment comes first for that reason.
Getting started
Consultations are free and run 15 to 40 minutes. Call (310) 927-1755, email michael@michaelneetherapy.com, or use the contact page. The office is at 13101 W. Washington Boulevard, Suite 454, Los Angeles, CA 90066, minutes from Marina del Rey, Venice and Santa Monica, and telehealth is available anywhere in California.
Anxiety can be worked on individually or, when it is shaping a relationship, in couples therapy.