ANXIETY & DEPRESSION THERAPY
Anxiety / depression is one of the most common problems we encounter in our clinical practice. The Latin roots of anxiety include concepts related to pain and distress. To feel anxious is to catastrophize your world; neutral or even positive events seem like disasters to people with anxiety.
Why do we feel anxious? The arousal that underlies anxiety is actually a good thing; it’s part of what lets us run from threats and marshal our mental resources to solve problems. You’re programmed for arousal and survival, but this programming can go wrong. Our developmental experiences can lead us to form negative cognitions that perpetuate themselves and inform our behaviors. Part of treating anxiety is about isolating, exploring, and processing these cognitions.
The bad news is that anxiety is self-perpetuating. Negative cognitions run deep and strong, and you might not even know you have them. The good news is that your brain is adaptive: It wants to turn negative into positive, hurt into healing, chaos into meaning.
THERAPY PROCESS
Our approaches to healing anxiety are based in your brain’s own strengths. Therapy based on memory retrieval and reprocessing—EMDR—isolates the roots of your negative cognitions and helps you challenge the catastrophizing, self-defeating thoughts that give rise to anxiety. Neurofeedback puts you into control of your brain’s arousal patterns, letting you feel what it’s like to be calm and empowered instead of anxious and afraid. Psychoeducation and talk therapy help you better understand, benefit from, and participate in the overall process of anxiety reduction.
Life gives us many reasons to be anxious. From bad childhood experiences to work crises, from relational stressors to the state of the world itself, we’re all impacted by experiences and stimuli that demoralize and threaten us. You’re not alone in feeling frightened, out of control, and powerless. Fortunately, you’re not doomed to anxiety; your cognitive wiring has just been temporarily overwhelmed. We can help you—not to eliminate anxiety, but to return it to its proper place in the infrastructure of yourself. Anxiety, like depression, is your brain’s overzealous attempt to address meaningful problems; this attempt needs to be respected, worked with, and returned to its intended purpose of putting you into a problem-solving, functional state instead of an anxiety-ridden, debilitated state.
