If I wrote that everybody experiences anxiety and stress you might think I was minimizing what you’re experiencing. Truly I’m not. I don’t even know about your stress and your stressors or your anxieties and all you’re dealing with. It’s my job to listen to you and learn exactly what you’re experiencing so I can help you help yourself by learning to deal with your stress differently.
First of all, I want to say, loudly and clearly: since Covid hit our world there’s been a lot more free floating stress, anxiety and trauma than usual. Lots more! Covid has rocked our world in more ways than we can count. When your life is turned upside down, like Covid has done, it’s hard to cope with everyday things because all our plates are fuller than they were and we have more unanswered questions and more real fears for our physical and emotional safety which is two of our basic human “Needs” we all have. When our basic needs aren’t met the feelings that come up are hard to handle. So, IF you’re feeling bogged down with stress and anxiety and/or being triggered to earlier traumatic events – you’re not alone AND there’s help available for you! You can reach out to a therapist for some appointments to come up with more ways of handling stress and learning what you can be doing differently in your life to cope with this current unprecedented level of stress.
It’s not the absence or presence of stress and anxiety that count, it’s the degree to which anxiety and/or stress affects you that’s key to whether you can handle life well or not. Is anxiety and stress motivating you to overcome them or holding you in a black hole that seems way too far down for a climb up. The hole can feel so deep there’s no light shining down from the top to guide you. It can be a slow descent or a fast crash – no matter how you got there, once you’re there it’s a paralyzing place to be.
You don’t need to be overwhelmed by stress or anxiety to have it affect your feelings of powerlessness, inadequacy, and fear and therefore how you are coping with life. Any amount can trigger internal messages like, “I don’t like feeling stressed and anxious.” “This is interfering with how I want to be.” Or, “It feels so hard to function with this weight of agitation and fear.” Or, “I worked so hard and now I’m seeing a life I envisioned slipping away.”
Sometimes, whatever is stressing you today triggers you (back) to an old, unresolved stressful situation or trauma. You can think of it as: when today’s stressful situation reminds you of an old anxious or traumatic situation, they can both blend into one much larger stressful challenge to you. And you can feel really stressed out! In therapy you’ll learn to recognize when that’s happening and we can heal the old trauma or stress, separate the two stresses out, and figure out ways of handling today’s stresses more effectively.
There are a variety of ways we can work together to reduce your anxiety and stress. If we try all we can think of, and you’re still feeling like your stress is out of control and running your life instead of you running your life, we look to referring you to doctor to assess if medicine can help reduce your stress. Usually, you can learn to reduce stress and anxiety to a manageable level with some tools you can use anytime, anywhere for some relief.
Therapy Modalities We May Use:
- Talk Therapy
- Brainspotting
- Breathing Techniques
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
- Dialectical Behavioral Therapy
- Gestalt Therapy
- Mindfulness
- Motivational Interviewing
- Neuro Linguistic Programming
- Psychotherapy
- Thought Field Therapy