Getting Help for Stress and Anxiety

Stress, worry and anxiety are familiar feelings for everyone but sometimes they reach a level where you need help. Anxiety can take different forms. Some of the common ones in Elizabeth practice include:
  • Work related issues: worries about job performance, workplace problems, unemployment, and career changes.
  • Relationship related issues: problems with or fears for partners, children or aging parents, dating, breakups/divorce, loneliness or social anxiety
  • Generalized anxiety: it’s not one thing, the problems just keep coming.
  • Chronic anxiety: It’s always something. Even when things are OK in the moment, there is still the worry that trouble is coming.

How to Treat Stress & Anxiety

​Elizabeth adjusts her approach to the personal style of the client and specifics of how anxiety is showing up in their life. There are different ways to think about anxiety and each perspective leads to a different treatment approach.
  • If stress and anxiety are caused by a solvable problem, then we can use new coping tools to reduce the symptoms plus solution focused work to resolve the problem. 
  • If we think of anxiety as a habit of thought, learning to recognize when it is happening, pause, and make a different choice is a way to break the old habit and establish a new, more effective response.
  • If anxiety is as an overuse of our otherwise helpful ability to plan, then the key is to harness constructive worry letting excessive rumination take over.
  • If we think of anxiety as part of a survival strategy, learned in past traumas, then addressing the trauma will release the need for anxiety.
  • If we think of anxiety as a voice in the head or a gremlin on the shoulder, then we can ask questions about what anxiety is trying to accomplish and how it convinces you to do what it wants.
  • If we think of anxiety as a defense against fear, then dealing with the fear more directly reduces the need for anxiety.
  • If we think of anxiety as physical experience in the body, then medication, exercise, meditation and relaxation techniques can help shift the internal functioning of the body.
 
As the sessions unfold, Elizabeth adjusts her approach, using tools from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Emotionally Focused Therapy and Process Therapy to match what is happening in the moment, paying attention to what works and doesn’t work for the client. 

How To Get Started

​If you would like Elizabeth to help you with stress and anxiety, visit For Prospective Clients and then contact Elizabeth.