Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Benicia, CA.

Are you feeling stuck? When you’re depressed, anxious or overwhelmed, it feels that life is always difficult. Anxiety and stress can also immobilize us and make it difficult to take any action. Taking the time to work through challenges in therapy improve your life in ways you never imagined. I am a therapist who helps clients manage anxiety and break through depression. My style is warm and nonjudgmental, and I work collaboratively with a wide range of clients. I have a great deal of experience with postpartum depression and anxiety. Using insight-oriented psychotherapy and mindfulness techniques, I will help you find a way to stop feeling stuck and move forward.

Anxiety and stress are not just clinical diagnoses. They are pervasive to the human condition. If you are alive, you are feeling them. They play a role in relationships, work, eating, sleeping... everything! However, it is not enough to simply "manage" them. We need to understand what scares us, what keeps us awake at night, what it is that matters to us. Because anxiety is experienced to some degree whenever something matters, it also points us to our desire and helps us to learn about what we want. Therapy can help us make use of our anxiety to give us a better sense of what we want from our lives and how to confront the fears that are on the way.

Anxiety and stress are actually two different things. Where stress usually comes from actual and identifiable challenges, anxiety tends to be more arbitrary in that there isn't necessarily one specific cause. However, both anxiety and stress tend to develop based on one's specific context--that is what one has experienced through their lifetime. While some anxiety and stress is actually good for us (i.e. propels us toward action), excessive amounts can create both emotional and physical challenges. I work with clients from a top-down/bottom-up approach, working to help the brain to better control the bodily effects of stress and anxiety and the body to control the brain.

There is an almost infinite list of causes for anxiety and stress, probably a few more if you live in a metropolitan area. Maybe your anxiety is decades old from trauma, family of origin, or chemically related. Perhaps it's situational and can be attributed to a recently suffered trauma, is work related, or relationship related. When you are stressed out or anxious, your brain doesn't function optimally. Instead, it functions in crisis mode and impairs your decision making ability and leaves you feeling too drained for the rest of your life. I will help you to regain your control by giving you concrete strategies and tools to manage them.

The modern world we live in is full of amazing technological advancements and organizational wonders, but it is also more complex and demanding than ever before. The myriad competing demands of our lives, how busy we are, the continual pressure to do and be more creates enormous stress for all of us. This stress can escalate into anxiety and the added strain of these issues easily begins to short-circuit our ability to function at our best, to feel good, to maintain relationships and responsibilities. I can help you understand the internal and external forces creating these negative feelings, and together we can find strategies for minimizing stress and anxiety so you can feel better.

Anxiety often serves a useful function for humanity when it is not overused, facilitating us keeping our responsibilities and agreements, and remaining ethical and moral in our behavior. Yet, anxiety, leading to stress is the most common dysfunctional problem in today's high pressured world where stressors abound. Anxiety when overused, like too much anger, is self destructive to our minds and bodies. My therapy style assists you to get to the root of your anxiety, determining what secondary gain you may be getting from this behavior and weighing it against the cost. I can assist you to get to the source of your anxiety and learn behaviors thta will serve you and your family better in life.

Anxiety and stress come in all shapes and sizes and can be thought of as acting on different levels, including the physiological, cognitive, and behavioral levels. These levels often interact with each other and can make it difficult to function in life. I can help you gain an objective understanding of your anxiety and stress and teach you skills to help you cope more effectively with future stressful events.

I work with clients using Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, mindfulness, Narrative Therapy, Expressive Arts, and psychoeducation to address anxiety and stress. Many folks are experiencing extreme stress as a result of all we have experienced in the last year. I'm able to work with clients experiencing burnout, increased anxiety, and higher stress relying on neuroscience as the guide.