Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Porterville, CA.

I take a practical approach to treating anxiety and stress. I help you identify the sources of anxiety if you do not already know them. I support you in learning skills to regulate your emotions and increase awareness of body sensations and experiences in order to help you be able to control and reduce feelings of anxiety. I also use a combination of exposure therapy, if appropriate, and adjustment to lifestyle to help you reduce or eliminate sources of anxiety or stress. I know that every experience of anxiety or stress is unique and I will work with you to develop a plan of support tailored to your needs. I will provide a safe environment for you to challenge and overcome your fear/stress

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.

We hold our anxiety and stress in our body. We feel tension, gut problems, hot flashes, disrupted sleep and more. I work with anxiety and stress by helping individuals learn and develop tools to re-regulate their nervous system. When we have a coherent and fluid nervous system, we can do difficult things without feeling paralyzed by overwhelming fear.

Anxiety and stress are the symptoms I treat most often in my practice. Some people are not aware, but trauma is deep-rooted anxiety that is held within our body. We can feel anxious about work, children, relationships, or family. We can feel stressed about work or relationships and friendships. A highly effective tool for treating these symptoms is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way that you can learn to relax the anxiety that is held within your body and your mind. I love this technique because it is not only highly effective, but it is very easy to learn. You can walk away from your first therapy session with a start to your mindfulness journey and have real tools at your disposal.

I begin by understanding how you experience anxiety/stress because how you experience them is unique for you. Then we begin to increase your tolerance for how you experience anxious/stressful thoughts, feelings, memories, and/or situations. This is necessary so the anxiety/stress stops being an overwhelming experience that interferes and gets in the way of your life. It's crucial to be able to become more comfortable when you experience anxiety/stress because they're a part life. The problem is the distressing and limiting to debilitating effect they have on you. As you learn to be able to do this, you will begin to experience more peacefulness, calm, hope, self-confidence and self-esteem.

Couples interact in 1 of 3 ways to anxiety and stress. (1) They turn toward each other. (2) They turn against each other. (3) They turn away from each other. The latter two responses cause or compound existing stress and anxiety. Instead finding support from the other, a bad situation is made worse when a couples are not there for each other. I help spouse's reduce their stress and anxiety by assisting them to turn toward each other and find relief and gain the knowledge that whatever one is facing, he or she is not facing it alone.