Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Charlestown, MD.

Everyone feels anxiety at some point in their lives but when it starts to interfere with your life, counseling can help. Although anxiety can feel debilitating, it is treatable. People with anxiety don’t always share the same symptoms, they vary from person to person. Therapy will help you to reclaim your life and function in a chronically stressful world.

To help you manage your stress and anxiety symptoms, we start with understanding the nature and patterns of your symptoms in relation to environmental triggers, traumatic life events, and unhelpful thinking patterns that influence your daily perspective. Using a collaborative alliance, we will look for better ways to manage both your external stressors and internal reactions. A cognitive-behavioral approach offers practical methods to understand how thought patterns influence emotional reactions and behaviors. By redirecting and re-framing your thoughts with alternative thoughts, you can experience a reduction in unpleasant emotions and an increase in personal effectiveness.

There are at least four components to reducing anxiety. The first is to learn self-soothing techniques. the second is to become aware of the thoughts and images which are making you anxious and to deliberately choose other thoughts and images. The third is to discover and face what you are most afraid of. Sometimes, when there has been trauma, this fear is something that has already happened and from which you have not recovered. Often it is something out of your control, a fact of life, like death! We need to make peace with these, accept their reality and make the best of what we have. I have some excellent tools from hypnosis and a field of study called NLP to speed your progress.