Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Riverside, MD.

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.

My clients benefit from my skills-based approach to anxiety management. I believe that everyone experiences anxiety uniquely. Together we explore how your anxiety can serve you and can also hinder you. I use a variety of evidence based methods to help my clients manage anxiety, even when their anxiety symptoms are primarily physical (muscle tension, headaches, racing heartbeat). I enjoy finding creative solutions with my clients in a collaborative relationship.

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.

There are few things worse than being paralyzed by anxiety and/or stress. I have worked with people experiencing symptoms that mirror a heart attack when faced with a panic attack; it is scary, overwhelming and debilitating. The good news is that there are ways to minimize this overpowering discomfort. I have helped my clients learn simple breathing exercises, relaxation techniques and other helpful coping skills to help them function better when facing overwhelming stress. I want to help you to navigate your life so that anxiety and/or stress is not winning and robbing you of joy in your daily activities. Trust me on this one, I have seen the smiles on my clients who have won.