Stress, PTSD and Anxiety Therapists in Linden, NJ.

I can help you understand and reduce anxiety and stress. We'll start with a thorough assessment to understand whether you're experiencing clinical anxiety and what subtype or if you're just in a stressful season. Either way, we'll discuss a toolbox of self-care strategies from mindfulness and exercise to evaluating your work and lifestyle commitments to develop a customized stress-management plan for you. Then comes the hard part--sustaining those goals over time. I'll be with you every step of the way until you experience the peace you want in your life.

We embrace an expansive view of the individual and collaborate with clients to explore how their sense of self, past experiences, environment, and culture, impacts their current moods, relationships, experiences, and self-beliefs. We will work together in identifying what areas of life you would like to further explore to best reach your goals/growth in this process of self-discovery.

Anxiety is excessive worry about negative events that you expect to happen, but are not necessarily in the cards. The worry is enough to bring on dread, panic, obsessions, compulsions, and phobias. Usually, early life experiences – perhaps forgotten or suppressed -- taught you to anticipate the worst. Together, we will bring these memories into consciousness so you can consider if they still apply to you in your current life as an adult. This will help you stay more grounded in the reality of the here and now, which can significantly reduce anxious symptoms. I will also teach you calming techniques, including mindfulness practices and self-compassion to counter anxiety when it arises.

One of the approaches I use for anxiety and stress is Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which refers to a family of techniques that are designed to target maladaptive thoughts and behaviors that maintain anxiety over time. My objective with this kind of therapy is to facilitate more adaptive thinking through cognitive restructuring by identifying the presence of intrusive thoughts. In addition, Dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT) is another psychotherapy I use to focus on emotion regulation, mindfulness, interpersonal relationships, and distress tolerance.

Anxiety and stress are interrelated. Generally people with anxiety disorders, including obsessive-compulsive disorder, tend to internalize conflicts that cause them to always be stressed out, which affects their thinking and behavior. Through an eclectic psychotherapy approach that includes psychodynamic, cognitive and behavioral work, I help them release the fears and angers that underlie the build-up of stress. In time they learn to moderate their feelings, cope better with stressful situations and live a calmer life.