What this can feel like
- Waking at 3am with the same loop running, and by morning losing a fight nobody else heard
- A chest that gets tight in meetings you're not even speaking in
- Avoiding things you used to do easily, then explaining the avoidance to yourself in ways that almost make sense
- Catastrophic thinking that you can identify as catastrophic and still can't stop
- Physical symptoms — gut, sleep, headaches, jaw — that come and go with stress and look 'fine' on tests
- A constant low-grade buzz of dread that you've started thinking is just your personality
- Calling something 'high-functioning anxiety' as if that makes it manageable
How therapy can help
Therapy for anxiety works when it actually addresses the body, not just the brain. We use evidence-based modalities that have been shown to reduce anxiety symptoms over a course of weeks to months:
- Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) — including exposure-based work for specific fears, which sounds unpleasant and isn't, and works
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) — for the part of anxiety that doesn't go away no matter how much you try to think your way out
- Somatic and breathwork-based regulation — for the nervous system, which doesn't respond to logic and isn't supposed to
- Mindfulness-based approaches — to change your relationship with the anxious thought without having to win an argument with it
- Sleep, lifestyle, and routine work — because anxiety is not separable from how you actually live
If the anxiety is connected to identity — minority stress, family, coming out, dysphoria — we treat it in context. Decontextualized CBT for someone whose nervous system is responding to a real environmental load is treating the symptom and ignoring the cause.
You don't have to figure this out alone
If any of this looks familiar, that's reason enough to reach out. The first conversation is mostly logistics — you don't have to walk in knowing what to call any of it.