Anxiety Counselling in Vancouver

Our approach to anxiety therapy in Vancouver

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Anxiety is a change in mood that happens to many of us. Anxiety is characterized by feelings of worry, stress or nervousness and is accompanied by somatic symptoms like muscle tension and stiffness, butterflies in the stomach, or jaw clenching. Folks who experience anxiety talk about being “wound up or on edge”, feeling unsettled and hypervigilant, or having ruminating or catastrophizing thoughts. Folks with anxiety can also get stuck in "what ifs" thinking patterns. This worry is often exaggerated and unrealistic, with nothing specific to provoke it. In Canada, anxiety disorders affect 5% of the household population, causing mild to severe impairment (CMHA, 2021).

Anxiety is not uncommon, but still misunderstood. Like other mental health challenges, anxiety can impair our social, occupational and/or familial engagements. For example, since COVID-19, some folks have been experiencing anxiety that interferes with their ability to do activities of daily live (ADL), such as grocery shopping, dog walking, or hanging out with friends. 

Anxiety can impact each of us differently. It is not a one-size-fits-all challenge. Anxiety symptoms go from butterflies in the stomach, muscle tension, hypervigilance to paralysis and panic attacks. You might even experience an upset stomach or diarrhea, even with the use of Pepto Bismol.   

A different way of understanding anxiety that has helped us over the years, and that is borrowed from theories of the Stress Response and Accelerated Experiential Dynamic Psychotherapy (AEDP), is understanding anxiety as an inhibitory emotion or protective emotion to threat. This can be a real or imagined threat that stems from the mental, emotional, social, or physical environments. We have come to appreciate this perspective of anxiety because it helps explain its symptoms as an automatic response to real or perceived danger that keeps you ready to survive. It is a sort of protective mechanism that is unconsciously triggered to keep you safe and alive, even if it demands a lot of mental and physical resources. 

Anxiety can also appear when core emotions (like sadness or anger) are too intense and your brain wants to push them away, or are in conflict with what pleases others you need like parents, partners and friends. For instance, like shame and guilt, anxiety shows up as poor sleep or difficulty concentrating at your workplace when being angry with your colleague threatens your involvement in a passion project.

While there are a lot of self-help resources and tools that you can do to improve your anxious mood, sometimes a powerful way to turn anxiety and stress around is by going to counselling. To help your anxiety in counselling, we will explore your story, make connections between past, present and future experiences, uncover and expand new truths, and start healing what is keeping you worried. 

Together we will have the opportunity to integrate mindfulness, somatic experiencing, emotional awareness while using evidence-based practices, such as person-centred therapy, accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), internal family system (IFS), sensorimotor psychotherapy, and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR).

If you have any questions about this perspective of anxiety or want help in Vancouver, feel free to get in touch.