What I help with
Anxiety therapy for the alarm that will not switch off.
Anxiety is the body's alarm system doing its job at the wrong volume, long after the danger it was built for.
What this is
Anxiety is the body's alarm system doing its job at the wrong volume. It is meant to fire when something is genuinely wrong and then settle. When it stops settling, the same signal that once kept you safe starts running in the background of an ordinary Tuesday.
It shows up in the body before it shows up in words: a chest that will not loosen, a jaw held tight, sleep that comes late and breaks early, a stomach that reacts before you have consciously decided anything is wrong. It also shows up as thinking. Planning for outcomes that have not happened. Rehearsing conversations. Checking, and checking again.
None of that means something is broken in you. In Internal Family Systems terms, the anxious part of you is a protector. It took the job because at some point the job needed doing. Anxiety therapy is not about removing that part. It is about understanding what it is protecting, so that it no longer has to work quite so hard.
What the work looks like
A quiet, honest shape to the hour.
We start with the body
Before we analyse anything, we work with what your nervous system is doing right now. Mindfulness-based and body-aware work gives you something to do with the physical wave, so that sessions are not simply a description of the anxiety.
We get curious about the protector
Using Internal Family Systems, we get to know the anxious part rather than argue with it. What is it afraid will happen? How long has it been on duty? What would let it stand down?
We reach what sits underneath
Anxiety usually guards something older. Often that is unprocessed trauma, grief, or a period where staying alert was the reasonable response. When that is met, the alarm has less to hold.
Who this is for
Adults, teenagers, and children in Greenville and across South Carolina who are living with worry that has outgrown its usefulness. That includes panic that arrives without warning, social anxiety, health anxiety, anxiety that turned up alongside a life change, and the quieter kind that never quite announces itself but shapes every decision. I work with anxiety individually and, where it is affecting a relationship, with couples and families. If you are also carrying depression or the effects of trauma, that is common, and we treat it as one picture rather than three separate problems.
Questions
A few things people ask.
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