Help with anxiety
A personalized, compassionate place to explore worry and anxiety.
Understanding anxiety
Anxiety is often referred to as stress. Stress is a broader term, and some stress can be part of learning, exercising, developing skills or accomplishing a task.
It can be natural to feel anxious in a troubling situation, before a public presentation, when asking someone out on a date or when facing a difficult conversation at work. These feelings may pass with the situation. When anxiety becomes repetitive, persistent or pervasive, it can begin to affect how you live.
What may contribute to anxiety?
Understanding anxiety involves looking at your individual experience. Family, social and environmental history, temperament, difficult or traumatic experiences, neglect, development and the support available to you can all be important to explore.
Facing major decisions or stressful experiences without adequate support, including during childhood, may shape the ways you respond and cope today. Physical health, medications, substances and lifestyle are also matters to discuss with an appropriately qualified professional.
Different experiences of anxiety
Panic
Sudden, intense fear can come with a pounding heart, sweating, trembling, breathlessness, chest discomfort, nausea, tingling, chills or feeling flushed. Some people describe feeling unreal, fearing that they are losing control or having a sense of impending doom.
Social anxiety
Everyday situations such as shopping, working or speaking with others can bring overwhelming worry and self-consciousness. You may fear being watched, judged, embarrassed or ridiculed.
The worry can begin days or weeks before an event, continue while you are there and return afterward as you think about how others saw you. It may affect work, school, ordinary activities or making and keeping friends.
For some people, the fear centres on one situation, such as speaking in front of a group. Physical symptoms can include blushing, sweating, trembling, nausea or difficulty talking.
Specific fears
An intense fear of an object or situation, such as heights or flying, can lead you to avoid situations that would otherwise be part of everyday life.
Persistent worry
Sometimes anxiety feels present much of the time, even when its cause is difficult to identify. Worry and tension can become so uncomfortable that you stop doing things you would otherwise want or need to do.
How counselling can help
Counselling provides a place to explore your emotional responses, the patterns that keep anxiety going and ways of understanding and responding to them. The approach should take account of your needs and circumstances.
My goal is to help you with compassion in a private and confidential setting. You can begin by learning more about the practice and how to get started.
Self-assessment questions for anxiety
These questions are for reflection and discussion, not a diagnosis.
View the original questions
- Do you feel that you worry excessively about many things?
- Do you experience sensations of shortness of breath, palpitations or shaking while at rest?
- Do you have a fear of losing control of yourself or of “going crazy”?
- Do you avoid social situations because of feelings of fear?
- Do you have specific fears of certain objects, e.g., animals or knives?
- Do you feel afraid that you will be in a place or a situation from which you feel that you will not be able to escape?
- Does the idea of leaving home frighten you?
- Do you have recurrent thoughts or images in your head that refuse to go away?
- Do you feel compelled to perform certain behaviors repeatedly, e.g., checking that you locked the doors or turned off the gas?
- Do you persistently relive an upsetting event from the past?
Disclaimer:This self-assessment can help understand some of the symptoms of anxiety. This assessment is purely a screening tool and is not intended to provide or be used for diagnostic purpose.
James’ approach to anxiety
I begin by understanding what anxiety is like for you: when it arises, how it affects your life, and the experiences and patterns that may be contributing to it.
EMDR is my primary therapeutic approach. Together, we can consider whether it is appropriate for your needs. We take time for assessment and preparation, and consider your readiness before working with distressing experiences and the responses connected to them.
My goal is to offer a compassionate, personalized place to understand your responses and work toward the changes that matter to you. Read about EMDR therapy below, then visit Before We Meet to learn about the practice and how to get started.
