Anxiety Counseling: What to Expect & How to Prepare

Anxiety counseling is designed to help you understand, mitigate, and relieve anxiety, allowing you to return to the life you wish to live. This process involves various skills, approaches, and tools tailored to manage and reduce anxiety effectively. My personal approach to anxiety counseling revolves around understanding the root causes and patterns of anxiety, which helps in managing and mitigating it over time.

Understanding Anxiety

Understanding anxiety involves focusing both on where the emotion comes from and how we experience it.. Here’s how we approach this:

• Identifying Sources of Anxiety: We will examine patterns in your life where you frequently feel anxious. This includes identifying situations, perspectives, or life patterns that trigger anxiety. we will look at patterns in your life where you often feel anxious. From that understanding, we will seek to figure out what makes those patterns, situations, or perspectives so uncomfortable.
• Exploring Physical Sensations: We will also explore where and how you experience anxiety physically in your body.
• Changing Perspectives: Our goal is to understand and eventually shift how you perceive these anxiety-inducing situations over time.

Managing and Mitigating Anxiety

To mitigate or manage anxiety, we will utilize different techniques:

• Grounding Techniques: These are used in the moment to help you calm down and decrease the intensity of the anxiety. They focus on breathing and building awareness of your physical senses. Paying attention to your breath and what you can sense (see, hear, feel, smell, and taste) helps you to get out of your head and into the present moment.

• Coping Skills: These techniques focus on managing anxiety or stress and allowing you to calm down after the experience. They are your ways of recharging and getting ready for the next day.

Relieving Anxiety Through Reprocessing

Relieving anxiety combines understanding and managing with reprocessing. Reprocessing allows you to gain a different perspective and decrease activation in anxiety-inducing situations. This reprocessing can be done in different ways. Many clients find Brainspotting to be both highly effective and very quick. The goal of reprocessing is to reduce the intensity of anxiety by reevaluating the purpose or function of anxiety in your life. 

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If this article was helpful to you, or if you have any questions after reading this, please reach out! The staff at Tennessee Mental Wellness are happy to answer any questions, provide further resources, or match you with a therapist. 615.510.4551