Anxiety therapy in Byron Bay

What is anxiety?

Worrying all the time
overthinking everything
paralysed by indecision
frazzled by stress that won’t turn off
burning hot with self-consciousness
stopped in your tracks by panic

Thoughts

Anxiety is worry. Worrying about what people think. Worrying about what’s going to happen. Worry about what you’re going to do.

Body sensations

It’s also a whole range of very unpleasant body sensations.
Sandpaper scraping your internal organs.
Heat.
Your heart thumping violently against your chest wall.
Dread. Hot, prickly, spiraling, threatening to consume you.

The warning-light metaphor

Anxiety is a warning light on your dashboard that you’ve been ignoring for too long. It’s your nervous system’s increasingly desperate plea, Listen!

Listen to what?

To your body. To your deepest longings.

It isn’t a fault, a flaw. It’s you nervous system doing its job.

How therapy helps

Therapy supports you to stop ignoring the warning lights.
It’s very counterintuitive.
The warning lights—the scraping sandpaper, the heat, the thumping in your chest—are very unpleasant.
Of course you want to ignore them.
And when they’re too intense to ignore, of course everything in you screams, Make it stop!

Grounding skills

Grounding skills allow you to tolerate the presence of the unpleasant warning lights.

Acceptance

Much of the unpleasantness of anxiety is caused by your efforts to suppress it.
It’s like ignoring a distressed child.
What happens when you ignore a distress child?
She gets more distressed and cries louder.
What happens when you acknowledge the distressed child?
The urgency drops out of her crying.
Acceptance robs anxiety of its urgency.
And anxiety without urgency is almost no-longer anxiety.

Deep listening

Beneath the anxiety symptoms, your body is telling you something.
Maybe it’s telling you to speak up?
Maybe it’s telling you to do that thing you’ve always wanted to to?
Therapy helps you to listen to what your body is trying to tell you.

What therapy looks like

My style

We chat. If you need help to talk, I help. When you’re talking, I listen. Along the way, I make observations. And ask questions you might not have asked yourself. I invite you to try things out in the session. If you feel up to it, you try them out.

I move at your pace. Slow, fast, it’s all fine with me.

My general orientation is Gestalt psychotherapy, and I teach the ACT model.

How long are sessions?

50 minutes.

Where?

In person at my Byron Bay practice or by video link.

How many sessions will I need? How often will I need to go?

Good questions. I answer them here.