Anxiety Therapy

Sessions feel more like a conversation than an exercise, but they go somewhere most conversations don't. We'll slow down together, notice what your body is doing right now — not just what your mind is saying — and follow what shows up. Some sessions are quieter and more internal; others are more exploratory and talk-based. Somatic work might look like pausing to notice where you feel tension, tracking how a sensation shifts when you let it, or finding a steadier place in your body before touching something harder. There's no script, and you're always in the lead. The thread we follow is whatever anxiety is actually doing in your system on that particular day — not a worksheet or a set protocol.

Managing anxiety means you've learned to turn down the volume — breathing exercises, grounding techniques, naming your thoughts. Those tools are real and worth having. But they work on the alarm, not on what set it off. If your nervous system learned somewhere along the way that the world isn't safe, or that you have to perform to be okay, coping skills don't change that underlying belief — they just help you get through the day while it's still running. Healing means going back to where the pattern started and letting your system update its map. The alarm gets quieter because it actually has less to report, not because you've gotten good at talking yourself down. That's the difference we're working toward — a baseline that doesn't require so much management.

Somatic just means body-based — we bring attention to physical sensation as information, not as something to push through or ignore. With anxiety, the body tends to be several steps ahead of the mind: your shoulders tighten, your breath goes shallow, your jaw locks, before you've consciously registered that something feels threatening. So we slow down and get curious about that — what's happening in your chest right now? What does that sensation want to do? We might work with breath, with movement, with noticing the difference between bracing and softening. None of it is dramatic, and you don't need any background in bodywork. Most people find it surprisingly ordinary — and surprisingly effective, because you're working with the part of you that anxiety actually lives in.

Yes, and the approach is different from what most people expect. Panic is the nervous system going all the way to red — it's doing its job of protecting you, just with a trigger that's no longer matched to actual danger. The instinct is to fight it or escape it, but that tends to fuel the cycle. What helps is learning, slowly and at your own pace, that you can be with the sensations without them taking over — that the wave will pass. We'll build the internal resources first, before touching the harder material, so you're never asked to go somewhere your system isn't ready to go. Over time, panic becomes less frequent and less terrifying, not because you've white-knuckled through it but because your body has genuinely learned something new.

Anxiety itself isn't the enemy — it's a signal, and some of it is useful. What we're working toward is a nervous system that can read the room accurately: alert when something genuinely warrants it, and at rest the rest of the time. For most people, that means the chronic hum quiets significantly, the spiral thinking loosens, and the physical symptoms become less intrusive — not that every trace of anxiety disappears. What tends to shift most is your relationship to it: anxiety stops feeling like something that controls you and becomes something you can meet with more steadiness. Whether that looks like almost none of it or just a much more manageable amount varies from person to person, and it's something we'll track honestly together as the work unfolds.

That's a question for you and your prescriber, not something I can or should answer for you. What I can say is that therapy and medication address different things: medication works on the chemistry of anxiety, and the work we do together works on the patterns underneath it. Many people do both at once and find they support each other. Others do therapy without medication, and others are managing with medication and come to therapy when they want to work on the roots. There's no single right path. If you're already working with a prescriber, I'm glad to collaborate with them. If medication is something you're wondering about, bring it up on our consultation call and we can talk through how it fits with what you're looking for.

Some people notice a shift within a few sessions — something loosens, the self-observation becomes kinder, a session leaves them feeling genuinely different for a few days. Deeper change, the kind that rewrites old patterns, takes longer. How long depends on how long anxiety has been running, what's underneath it, and what your system's pace of change naturally is. I won't give you a timeline that's really just a number I made up. What I can tell you is that we'll check in regularly, be honest about what's moving and what isn't, and you'll never feel like you're just treading water with no direction. If things aren't shifting, that's worth naming and adjusting for — not ignoring.

For most people, yes — including somatic work, which surprises some clients. Being in your own space can actually help with body-based approaches: you're already in the environment where your anxiety lives, and there's something that allows people to settle in their own surroundings. The connection via video is real; sessions online don't feel hollow or clinical. That said, some people strongly prefer an in-person container, and I see clients at my Irvine office for that reason. The honest answer is that the best format is the one you'll actually show up to and feel safe in — and the consultation is a good moment to feel into which that is for you. If you're curious about the shoreline option, beach therapy is also available as a walk-and-talk format for those within reach of Huntington Beach.