Jul 11, 2023
Nov 21, 2022
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137 N. Oak Park Ave, Suite 329, Oak Park, IL, 60301 call 708-381-0634 or email
Anxiety Therapy
Do You Worry That You’re Not Good Enough?
Is insecurity holding you back from achieving your hopes and dreams?
Do you feel overwhelmed by all the demands put on you?
Are you tired of trying to manage work, family, relationships, and all your other obligations?
Maybe you’re dealing with feelings of inferiority and feel like you have to prove yourself again and again. Perhaps you struggle with social anxiety and obsessively worry about how other people perceive you. Deep down, you might feel like you just don’t measure up and that you’re not good enough. This could drive you to overwork yourself and feel burnt out and exhausted. You might suffer from fatigue, racing thoughts, panic attacks, and lack of sleep.
Loneliness And Anxiety Often Go Hand In Hand
Anxiety can be deeply isolating. Because you’re afraid of messing up, you may avoid social events and keep to yourself. Over time, this could make you lonely. You might pass up opportunities that you know would be good for you, which ultimately makes you more dissatisfied and adds to your anxiety.
If you want to break out of this cycle of avoidance and anxiety, I encourage you to pursue counseling with me. As an anxiety therapist, my goal is to help you press pause, break free from chronic worry, and live in the present instead of always dwelling on the future.
Our Success-Driven Society Leaves No Time For Relaxation And Self-Care
Anxiety is one of the most common mental health concerns there is. It shows up in many different ways—panic attacks, anger, irritability, and all-consuming worries about the future. A little bit of anxiety is not always bad, since it can help you stay motivated and productive. But when anxiety becomes severe enough to control your life, that’s a sign that you should probably seek treatment.
Today, we live in a society obsessed with performance, productivity, and success. As a result, anxiety has run amok. We are bombarded with life hacks about getting ahead, making it big, and gaining 10,000 social media followers. The natural result of this workaholic culture is that when we’re not producing, we feel like failures. We worry that we’re not good enough, so we work harder and harder, leaving no time for relaxation and self-care.
Vulnerability Is Often Frowned Upon In Our Culture
In many ways, the obsession with “having it all together” is tied to white supremacy in our culture. White supremacy frowns upon vulnerability and says we have to be emotionally composed at all times. This is why BIPOC people groups have historically been characterized as “too emotional” and “too volatile.” Many of us buy into the myth that emotions are bad and are a sign of weakness.
The truth is just the opposite. It takes incredible courage to be vulnerable and honest about how you feel. Anxiety therapy is a chance to talk about your emotions with someone who cares for you deeply and provides a nonjudgmental space for you to feel seen, heard, and appreciated.
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Anxiety Therapy Can Help You Shift Your Mindset From Anxious To Empowered
Sometimes knowing what’s wrong is not enough. You might know the behaviors that make you more anxious, but no matter how hard you try, you can’t seem to break out of them. This is normal. When your relationships and interactions are colored by anxious responses, those patterns are very hard to stop.
As a therapist, I want to help you figure out what needs to change for you to live the life you desire. I will give you skills for both regulating your stress and breaking out of the patterns that reinforce your stress. The goal is to shift your mindset from an anxious one to an empowered one, allowing you to carve your own path and make choices that align with your true values.
What To Expect In Sessions
A lot of anxiety therapy is about adjusting your expectations. Oftentimes, anxiety stems from looking too far ahead and seeing the huge gulf between the life you want to live and the misery you feel right now. In therapy we will work on bringing your gaze in closer, setting more reasonable expectations, and being kinder and gentler with yourself. This can help you live more comfortably in the present and stop leaping ahead into the future.
Additionally, we’ll explore the things that make it hard for you to practice self-compassion and slow down in life. Sometimes this means digging into the past and looking at the traumas and childhood wounds that you’ve carried into adulthood. Other times it means working through the pressing issues right in front of you. In this way, anxiety therapy is a chance to address the immediate while still peeling back the layers of your deepest concerns.
Tailoring Your Anxiety Treatment Plan
I consider myself a relational, interpersonal, feminist, and psychodynamic therapist. What approach I use ultimately depends on what works best for you—I want therapy to be tailored to your unique needs and perspective.
That said, anxiety therapy with me often has a two-way focus: helping you both tolerate and reduce distress. On one hand, I will give you coping skills for regulating your anxiety so that it is more manageable. On the other, I’ll help you address the automatic thoughts that lead to anxiety, allowing you to nip anxiety in the bud and prevent it from reaching such high levels.
With my help and support, I am confident that you can flourish and embrace a future where anxiety does not control your life anymore. Anxiety tells you to jump ahead of the present; I want you to feel at home in the present—to learn how to be still, press pause, and live in the moment.
You May Have Some Concerns About Anxiety Therapy…
I don’t think counseling will help. My anxiety is too bad.
Many people that I’ve worked with felt the same way at first. When we are trapped in our own minds—which is what happens when we’re anxious—we usually don’t see the possibilities that lie in front of us. The future appears hopeless because anxiety tells us that it is. Opening up to a counselor is a great way to break down the walls that anxiety creates. It’s a chance to achieve a fresher perspective and see that a life outside of chronic anxiety is possible. What’s more, even if you truly believe that nothing can help you, wouldn’t you rather give yourself a shot?
I’ve been anxious for so long that I don’t think I can change.
Change is hard and it takes time, but it can happen. I’ve seen many, many clients with debilitating anxiety find calmness, serenity, and peace of mind. What would happen if you let yourself imagine the possibility of change? Is it scary? Does it seem far away and unrealistic? Anxiety counseling is a chance for us to explore these possibilities together. If you can’t see the possibility of change yet, my job is to keep reminding you that it exists.
If I stop being anxious, I will stop being motivated and driven.
Perhaps you feel like anxiety has kept you safe and protected you. You might feel like it’s motivated you to work hard in life and worry that you wouldn’t accomplish as much without it. While it’s true that a little anxiety can provide a healthy dose of safety and motivation, too much anxiety ultimately keeps you from freedom and happiness. That’s why the goal of therapy is not to get rid of anxiety, but to regulate it so that it doesn’t control your work, social life, and other things that are important to you.
You Can Find The Confidence To Carve Your Own Path
If you want to stop letting anxiety get in the way of the life you want for yourself, I encourage you to pursue therapy with me. To get started, you can use the contact form or call 708-381-0634.
Kara E. Wolff, PhD
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