Empowerment center
good nature
LGBTQIA+ Affirmative Anxiety Therapy
in Agoura Hills, Los Angeles
Let’s decode what your anxiety is trying to tell you.
Anxiety can rear it’s head for so many reasons, and it can make life feel so much harder than it has to.
Social Situations
Performance & Success
You notice you feel more calm when you are alone, or around people that are super familiar to you. Beyond that, you might notice social situations from school to work to being around friends or social circles cause you distress. You might be frequently overthinking your interactions with others, constantly worried about being judged, suppressing your authentic views to not rock the boat or have people mad at you, or avoiding social situations that logically may seem “not that bad”. This rears it’s head in so many ways.
You notice your anxiety spikes in situations where there’s a lot of pressure to perform. Maybe it seems self or family imposed, or possibly triggered by standards of the specific environment you are in. The idea of failure scares you and the mental load of completing all your tasks is so much more than it could be if you weren’t feeling anxious.
The State of The World
Just Life Itself
Oof… where to even start with this one. Being a part of a marginalized and oppressed group is just so difficult on a personal level. Seeing all the oppression and violence play out on a larger scale is just excruciating to bare witness to. Anxiety here can show up in so many forms- worry about personal and collective safety, worries about how the future will pan out, overthinking what role you may play in activism or advocacy, or just general level of anxiety or discomfort living in the state of how things are. For f**k’s sake- when do we get to stop living through so many “unprecedented times”?!?!
What we call “generalized anxiety”- it’s the type of anxiety that just feels like it’s your baseline. Maybe certain things make you more anxious and create spikes in anxiety, but in between those situations you notice it’s just hard to relax. You might catch yourself overthinking about seemingly everything, struggling with insomnia, or avoiding situations that could put any more pressure on you because you might feel low key burned out all the time. It’s harder to be present, enjoy life, and do the things you can and want to do.
No matter what the trigger for anxiety is, if you are here seeking an anxiety therapist, I can imagine it means that your anxiety has taken over to the point where it’s become unbearable. You’ve reached the end of your rope with all this overthinking, burnout, feeling on edge, irritability, and somatic symptoms like stomach aches, headaches, and fatigue.
Understandably, it’s probably taken a toll on your personal, professional or academic life, and you just want more mental and emotional ease as you go through life.
You’re hoping that it doesn’t have to feel this hard all of the time.
How Therapy For
Anxiety Can Help
Life is going to have it’s challenges, and no amount of therapy can change that. But imagine being able to…
- Approach life’s difficulties feeling more settled, emotionally balanced, and confident.
- Understand yourself in more depth in the moment why anxiety is happening, with the capacity and skills to help yourself through the triggering moment.
- Learn from your anxiety about what you need to have a healthier, more balanced life.
Anxiety is not inherently a bad thing- it is a message from our nervous system that holds a lot of wisdom if we dive in deeper. Your nervous system is full of information, and together we can identify the aspects of your experience that are causing your anxiety to reach such distressing levels.
Together we can explore each distressing situation individually, but also patterns to your anxiety that keep showing up in your life. We can explore what in your history has essentially programmed your nervous system to react so strongly to situations where that level of alarm isn’t necessarily needed.
Along with this kind of deep dive, we can explore practical tools that would uniquely serve you in navigating anxious responses. What we find out while exploring your anxiety together will help us to create a personalized approach for you in moving forward. We won’t just throw “one size fits all” approaches at you and expect them to work.
For more information on our therapeutic approaches, feel free to check out our Deeper Healing Work page (Learn More →), which are amazing for anxiety work!
You are ready to…
- Take some weight off of your shoulders
- Understand your specific anxiety triggers so you can strategize in how to manage
- Feel more confident in listening to your mind and body so you can choose what’s right for you
- Get to the root of your anxious patterns so you can feel more long term relief
Your anxiety deserves a place to be heard and explored. Let’s dive in to see what it knows.
book a free consultation →
Frequently asked questions
Anxiety isn’t inherently a bad thing- it’s a signal that alerts us to have caution in a specific situation. Healthy anxiety is anxiety that shows up when it’s needed, and seems to be proportionate to the trigger for anxiety. For example, low to moderate level anticipatory anxiety is pretty normal before giving a presentation when it’s important to the person to do well.
Anxiety could use some therapeutic support when it lingers around more than it should, or it’s blown out of proportion given the trigger. Examples of this would be low to moderate anxiety that seems to always be present (known clinically as “Generalized Anxiety”), or a full blown panic attack in a situation like giving a presentation when the consequences of messing up aren’t that big. Think of these types of anxiety as an overactive smoke detector- something has trained the nervous system to over respond.
Anxiety usually comes with an emotional charge, typically that of stress or upset. Intuition is more of a calm knowing. Sometimes with everything going on in life, it can be hard to tell the difference between the two.