Specialty · anxiety
Anxiety therapy in California
Not the clinical description — the everyday version. The mind that starts up at 3am and reviews everything. The body that will not settle even when the day was fine. The decision that has been sitting unmade for months. The list of situations you quietly stopped saying yes to.
Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.
What anxiety work looks like with me
Anxiety is rarely just worry. It is a body running a threat program: shallow breath, tight jaw, stomach that knows before you do, shoulders that have been braced so long they feel normal. Then the mind arrives to explain the alarm, and it is very good at finding candidates — the email, the health thing, the conversation from Tuesday, the future in general. The explanations change; the alarm is the constant.
The most expensive part is usually avoidance. It starts sensibly: skip the one event, decline the one call, put off the one appointment. Relief follows immediately, which teaches the system that avoidance works, and the boundary of what feels manageable moves inward again. Over a few years a life can get noticeably smaller without any single decision that felt dramatic.
I want to be honest about the aim. It is not to eliminate anxiety, and I would not promise that. Anxiety is part of a working nervous system and some of it is useful information. The aim is to change your relationship to it: to have it be something you notice and consider rather than something that decides for you. That looks less like silence and more like anxiety being present without holding the vote.
Where anxiety usually shows up
3am and the racing mind
Falling asleep is fine, then you are awake at three with the full review. We work with the wind-down, the waking, and what the mind does with the dark.
A body that will not settle
Chest, jaw, gut, shoulders, restless legs. We work directly with the physiology rather than trying to think your way out of it.
The decision you cannot make
Both options analyzed exhaustively, neither chosen. Often the fear is not of the wrong choice but of being responsible for it.
Avoidance
The invitations declined, the calls not returned, the appointment postponed. We widen the edges again in increments you agree to.
Social anxiety
Rehearsing before, replaying after, reading faces throughout. We work on the self-monitoring that makes ordinary contact exhausting.
Anxiety with grief or trauma
After a loss or a frightening event, anxiety often arrives as the aftershock. Treating it in isolation misses what it is attached to.
How we would work
We begin with a free 20-minute consult, no pressure and no follow-up if it is not a fit. From there, sessions are by secure video anywhere in California — often easier with anxiety, since you are not managing a waiting room or a drive home on top of the session.
The early work is usually somatic and regulatory: learning what your particular alarm feels like at low volume, before it is at full pitch, and what genuinely settles your system rather than what is supposed to. Mindfulness practice builds the ability to observe an anxious thought without immediately obeying it. ACT gives us a way to move toward what matters to you while anxiety is still present. CBT is useful for the specific loops — catastrophic forecasting, certainty-seeking, reassurance — where structure helps.
We also look at what the anxiety is attached to. Often it is grief that has not been spoken about, a pattern that keeps repeating, or trauma the body has not finished with. When that is the case, treating the anxiety alone is like resetting an alarm without checking the room. I do not treat bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, and I am not a crisis service; if you are in crisis, call or text 988, or call 911.
- Somatic and nervous-system regulation
- Mindfulness practice
- ACT
- CBT for specific anxious loops
- Internal Family Systems (IFS)
- Hypnotherapy — certified hypnotherapist
Questions people ask about anxiety therapy
- Can therapy help if I'm anxious about therapy?
- Being anxious about therapy is a reasonable response to talking with a stranger about the least composed parts of your life. It is also workable, and we can treat it as the first thing we look at together rather than an obstacle to get past. The free 20-minute consult exists partly for this: you can ask what sessions are like, what I would and would not do, and decide afterward with no follow-up from me. In session you are allowed to say that a question is too much right now.
- How is this different from what I've tried?
- Many people arrive already fluent in coping skills. They can list the breathing exercises and the thought records, and the anxiety continues anyway. The difference here is where we start: with the body's alarm system and its timing rather than with the argument against the anxious thought, because the body usually moves first. We also work on your relationship to anxiety — how much authority it has over your decisions — instead of aiming only to lower its volume.
A steadier place to start
If the 3am review has been going on for a while, text or email and we can talk about it. Telehealth only, by secure video or audio, for people physically located in California. Laurie, LMFT.