For when you can't switch off
Key facts
You've tried the breathing exercises. You've done the apps. You know you're supposed to "sit with the discomfort" but sitting with it hasn't made it go away.
The anxiety is still there. That low hum of dread that follows you into meetings, into sleep, into the gaps between tasks. The way your body braces for something that never quite arrives.
Many approaches to anxiety focus on management. Contain the symptoms. Challenge the thoughts. Learn to function despite the noise. These approaches can be useful, especially when anxiety is acute, specific or overwhelming.
But sometimes anxiety does not only feel like a malfunction. It can also feel like a signal.
Psychodynamic therapy doesn't treat anxiety only as a problem to be managed. It asks what the anxiety may be protecting you from. Sometimes it sits close to feelings that have become difficult to approach directly: grief, anger, need, disappointment.
Your nervous system may have learned a long time ago that certain things were not safe to feel. The anxiety can still seem to be doing its job. The question is whether that protection still fits your life now.
We meet weekly or twice-weekly and pay attention to what your anxiety may be about. Not just the surface triggers, but the deeper patterns that may sit beneath them.
Maybe you're terrified of getting things wrong because getting things wrong meant something specific in your house growing up. Maybe the anxiety spikes around certain people because they remind your body of someone it hasn't forgotten. Maybe you're anxious because you're living a life that doesn't fit, and some part of you knows it.
This isn't about giving you tools to push through. It's about understanding what you're pushing against.