Anxiety

Anxiety is not a flaw in your character. It is an alarm system doing its job too well — sounding for threats that have passed, or never quite arrived. Most people who come to us for anxiety have been managing it alone for years, and are exhausted by the effort of looking fine.

In the first few sessions we map what your anxiety looks like: when it shows up, what it tells you, and what you do to make it stop. Often the things that bring short-term relief — checking, avoiding, over-preparing — are the same things keeping it going.

From there the work depends on you. With Tomasz it might be structured CBT: noticing thoughts, testing them, and gently facing what you have been avoiding. With Ella it might be slower, following the anxiety back to where it learned to be so loud. Many people do some of each.

What people usually tell us, after a couple of months, is not that the anxiety has vanished. It is that it has become quieter, and that they trust themselves to handle it when it comes.