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Anxiety Therapy
For when worry has become a kind of weather — pervasive, unspecific, exhausting. Anxiety therapy on the Westside of Los Angeles that works with the underneath, not only the surface.
On the work
How I think about it.
Anxiety is, in much of contemporary mental-health culture, treated as a symptom to be eliminated — quickly, ideally, with the right combination of tools and techniques. There is good evidence for those tools. They sometimes help.
And: they sometimes don't, or they help less than one had hoped, or they help for a while and then the anxiety returns in a different shape. When that happens, it tends to mean that the anxiety is doing something. That it is signaling toward something the surface of the mind does not yet want to know.
Psychoanalytic work with anxiety begins by taking that signal seriously. Not as a thing to suppress, but as a communication. What is the anxiety afraid of? What is it protecting against? What would it mean to feel what the anxiety is keeping at bay? These are slower questions than the cognitive-behavioral ones, but for many people they reach further.
If you have tried shorter or more structured anxiety treatments and found them helpful but incomplete — or if your anxiety is the kind that does not seem to have an external cause but will not let go — this is the kind of work that may be worth trying.
When this might help
Signs worth taking seriously.
None of these on their own is a diagnosis. Together, they may be worth a conversation.
- 01
Persistent worry that doesn't match the situation — about work, health, relationships, the future, things you cannot quite name.
- 02
Panic that arrives unpredictably, or somatic anxiety (chest, throat, breath, gut) that medical workups have not explained.
- 03
Perfectionism, over-functioning, or a sense of being unable to rest even when nothing requires you to be working.
- 04
Anxiety that lifted with prior therapy or medication and has now returned — perhaps in a different form.
What to expect
The shape of the work.
01
A wider question
We begin by enlarging the frame. Not only "what triggers the anxiety," but: what does it organize? What does it protect against? What life does it allow you to keep living, and what life does it foreclose?
02
Working underneath
Over time, we begin to find the feelings the anxiety has been standing in for — often older, often less acceptable to the conscious mind. Naming them changes the system.
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Lasting change
The goal is not the absence of anxiety, which is neither possible nor desirable. It is the ability to feel what you feel without needing to convert it into worry. That capacity, once built, tends to stay.
Begin
The first step is a conversation.
A complimentary 20-minute consultation by phone — to hear what brings you, and to see whether we might be a fit. There is no obligation.