Managing Anxiety: How Individual Therapy Provides Lasting Relief

A lot of people who get into therapy cite anxiety as a factor for actually coming to therapy sessions. Anxiety is one of the most common struggles we see at Catalyss Counseling, and it seems to be the state of our whole culture at large right now. Anxiety can show up in many ways, from phobias to a general unease to a constant preoccupation with the uncertainty of the future. 

There are many ways to address and deal with anxiety. Medications, exercise, and even diet can help soothe some of the feelings. Individual therapy is another great way to tackle anxiety, by both soothing it temporarily as well as addressing the root causes and bringing some relief permanently. 

Understanding Anxiety

While some people understand anxiety to be a disorder to be treated or a pathology that only some people deal with, it’s better to think of anxiety as universal. That way you can expand your notion of what anxiety is.

Philosophers, authors, and psychologists have been thinking about anxiety for a long time. A constant theme that comes up in the writing and research is that anxiety is just part of human life. There’s no way around it. Everyone experiences it in their own way and to varying degrees. 

What brings people into therapy for anxiety is when the cost of it is tipping the scales in the rest of your life. Thus making anxiety the primary occupation of your mind and taking your attention away from things you love and things that give you joy.

Anxiety, in a broader sense than a diagnosis, can be defined as a state of being in which bodily or mental sensations have no obvious or clear object to refer to. From an existential perspective, there will always be something outside of our reach as humans. This means that anxiety in its most basic sense will never fully subside. 

Anxiety in Therapy

So how does therapy help with those moments when this anxiety gets the best of you? Aside from allowing you to learn new ways of coping with anxiety, like mindfulness or physiological practices to soothe the mind, therapy can help in giving that anxiety a meaningful place in your life.

When someone just like you sets aside a regular and consistent time to talk to a trained therapist who reserves judgment or prescriptions, something can begin to shift. Your anxiety, which is caused by a lack of reference points, can actually begin to develop an anchor which is embodied by the therapist within the therapy hour. 

The influential psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion taught that anxiety is a toxic amount of stress or worry in our bodies and minds. He believed that one of the most profound processes of therapy was to learn how to have a place to “put” that toxic energy and try to come to terms with it more objectively, turning the toxic energy into productive energy.

You can experiment with this by trying to sit alone with your anxiety and letting it fester, or by going to a trusted friend and talking about it. In the first scenario, the anxiety might get too toxic to hold comfortably by yourself. But sharing it with a friend can help bring someone else in to create a container to hold the anxiety. That’s exactly what a therapist in individual therapy can do. 

Processing Anxiety

Anxiety and expression contradict each other. Struggling during sessions to give words to your anxiety isn’t a bug of therapy, it’s a completely normal process. Many times, it is thought that the product of something is always more important than the process. But not so with dealing with anxiety in therapy! 

It may seem counterintuitive at first, but one of the greatest achievements of therapy is to develop the compassion, nonjudgmental attitude, and patience to articulate your own anxieties. This process is exactly what is therapeutic about talk therapy. 

Your overwhelming or toxic aspects of anxiety will be slowly soothed and bound to words and ideas over time. Your mind will learn how to actively process anxiety, rather than being overwhelmed by it. This process is known as “binding” or “verbal processing”, and it teaches how to anchor and gain some mastery over anxiety. 

In conclusion, anxiety is a normal part of human life, no matter how many services or products on the market promise an anxiety-free life. In fact, in many ways, anxiety can provide the kind of edge, challenge, or excitement in life that people need to expand or grow.

Of course, everything is better in moderation, and anxiety can quickly become overwhelming and consistently painful. Individual talk therapy can help alleviate and construct meaning to deal with anxiety to promote long-lasting positive change.

How We Can Help

If anxiety is something that runs your life, it may be worthwhile to look into getting into individual therapy to understand and process these feelings. It’s okay to have hope that things will get better. If you are located in Colorado, check out our Denver-based clinic that offers both in-person and virtual counseling with our trained anxiety therapists!

Other Therapy Services Available at Catalyss Counseling:

Here at Catalyss Counseling, we want to meet all of your counseling needs in the Denver area. Our supportive therapists provide depression counseling, therapy for caregiver stress, grief and loss therapy, stress management counseling, and more. We also have specialists in trauma and PTSD, women's issues, pregnancy and postpartum depression or anxiety, pregnancy loss and miscarriage, and birth trauma. For therapists, we can also provide clinical supervision! We look forward to connecting with you to help support your journey today.

Author Biography

Sean Carroll is a student intern and a provider for the affordable counseling program at Catalyss Counseling. He works with men, anxious adults, and those seeking improved relationships to become “unstuck” and get to the root of the problem, so you can focus on the things in your life that are meaningful. Follow Catalyss Counseling on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.