Anxiety is not a character flaw. It's not weak thinking or excessive worry. It's a signal — one that points toward something you haven't yet been able to face directly. Therapy that goes toward the source, not just the volume.
Book a Free Consultation →The alarm system isn't broken — it's calibrated to an old threat. Anxiety does its job: it protects. The question is what it learned to protect against, and whether that threat is still real. Most coping strategies work by turning down the volume. We work by asking what the signal is trying to say.
The nervous system responds before the narrative mind has time to interpret. The tightening in the chest, the shallow breath, the sudden absence — these are not symptoms of anxiety, they are anxiety. Working somatically means working where the response actually lives, not where we can most easily put words to it.
Rumination and cognitive loops are anxiety's way of trying to solve a problem that isn't actually cognitive. The mind keeps running calculations because it doesn't trust that anything else will keep you safe. The work is helping the nervous system learn that it can tolerate what's here — and that you don't have to think your way out of everything.
The brain that won't quiet. The list of things that could go wrong. The inability to be fully present because some part of you is always scanning the horizon. We work with the underlying need for control that drives the worry — and what happens when we practice tolerating uncertainty instead of outrunning it.
High achievers often have the most sophisticated anxiety — one that looks like ambition from the outside. The perfectionism, the difficulty delegating, the inability to feel satisfied by success — these are anxiety wearing the costume of drive. We work with what's underneath the performance, and what you're afraid would happen if you stopped performing it.
The fear of abandonment. The fear of engulfment. The careful monitoring of how you're being perceived. Relational anxiety is the nervous system's learned response to how early closeness went — and it plays out in every relationship that matters. We slow it down, look at it directly, and practice something different.
The dread that doesn't have an object. The sense that something is fundamentally wrong, even when nothing specific is. Existential anxiety is the signal that life is asking something of you — some reckoning, some choice, some more honest relationship with your own finitude. This is territory I know — and it's territory worth entering.
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
— Søren KierkegaardAnxiety work is part of individual therapy. 50-minute sessions, weekly — especially at first. In-person in Palo Alto or via telehealth across California.
$250 per 50-minute session. Sliding scale available. In-network:. Superbills for other PPO plans. HSA/FSA accepted.
15 minutes, free. No forms to fill out first. You tell me what's happening; I tell you how I work. We see if it's a fit — that's the whole agenda.
The alarm has beengoing off long enough.let's find out what it's protecting.
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