Anxiety Counselling
Anxiety is more than just feeling stressed or worried. While stress and anxious feelings are a normal response to situations when we feel under pressure, they usually pass once the stressful situation has passed, or the ‘stressor’ has been removed. Everyone feels anxious from time to time, but when anxious feelings don’t go away, or they happen without a particular stressor or when anxiety starts to affect your ability to cope with daily life, it may be a sign that you are suffering from an anxiety condition.
Anxiety is the most common mental health in Australia, affecting one in four people at some stage in their life.
There are many ways to help manage anxiety and the sooner people with anxiety get support, the more likely they are to recover.
Understanding what anxiety is helps you to make sense of what ‘normal anxiety’ is versus ‘problematic anxiety’. This helps you as an individual or as a parent to begin to understand when to worry about the worry or when not to.
The best way to view anxiety is on a continuum, at the one end there is ‘normal anxiety’, in the middle there is problematic anxiety and at the other end you have anxiety as a disorder. Individuals will move up and down the continuum depending on what is going on in their lives, and many will never reach the disorder end of the scale.
One of the reasons anxiety becomes problematic is when people experience anxiety in the wrong situations or at a constant level. For example, when leaving the house or if all social experiences is anxiety provoking. Or if someone is in a relationship, they are not happy in, but don’t know how to leave, this can create a constant state of anxiousness that can seep into other areas of their lives.
Another integral complication with problematic anxiety is that some people have lived with these feelings for so long that this has become a normalised state of being. When this is the case people will have found ways to cope and manage their anxiety – the main coping strategy is avoidance.
This is why it can sometimes take a long time for people to seek help, because by avoiding doing the things that make them anxious, they can be lulled into a sense that they are okay. This is a concern when raising children, because if you have learnt to avoid your own anxious triggers, then you will find it hard to help your children understand and work through their own anxious moments. If children don’t learn to do this when they are young, they are more likely to experience problematic anxiety later on.
Working with a therapist at Remede can help you to understand your anxiety, your triggers and how to work with and integrate anxiety at both a body centred level (somatic) and cognitive level, using a variety of different psychological therapies, dependent on your individual needs.
At Remede we also offer EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) with Alexandra Field, an effective evidence-based approach to working with anxiety, together with counselling therapy.
We welcome you to make an appointment with one of our highly qualified and experienced counsellors to help get your mental health back on track.
To make an appointment, call 08 92861166 or email: reception@remede.com.au
Our Practitioners: