Anxiety Treatment Program

Anxiety therapy begins with a thorough assessment to determine the unique nature of your anxiety issues. There are many different types of anxiety, including generalized anxiety disorder, panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), specific phobias, and social phobia.

However, we’re less concerned with labels than we are with how exactly you experience anxiety. For example, what triggers your anxiety? What does your anxiety feel like? What sorts of anxious thoughts do you struggle with? What helps your anxiety, and what tends to increase it?

Motivation Enhancement is often the first task in anxiety treatment. Therapy can be hard work. It is important to identify reasons why all that hard work will be worth it. The client and therapist work together to prepare the client for the rewarding but difficult process ahead.

Keeping track of thoughts, emotions, and behaviors is an important part of anxiety therapy. At ATC, we use a simple smartphone app to track client data.

For example, most clients will be asked to track their daily level of depression and anxiety. If a client has panic attacks, they will track those as well. This allows the client and therapist to look for patterns and triggers, and to measure progress.

Mindfulness in this context simply means awareness- awareness of one's thoughts and emotions. Many people do not realize they have difficulty noticing when they are experiencing strong emotions, and identifying what those emotions are. Others struggle with identifying their thoughts, or have difficulty maintaining attention.

Persons with anxiety and depression may need help learning to identify emotions and emotional triggers. By practicing being mindful, clients improve their ability to identify their thoughts and emotions- the first step in changing them.

Challenging thoughts and changing behaviors is an important component in anxiety treatment. After identifying maladaptive, harmful thoughts and behaviors, the client and therapist work together to begin the process of changing them. For example, a client with panic attacks may believe that a rapid heartbeat is a sign of a heart attack. They will be asked to challenge that thought with evidence, and will over time develop a more balanced belief. The new belief will result in less distress.

Phobias are a type of anxiety where there is a fear response to specific objects or situations.

Exposure is the process of "exposing" a client to thoughts, sensations, and situations that illicit distress. This is the core of anxiety treatment, and often reduces anxiety symptoms very quickly.

Exposure is done in a systematic, gradual way so the client does not get overwhelmed. Instead, they experience those situations that cause them anxiety without the feared outcome occurring, breaking the association between the feared situations and the feared outcome, allowing new learning to take place and anxiety to dissipate.

Exposure exercises are at the core of anxiety treatment, and often reduce anxiety symptoms very quickly.

Thoughts: Exposure is used to reduce the intensity and frequency of distressing thoughts, such as those persons with obsessive-compulsive disorder have. Over time, the client learns that thoughts are not, by themselves, harmful.

Memories: Exposure to memories is an important part of treating trauma, such as with PTSD. Persons will be asked to recite the story of their traumatic experiences. They may record those, and listen to them later as homework.

Sensations: Such as a rapid heartbeat, light headedness, cold or heat. Clients may induce these in session with their therapist, and repeat the process later at home. This type of exposure is especially important for persons with panic attacks triggered by bodily sensations.

Situations: Clients will spend time in situations that illicit distress. For example, clients with a fear of driving will be asked to drive increasing distances in a systematic manner. Over time, their distress goes down.