Anxiety Therapy
Online in California & Bay Area
Your mind is good at this. Too good. It runs through every possible outcome, catches every potential threat, replays conversations to find what went wrong, and generates new things to worry about before the last ones are resolved. On some level you know the worry isn't solving anything. And yet it keeps coming.
Anxiety isn't a character flaw or a failure of willpower. It's a nervous system that learned to stay vigilant, often for very good reasons, and hasn't yet learned that it's safe to rest. Understanding that distinction changes everything about how we approach it.
At Compassionate Tides Therapy, I work with adults who are exhausted by their own minds and ready for something more than management strategies.
Is this you?
You might be in the right place if:
Your mind rarely goes quiet, even when nothing is actually wrong. You replay conversations, decisions, and worst-case scenarios on a loop that feels impossible to interrupt. Your body holds the anxiety even when your mind tries to logic its way out: tension in your chest, your shoulders, your gut. You seek reassurance, information, or certainty, and it helps for a moment before the doubt cycles back. You avoid situations, conversations, or decisions because the anticipatory anxiety feels more unbearable than the thing itself. You've been told to "just relax" or "stop overthinking" as if that were something you hadn't already tried. Anxiety has quietly shaped the size of your life, what you do, where you go, what you're willing to try.
You are carrying the weight of what's happening in the world and finding it hard to separate your nervous system's response from the reality of what is actually threatening. The anxiety isn't irrational. The world is genuinely difficult right now, and your body knows it.
Anxiety is not the same for everyone. It can look like panic attacks or it can look like a relentless internal hum that never fully quiets. Both are real, and both are workable.
What makes this approach different
My approach to anxiety is somatic and trauma-informed, which means we work with both the thinking patterns that maintain anxiety and the body-level activation underneath them.
Somatic Therapy works with the body's anxiety, not just the mind's. We develop your capacity to notice and work with physical sensation, to regulate your nervous system in real time, and to build a somatic sense of safety that doesn't depend on certainty.
EMDR addresses anxiety that is rooted in specific experiences or memories. When anxious patterns are tied to past events, EMDR can help reprocess those roots so the present feels less haunted by them.
IFS (Internal Family Systems) meets the parts that are driving the worry. Often there is a part of you that believes the anxiety is keeping you safe, a part that is exhausted, and a part that is ashamed of how much it affects your life. IFS creates space to understand and work with those parts rather than fight them.
Cognitive approaches where relevant, including I-CBT for anxiety patterns that overlap with OCD-spectrum presentations like health anxiety and rumination rooted in obsessional doubt.
Anxiety is treatable. And treatment doesn't have to mean white-knuckling your way through life.
Most people who come to therapy for anxiety have already tried to think their way out of it. They understand the cognitive distortions, they know their worry is often irrational, and they've tried the breathing exercises. The insight is there. The relief isn't.
That gap exists because anxiety is not primarily a thinking problem. It is a nervous system problem. And a nervous system that is chronically activated doesn't respond to logic. It responds to experience, to felt safety, to learning through repeated bodily experience that the alarm can quiet without catastrophe following.
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The pervasive, hard-to-pin-down anxiety that colors everything. It's not about one specific fear. It's about a nervous system that is rarely if ever at rest, and a mind that has learned to find the next thing to worry about before the last one resolves.
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The persistent fear that something is wrong with your body, whether a symptom, a sensation, or a test result, that reassurance from doctors, loved ones, or Google can't touch for long. Health anxiety is exhausting precisely because the body always provides new material, and the cycle of worry and checking never fully resolves.
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The sudden, overwhelming wave of physical and psychological terror that can feel like dying, losing control, or going mad, even when there is no identifiable threat. Panic is highly treatable, and understanding what's happening in your nervous system during a panic attack is itself part of recovery.
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The loop that won't stop: replaying the past, rehearsing the future, analyzing conversations and decisions long after they're done. Rumination feels like problem-solving but functions more like a compulsion. It generates the feeling of doing something without producing resolution.
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When anxiety is rooted in past experience, the nervous system learns to stay alert for threats that may no longer be present. This kind of anxiety often doesn't respond well to standard anxiety treatment alone. It requires addressing the underlying trauma as well.
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Anxiety is not always a distortion. For many people, particularly those navigating racism, homophobia, transphobia, economic precarity, or the cumulative weight of living in a body or identity that the world treats as less than, anxiety is an accurate response to real and ongoing threat. That doesn't make it less exhausting or less workable, but it does mean treatment needs to be honest about what is actually happening. I work with clients on building capacity and resilience without pathologizing the responses of people who are living in genuinely stressful circumstances, and without asking you to simply reframe your way out of something that is real.
Presentations I frequently work with:
What to Expect
We begin by understanding your anxiety: what it looks like, when it started, what maintains it, and what has and hasn't helped before. Chances are, you have been around the therapy block or know very well “why” you are anxious. Treatment is individualized. Some people benefit most from somatic and nervous system work. Others need cognitive approaches, parts work, or trauma processing. Most benefit from some combination that shifts as the work deepens.
Sessions are telehealth, available to adults throughout California. I am a private-pay practice and can provide superbills for potential out-of-network reimbursement.
Frequently Asked Questions
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A lot of anxiety treatment focuses primarily on cognitive restructuring, identifying and challenging anxious thoughts. That's useful, but insufficient for many people, particularly when the anxiety has a strong body component or is rooted in past experience. A somatic and trauma-informed approach works at a different level and often reaches what cognitive work alone doesn't.
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They do overlap significantly, and health anxiety and rumination in particular sit at the intersection of both. A thorough assessment helps clarify what's driving the pattern and what treatment approach will be most effective. If you're not sure, a consultation is a good place to start.
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It depends on your presentation. For some anxiety presentations, graduated exposure is a core component of treatment. For others, particularly those rooted in trauma or obsessional doubt, different approaches are more central. We figure this out together based on what's actually happening for you.
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That's actually very common and very relevant clinically. Somatic therapy is specifically designed to work with anxiety that lives in the body, not just the mind. Your physical experience is important information, not a complication.
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Yes, and it's worth naming directly. Anxiety rooted in collective stress, systemic oppression, or ongoing societal threat is different from anxiety rooted primarily in cognitive distortion or nervous system dysregulation, though these often overlap. Good therapy doesn't ask you to detach from reality or convince yourself things are fine. It helps you build capacity to stay present and regulated in the face of what is genuinely hard, grieve what deserves to be grieved, find community and meaning, and protect your nervous system without having to look away from the world.
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It varies. Some people notice meaningful shifts relatively quickly. Others, particularly those with longstanding anxiety rooted in early experience, benefit from longer-term work. We assess this together and check in regularly about how things are progressing.
You've spent long enough inside a mind that won't quiet down.
Anxiety is not just something to manage. With the right support, it's something you can actually move through.
