Anxiety Therapy

​What’s Underlying the Anxiety Impacting Your Life?

The symptoms of anxiety can feel debilitating and are hard to see past but at Heartwood Counselling the question we want you to ask is “What’s underneath?”

Sometimes, asking that question isn’t easy. It may bring up emotions, experiences, or beliefs you’d rather not face. Fortunately, we can do it together, and that honest investigation can be fundamentally transformative.

At Heartwood, we help you:

• Identify how anxiety is showing up in your life 

• explore what underlying emotions, memories, old coping strategies, or patterns may be driving the anxiety

• gradually move from simply managing symptoms to creating relief that lasts

Help with an acute crisis is also available, but if you're in need of immediate help, please call the Vancouver Island Crisis Line at 1-888-494-3888

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How Anxiety Therapy in Victoria BC Can Benefit You

Partnering with skilled, experienced counsellors will help you move beyond just symptom relief, but it will also support you in creating new patterns of relating to and being in the world that are more easeful and authentic.

 

 Here’s how therapy at Heartwood can benefit you:

1. Relief from immediate discomfort

You’ll learn tools and strategies that help you feel more grounded in your body and less overwhelmed by the stimuli of life, which, quite frankly, can be objectively overwhelming. It’s completely understandable, and that our nervous systems struggle with modern life.

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2.  Understanding of your unique anxiety profile

You are the expert in your own life and have deep insight into your experience of anxiety. Clinicians can help by offering additional perspectives, insights and tailored strategies to work with whatever you're dealing with, whether it’s a specific phobia like Arachnophobia or Agoraphobia, or a broader condition such as Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD).

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3. Identification of underlying triggers & patterns

With an attuned holistic approach, you’ll begin to see more fully how your life experience, unexamined beliefs, childhood and nervous system have a complex interplay that can produce anxiety but can also be reframed to enhance resilience. 

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4. Development of long-term resilience

You’re resilient and already carrying more strength than you might realize. Our strengths-focused approach invites you to tap into that inner resource and build on it. We guide you toward new strategies that can help you move through life with more ease. It’s important to recognize that many of the patterns that are not working for us today did serve us at one time and are old patterns attempting to protect us. Those patterns of thinking did their job; there’s no need to hate them or beat yourself up about them! We can learn how to thank them and let them go. 

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What Forms of Anxiety Do We Work With?

When you’re searching “anxiety counselling in Victoria BC”, you’ll want counsellors with experience across:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) — pervasive, ongoing worry that is impacting your daily life.

• Panic Disorder / Panic Attacks — surges of fear often accompanied by intense physical symptoms, that can feel like drowning, pain or being completely out of control.

• Social Anxiety Disorder — fear of being perceived/seen or of even simple social interaction, this often leads to isolation and should be addressed urgently, as social isolation has been found to cause severe health consequences. We are social animals, and even the introverts among us need some social contact. 

• Specific Phobias — intense fear of particular objects or situations, such as Arachnophobia (fear of spiders), Ophidiophobia (fear of snakes), Acrophobia (fear of heights), Aerophobia (fear of flying), Cynophobia (fear of dogs), Trypanophobia (fear of injections or needles)

• Co-occurring issues — For many people, anxiety interacts with trauma, neurodiversity, life transitions and chronic stress. We also recognize the role that intersectionality plays in how an individual is able to engage with the dominant culture, seek support, express themself and find belonging. Our practitioners are sensitive to the complexities of co-occurring conditions and intersectionality.
   

At Heartwood, we bring both experience and flexibility, if one form of therapy isn’t working for you, we will try something else. You can expect to experience therapy that honours mind, body and nervous system; the therapy we offer is never just “talk”. 
 

Getting Started: Your Anxiety Therapy Journey

1. Reach out for an initial consultation with Heartwood Counselling
    

2. Clarify your goals and what you’d like to shift (don’t worry, we will help with this)
    

3. Begin sessions with a practitioner you click with and at a pace that honours your needs. This is your journey and we are honoured to walk alongside you.
    

Begin working through underlying issues and building coping skills that relieve symptoms in the short term and provide a protective foundation for handling future stress or life changes in the long term.