Anxiety
Effective anxiety therapy in NYC specializing in CBT, ERP, social anxiety, panic disorders, and performance anxiety. Evidence‑based treatment tailored to help New Yorkers reduce worry, reframe distorted thinking, and build resilience and daily coping strategies.
Definitions
Anxiety is a physical and emotional state of "being on high alert." The nervous system feels braced, ready, and tightly wound. It's very intertwined with the "fight, flight, freeze, and appease" responses. It's a reaction to real or perceived fear, and it lives in the body.
Fear and anxiety are related but different.
Fear is an involuntary response to a perceived threat. Anxiety is the effort to manage that fear, to push it away, plan around it, or hold it down. That effort also tends to prolong distress.
A classic metaphor: Anxiety is the state your body enters when it believes there’s a tiger around the corner.
Even if there is no tiger. Even if it’s just a hard conversation, an unread text, or an awkward moment. The body prepares for danger before the conscious mind can make sense of it. It’s a survival response.
Symptoms
Anxiety often functions as a form of avoidance.
Rather than directly experiencing fear, sadness, or guilt, folks might analyze, plan, replay, or preemptively act. These are both adaptive and maladaptive strategies to prevent distress. They may bring temporary relief, and can be very helpful in certain work environments, but they reinforce the belief that emotions are dangerous and must be controlled or avoided.
Over time, this creates a feedback loop. Avoidance teaches the body that emotion equals threat.
So the next time fear arises, it feels even more urgent to escape it. The body forgets what it’s like to simply feel and recover. This avoidance is a type of compulsion (not OCD) that shows up all too often.
Compulsions - mental or behavioral - become attempts to manage that fear. They make sense. They’re protective. But they also keep the system stuck. Anxiety learns safety not by eliminating fear, but by tolerating it. That’s how the body starts to trust itself again.
Conversely, when the body lives in a state of constant anxiety or prolonged fight-or-flight, it takes a toll.
The nervous system becomes over-activated, braced against a threat that never fully arrives. Over time, that kind of sustained stress builds exhaustion, fatigue, and lethargy. With enough time, it can shape how the brain and body function. It can make it harder to rest, harder to connect, harder to feel grounded. Chronic anxiety can contribute to the development of other conditions like Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), OCD, and depression.
Why Does It Show Up?
Anxiety often forms early, shaped by the conditions you developed and survived in.
It shows up when something in your system learns that vigilance keeps you safe, or it keeps others safe from you. Sometimes that means you have to stay small or quiet. Sometimes you have to be the one in charge.
Eventually, anxiety becomes a way to manage relationships, needs, and the unknown.
Anxiety can also be inherited.
Not just genetically, but relationally. If the adults around you modeled fear, urgency, or perfectionism, your body may have learned to live in a state of anticipation. This is both mental and physiological learning. Your nervous system weaves wordless patterns of those who came before you and draws maps of those around you.
Some anxiety is cultural, too.
When you grow up in systems that punish mistakes and pathologize emotions, anxiety becomes a way to preempt failure and hold safety as a performance. Do everything right. You have to. That performance can work for a while. But eventually, it takes over, and you lose touch with what it means to feel sturdy without effort.
Why Now?
Anxiety tends to surface (or get louder) when life asks something new of us.
A transition. A loss. A possibility. Even growth can feel threatening to your nervous system if you've learned to expect harm. How unfamiliar or unsafe do these changes feel based on past experiences?
How you cope with anxiety is based on how your body adapted to stress as a child.
Those strategies (bracing, planning, avoiding) probably made a lot of sense at the time. But these strategies start to do considerable damage when they stay with you after the threat leaves.
Again, none of this exists in a vacuum. The systems we live in reward control, self-sufficiency, and silence. They rarely create spaces for rest, regulation, or connection-based recovery. Especially for folks navigating intersectional identities, anxiety is additionally shaped by cultural and structural realities.
How Therapy Can Help
We start by building safety, together, through presence, trust, and authenticity in our relationship.
We want to build kind of safety that allows a nervous system to stop bracing, even just a little. From that place, we begin to slow things down. We listen to what your anxiety is trying to protect. We let the body relearn how to feel what it couldn't in survival mode.
I use Internal Family Systems (IFS) to explore the parts of the self that hold fear, the parts that work to suppress it, and the ones caught in between. We give each of them time and space to tell us who they are, why they're there, and what they are trying to protect.
Somatic work helps reconnect to the body’s cues. We track where anxiety shows up physically and how it moves when it’s allowed to be felt.
Gestalt techniques keep us present with what’s actually happening in our relationship, rather than what the mind fears might happen.
And ERP (Exposure and Response Prevention) gently supports folks in interrupting compulsive cycles, helping the body learn through experience that distress can be tolerated.
This work centers on making space for fear in a way that doesn't require force or suppression.
We allow fear to exist in the room without trying to break it down or push it aside. It can be held gently and safely, even if just for a moment.
Our Work Together
In our work together, we focus on changing your relationship to anxiety. Instead of reacting to it, we learn to sit beside it. We explore the thoughts, behaviors, and sensations that come up, and what they might be protecting.
Together, we practice allowing fear to rise and fall without immediately managing it or falling too deep into it.
We stop trying to win the war against emotion, and instead build tolerance for what’s already here. Over time, this helps reduce anxiety's grip over daily life.
This is what the inhibitory learning model calls “new learning.” Over time, the brain begins to learn something new: fear can be felt and moved through without collapsing or losing ground. I can move through this and still be safe.
Anxiety, when listened to carefully, tells a story of survival.
A body that tried its best. A nervous system that didn’t get to learn safety. The work we do helps that story shift toward something more grounded and open-ended.
