Somatic Therapy for Anxiety and Panic — Online
Somatic therapy for anxiety works with the body's alarm response directly rather than through argument.
A mind-body approach to therapy
We attend to what happens in your chest, your jaw, your breath, and your attention when the alarm fires, and we build your capacity to stay with it until it completes. For anxiety that has not responded to insight or to reasoning, this is usually the missing piece.
You probably already know that your fear is disproportionate. Knowing it has not helped.
I see clients over secure video in California, Illinois, Texas, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and Maryland.
Why talking yourself out of it stops working
Your alarm system does not process language the way your reasoning does. It runs faster, it runs on pattern, and it was built to act before you finish evaluating. When it fires, the parts of you that construct arguments are already downstream of a body that has made its decision.
This is why a fifth round of cognitive restructuring can stop producing anything at all. The technique is sound and the target is wrong. Somatic work changes the target. We go to the sensation, the posture, the held breath, the place your eyes go when you brace, and we work there. Interpersonal neurobiology gives the rationale — repeated experience changes the pathways, and the pathway you want to change is one that lives in the body.
For a lot of people, anxiety also has a history. It started as an accurate response to an environment where vigilance was useful, and it stayed on past its usefulness. When that is the case, treating it as a malfunction misses what it is doing for you.
Panic has a shape. Something in the body registers first — a skipped breath, a change in vision, heat moving up — and then interpretation catches up and names it danger, and the naming amplifies the sensation, and that loop is the attack.
The work has two parts. One is interrupting the loop while it runs, which takes practice and a small number of reliable tools rather than a long list. The other is reducing how often the loop gets initiated, which takes longer and involves the history.
I will not teach you to fear the sensations less by arguing that they are harmless. We practice staying with them until your system gathers its own evidence. That is slower and it holds.
Panic, and what happens in the middle of it
How I work, and how it runs over video
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This is where I start with most anxious clients, and it has been among the most instrumental tools in my actual clinical work. We find a state your system can access on request and we make it reliable, before we go anywhere difficult. Having somewhere to come back to changes what you can approach.
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A specific eye position held while attending to a felt sense, which lets deep processing happen without narration. For anxiety with a traumatic root this often does in a few sessions what months of discussion circled.
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The anxious part usually turns out to be protective and often young. We get to know what it is guarding against rather than trying to retire it.
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For the stretch where the goal shifts from feeling less anxious to living the life you want while anxiety is present some of the time.
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Over video this is more straightforward than people expect, and in places better. Your nervous system is at home, which is where you need the new pathway to work. I watch your breath, your color, your posture, and the pauses, and I adjust pace in real time — on a screen your face is closer to me than it would be across a room. Brainspotting translates well; I guide eye position using the screen and we calibrate in the first session.
The practices also stay where you live. The thing that settles you is your own chair, your own window, your own hand on your own sternum, and you do not have to translate any of it from an office afterward.
Questions people ask before starting
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Yes. The regulation work, guided imagery, parts-work, and Brainspotting all translate to secure video, and being in your own environment is an advantage for building a response you need to have at home. I track breath, posture, and pacing on screen and adapt as we go.
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It works alongside it. Plenty of my clients take medication, and that decision belongs to you and your prescriber. I am a clinical social worker and do not prescribe.
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Regulation tools often give some relief inside the first few sessions. Changing how often the alarm fires takes longer, and depends a great deal on whether there is a trauma history underneath. I would rather give you that honestly than quote a number.
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California, Illinois, Texas, Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., over secure video. Three tiers — $160, $200, or $250 — and you choose what is sustainable for you. Out-of-network by design, superbills provided, Thrizer partnership for reimbursement, first consultation free.