Anxiety

The first sessions are for mapping, not fixing. In which situations does the anxiety rise? What story does it tell? What does it do to the body — and which avoidances, including the disguised ones like over-checking and reassurance-seeking, have organised themselves around it? Anxiety thrives on vagueness; naming its exact shape already changes your relationship with it.

Then the work follows the approach clinical guidelines place first for persistent anxiety: cognitive and behavioural methods, applied to the two levers that keep an alarm oversensitive. The interpretations that fuel it are examined against reality rather than argued away, and the avoidances that maintain it are approached gradually — in steps agreed together, never forced — so the alarm can relearn from experience that the feared outcome mostly does not happen, or is survivable when it does. Alongside, body-based regulation gives you something concrete to do while the alarm is ringing: a trained, slowed exhale works on the physiology directly. Where it is appropriate, medical hypnosis can complement the work — rehearsing feared situations in a calm, focused state before meeting them for real.

The aim deserves stating honestly: not a life without anxiety, which no serious clinician would promise, but an alarm that rings when it should, a body that knows the way back down, and choices that belong to you again rather than to the fear. Most people are surprised to discover that the goal was never silence — it was learning to hear the alarm without obeying it.