Anxiety counselling · Farnham and online
Anxiety is exhausting in a way that's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't had it. If you've been managing it alone for a long time, you don't have to keep doing that.
Recognising it
People describe it to me in these sorts of ways.
The work
Weekly, fifty minutes, at your pace.
We start by looking at when it shows up and what happens in your body when it does, because anxiety is usually more specific than it feels from the inside.
From there the work tends to go two ways at once: something practical about the weeks as they happen, and something slower about where the pattern came from. You set the pace on both, and nothing gets pushed.
I won't hand you a breathing exercise and call it done. If a particular technique is useful for you, we'll use it, but the main thing on offer is an hour a week where you don't have to manage anyone else's feelings.
Being honest
If anxiety is affecting your sleep, your eating or your ability to work, it's worth speaking to your GP as well as, or instead of, seeing me. NHS talking therapies take self-referrals in most areas, and for some people medication alongside counselling is the thing that helps.
I'd rather say that plainly than have you feel counselling is the only door.
Getting started
Fifty minutes to say it out loud and see how it feels to talk to me. Nothing to commit to afterwards.
Counselling isn't an emergency service, and I don't monitor messages in the evenings or at weekends. If waiting isn't safe, these people answer straight away.