People that suffer from anxiety tend to overly focus on unpleasant thoughts, feelings and situations to the point where it affects their abilities to live their daily lives. Often they will try to avoid situations that cause those fears and worries but this is not an solution for the condition and may even reinforce make it worse.
Therapies are available to treat anxiety which aim to help a person understand the reasons for the feelings they are having, how these feelings are triggered and provide techniques that help them re-frame their thinking to manage their anxiety.
Anxiety disorders fall into several major groups that can be treated with anxiety therapy including panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), phobias, general anxiety disorder (GAD), post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD). It is estimated that in the United States almost a fifth of the adult population and nearly a third of adolescents experience symptoms of anxiety.
Different types of anxiety disorders have varying symptoms and diagnoses and therapies need to be tailored to the individuals circumstances. Following are some of the different types of anxiety therapy that can be used to help people suffering from this condition:
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is based on the idea that it is a person’s thoughts, not the external reality that lead to feelings of anxiety. The goal of this approach to anxiety therapy is to help a person understand the causes of their negative thoughts, and the behaviour patterns that give rise to them, and emphasize the replacement of negative thinking with a more realistic perception of their circumstances. Patients are taught to recognize the cause of their anxiety and what triggers them and then to apply coping skills that are developed with the therapist to help overcome them.
Exposure Therapy
This type of therapy is one of the most common ways to treat anxieties related to phobias. The goal is to confront the things that cause the patient’s anxiety head-on (that is, by exposing them to the conditions that cause it) and then overcoming their fears by using various relaxation techniques and others that help to deal with the cause of their anxiety.
Art Therapy
Art therapy is an approach to anxiety that involves using the creation of visual or plastic art objects (drawing, painting, sculpting and so on) to help express and process the emotions that occur during a person’s anxiety and dealing with them through the process of creating art and practicing mindfulness as they do so.
Psychoanalysis Therapy
In Freudian psychological theory, symptoms of anxiety are born of unresolved unconscious conflicts that occur in a patient’s brain. The purpose of this type of therapy is to resolve these conflicts and thus to remove the causes of anxiety. This involves the therapist discussing a persons fears, thoughts and desires to understand how they view themselves and then to propose strategies for constructing a different, better self-image for the patient. This is an intensive form of treatment that can take years to identify and modify a person’s way of thinking.
Want to book a session with a great therapist? Check out the best anxiety counseling in Philadelphia today.
