You can recover with a well-rounded approach that includes addressing the issues underlying the initial cause, increasing your understanding about anxiety and learning skills to limit its impact. 

How can counselling help?

I choose to use a range of techniques throughout the course of therapy, depending on what's going to be the best fit for the issue we're working on at the time.  These may include relaxation and mindfulness techniques, problem solving and communication skills, identifying unhelpful beliefs, thoughts and behaviours or a practical plan to address a specific problem.

The aim of therapy is to increase self awareness and confidence and release you from the limiting and self-defeating concepts that have been a barrier to your well-being.

Understanding anxiety & panic attacks

Knowing what first led you to feel anxious is a good place to start your recovery journey. For some people the cause is obvious. They can point to a specific event as being a catalyst, with continued anxiety or panic resulting from it remaining an unresolved issue in their life.

Other people will come to counselling and say something like: "I can't understand why this is happening. I have a good job and two great kids. I don't even have any problems in my marriage. It's just that I keep having panic attacks."  For these people, nothing jumps out as an obvious cause for their attacks.

Yet, something has usually happened in the past or is happening now to trigger this reaction. While most people look for an event, the cause can be something more subtle like a distorted view of who you think you are or should be.  One of the goals of therapy is to bring into awareness, what may be hidden or not obvious at first glance.

It may be helpful to think of anxiety as a small voice that comes along to warn you when something's  not quite right. That there's a threat to your psychological wellbeing or physical safety. In an ideal situation we would listen, identify the threat and deal with it in such a way that our sense of wellbeing and safety is restored.

Other times and for reasons we may or may not be fully aware of, we choose to ignore that small voice. It might seem easier to go with the flow, avoid potential conflict or not draw attention to oneself for example. In other words, we respond to the situation in a way which is in conflict with our needs at that particular time.

The nature of anxiety is that if we choose not to listen when it's a small voice, it tends to get louder and louder. For many people this means anxiety expressing itself in physical symptoms. A panic attack is like anxiety screaming that you need to start thinking and behaving differently.

Unfortunately, once a person gets caught up in the cycle of attacks and anticipatory anxiety about when the next one will happen; the focus is on how to top them, rather than on why they might be happening.

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