Anxiety therapy in Santa Barbara
Anxiety can make everyday life feel overwhelming, affecting your relationships, work, physical health, and overall well-being. If you're stuck in overthinking, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or on the edge of burnout, therapy can help you find your footing again.
I work with adults across Santa Barbara — and throughout California via telehealth — who are high achieving and appear composed on the outside, but feel tensed and braced on the inside. Together we'll identify the patterns keeping you stuck, understand what your anxiety is protecting, and help you move beyond survival mode to begin living with greater calm, resilience, and connection to yourself and others.
What we might work on
Quieting the inner critic
Perfectionism and people-pleasing are often old survival strategies. We treat them with curiosity, not judgment — and loosen their grip.
Calming your nervous system
Practical, trauma-informed tools for overwhelm—including grounding, mindfulness, pacing, and EMDR—to help your nervous system move out of survival mode and into a greater sense of safety and balance.
Boundaries & communication
Saying no without spiraling, identifying and asking for what you need, and letting relationships nurture you rather than drain you.
Getting underneath it
Anxiety often has deeper roots in trauma, attachment patterns, and unprocessed experiences. Using a trauma-informed approach, we'll go beyond symptom relief to understand and heal the patterns driving your anxiety.
My approach
Person-centered first: the relationship we build is the foundation. From there I draw on CBT, mindfulness, psychodynamic work, and EMDR depending on what serves you.
Sessions are 50 minutes at my office at 27 E Victoria St, Suite F in downtown Santa Barbara, or by secure video anywhere in California. If anxiety is tangled up with your relationship, couples therapy may also be a good fit.