Does worry run more of your life than you want it to?
You have probably read the articles by now. You can breathe in for four and out for eight, you have deleted the news app, cut the coffee and tried the meditation program that came with your phone. Maybe a therapist helped you understand why you worry, or a prescription took the edge off, and some of it worked for a while. You can trace the worry to its source and name it before it speaks. Then a text goes unanswered for an hour or a number on a spreadsheet looks wrong, and your body sounds the alarm as if nothing had ever been learned.
You may have learned to manage your presentation so well that almost nobody around you would guess. You answer email before breakfast, hold the meeting together, remember the birthdays and keep the schedule for a family or a hospital unit. Inside, the engine never idles. A conversation from last week replays at 3 a.m. while you draft the next one. Your jaw is tight by noon, your stomach has opinions about every deadline, your shoulders have forgotten what down feels like, and sleep comes late and leaves early. Some of you answer all of this by doing more. Others disappear into a screen or a week of canceled plans.
If you tend other people for a living, as a therapist, coach, nurse or healer, you know the stress response well enough to teach it, and the knowledge does not travel from your head to the rest of you.
And if your title is something plainer, a parent, an attorney, the person who runs the shop, the one who keeps the volunteer list, the same alarm has found you. Your days look routine and cost more to hold together than anyone has seen. Or the holding together has begun to slip, and the cost lands at home: a short fuse with your children, less appetite for physical intimacy with your partner.
What if the alarm itself could be heard, and could finally stand down?
When therapy for anxiety helps and the alarm keeps ringing
Anxiety is a protective system at work: it scans for danger, rehearses the worst case so you are never caught off guard, and keeps you busy and prepared. Whatever made that necessary, a childhood that taught you to read every room or a life that has asked too much for too long, was real, and the system’s answer to it was intelligent.
The model I work with, Internal Family Systems (IFS), starts from a simple observation: a mind holds many voices. One part is after the promotion while another dreads the visibility. One wants to rest while another keeps the list going. Those are parts, and they argue the way members of a family do. The worrier is one of them. It belongs to a group of protectors whose job is to keep you from being hurt: managers who plan, check and prepare so that nothing goes wrong, and firefighters who react when something does go wrong, through panic, scrolling, wine or a sudden rage. Underneath the protectors are younger, more tender parts that carry the original fear, and the protectors exist to keep those parts from being felt. Behind all of it is your Self, the curious, steady center of you that is not a part and is never damaged. When the protectors trust it, Self can lead.
Different kinds of help reach different depths. Talk therapy and CBT work with thought and story: what you tell yourself and what you do next. Breathwork, yoga and body-based therapies speak to the nervous system directly. Medication lowers the volume for many people, and that matters. Parts work goes to the protectors who run the alarm and to what they guard. Each can give real relief, and each has a depth it does not touch. Anxiety usually lives at the depth no one has visited yet.
Most anxiety care stops at the edge of the person, and some of what rattles you may begin beyond it. Families hand down their weather: a grandmother’s vigilance, a father’s sleeplessness, the way a household held its breath. Researchers who study epigenetics have found that one generation’s stress can leave marks that can be passed on. Some people also carry what feels like a foreign charge, an anxiety with no history in their own life, picked up from a person or a place along the way. Talk, thought and work on the nervous system seldom reach what was never yours, and it can keep ringing after your own story has been tended.
Many of my clients carry an anxious part that is also their best employee: the planner, the fixer, the one who sees every outcome before it happens. It has taken them far, and it dreads the day it stops being needed. Success feeds it, which is why the strength that gets you through the week can hide the anxiety from the people around you, and sometimes from you. Pile onto that a culture that tells you to push through every challenge, and plenty of people live for decades with a hum of dread and no word for it.
What anxiety looks like in a body and a life
Anxiety often speaks first through the body: a racing heart, shallow breath, a knot in the stomach, shoulders that cannot come down, a gut that rebels before every big day, a head that will not stop. It can also look like illness: recurring infections, migraines, rashes, pain that moves around, exhaustion that sleep does not repair. For some people it is almost entirely somatic. The mind feels calm, even cheerful, while the body shows every sign of a nervous system in distress. These are intelligent signals from a system that believes it is under threat, whether your mind agrees. Anything the body reports deserves a doctor’s eye as well.
For others it runs the other way, loud in the mind and nearly silent in the body: the loop that replays a conversation, the self-criticism that gets there before anyone else can, the worst case rehearsed in detail. It shows up as perfectionism, as procrastination, as irritability with the people you love, as a body that crashes the moment you finally stop.
Some anxiety comes in waves with no visible cause, a panic that lands in the grocery store or in the middle of the night. Some is a low constant tone, the sense that something is about to go wrong. Some attaches to one thing, a presentation, a flight, a crowd, a phone call. Some belongs to a season: a diagnosis in the family, a layoff, a move.
Isolation feeds anxiety, and anxiety feeds isolation. The more you withdraw to protect yourself, the less your nervous system gets of what settles it, which is other people. Loneliness follows, and so does overwhelm, and each gives the alarm more to do. The weight multiplies for people who hold a lot: the entrepreneur whose payroll depends on next quarter, the partner who carries the family’s finances, the parent who holds every thread of childcare, the caregiver no one has a plan to relieve. Someone responsible for everyone often has no one responsible for them, and an alarm with no one to hand the watch to never goes off duty.
Therapists and healers know a version of this that rarely gets named. You carry other people’s trauma out of the room, and when a client is suicidal or in danger, you take it home. It sits in your body at dinner and follows you to bed with the question of whether you did enough. The training teaches you to stay steady for them and says little about where the weight goes afterward. It collects, and the protectors who keep watch for you grow more watchful.
However long it has been this way, the worry has been standing guard for you, and behind the guard is your Self, intact and well. I help you find the way back to it.
How I work
Anxiety sets the terms for how you lead, sleep, love and plan, and it is usually the thread beneath whatever finally brought you to look for help.
I know this territory from the inside. Anxiety and a complex trauma history are part of my own story. I know how much anxiety can strip the joy out of a life, and how hard it is to trust that anyone or anything is safe. I also know the way out of it, because I walked it, one slow step at a time. My professional training helps, and what I pass on to you comes from the deeper work I did to release my own anxiety, and from the elder wisdom that grew out of it.
The most successful way to begin is where you can feel a difference soonest: the body. Anxiety is a body state before it is a thought, so the first work is practical skills for your nervous system: the fullness of supportive breath, mindful movement, the weight of your own hands, ways of orienting to the room you are in. You can use them in a meeting, on a plane or in a hard conversation. Relief now gives your protectors evidence that something new is possible, and they need that before they will loosen their grip on anything.
Then we go to the roots, and this is where parts work earns its keep. We get to know your parts one by one: the one who worries, the one who plans, the one who fears being a burden, being found out, letting others down or watching the company collapse. Each has a history and a job, and each softens when it is met with curiosity instead of argument. The work follows whatever your body offers when a part speaks up, and what you feel is yours to name.
Anxiety also has a spiritual dimension that most clinical settings have no room for: the sense of being held by something larger than your own effort. When that sense is missing, every protector stays on duty, because nothing else seems to be on watch. For this part of the work I take the role of spiritual doula. A doula sits beside a birth. She knows the terrain of labor and trusts the person laboring. That is the role I take with you. It sits outside my psychotherapy license, as spiritual guidance and coaching. Diagnosed conditions, anxiety disorders among them, are outside what I treat. I do not share the view that worry is a pathology to be managed. A protective system built over years of real pressure is an intelligent adaptation, and it changes when it is understood.
Mind and body run as one system. Years of bracing wear on sleep, digestion, immunity and the heart, and a nervous system trained by danger can read threat into rooms that are safe. It can be trained in the other direction. What changes it is new experience, which insight can start and rarely finishes.
Brains and bodies keep learning for as long as we live. A protector that has carried its burden for decades can set it down, and the alarm can feel the freedom of relinquishing its role once something steadier is on watch.
My own approach is Neoshamanic IFS: IFS joined with ritual and ceremony, with the body, and with the larger world around us: land, community, ancestors and guides. A session might be a conversation, an inward journey with a part, a movement, a breath practice or a small ritual. You leave with something to do between sessions, and it may be mystical or ordinary: a relationship with your future self, a walk, a longer exhale, a better question, time with a beloved ancestor, a conversation you have been postponing. I come to this as an elder as well as a practitioner, someone with decades of this work behind her, both as a provider and as someone who has had to heal her own anxious parts. As a medicine weaver, I weave many medicines like N-IFS, motion, breath, sound, a relationship deep enough to hold you and, for some, psychedelic or plant medicine.
Under the alarm there is ground that has held all along. We find it together, and from there you can live as the person you came here to be, one whose protectors have finally been relieved of duty.
Who I work with
Anyone whose worry has grown larger than the life it was meant to protect. Credentials, diagnoses and job titles are not requirements for being here. If anxiety shapes how you work, parent or sleep, and the usual help has missed it, you are in the right place. The parent, the nurse, the attorney and the small-business owner sit beside the CEO.
Founders and executives, everyone leans on you, and the thing you built depends on your nerve. In a leader, anxiety looks like vigilance, over-preparation, a decision that will not close and a pace that will not drop, and it is often applauded until it costs you sleep or a marriage. I work with all of you, the desk and the nervous system behind it. More on Founders & Executives.
Mental health practitioners and coaches, your own story is what makes you good at this work, and the nervous system that holds your clients needs holding too. I sit on your side of the room as a fellow practitioner, and what I offer practitioners has long since grown past the borders of psychotherapy. More on Therapists & Practitioners.
My work is a serious investment, and because I give my clients a great deal of attention I keep my practice small. If the cost is beyond reach for now, the Trusted Colleagues page introduces practitioners I vouch for.
Start with a call
If anxiety keeps running the show, contact me to arrange a free consultation. We will talk through what is going on and decide together whether this work suits you.
Common questions
What does this add to what I have already tried?
What you have tried has left something useful, and I build on it. Many clients come with years of earlier work, and we begin from there, looking for the depth it has not touched. Often that depth is spiritual: a sense of being part of something larger, whatever name you give it, Source, God, the land, your lineage, with room to hold whatever else turns up. The piece of you that got you through earlier efforts, often a sharp analytical mind guarding something tender, is welcome here and usually knows the most about what needs protecting.
What happens in a first session?
We talk about what brings you, what you have tried and where anxiety lives in your body and your days. Then we try one or two body skills together, so you leave with something to use that night. You set the pace from there.
How long does it take?
The body skills can change how a day feels within a few sessions. The roots take longer, and how long depends on how many years the alarm has been on duty and how much support you have around you. You will know when your work is complete, and along the way, we check in regularly.
Will I feel worse before I feel better?
We start with skills for your body so you have ground to stand on before we go to the roots, and you set the pace. If a protector relaxes and an old feeling comes up, we slow down. You are never pushed past what your body is ready for.
Do I have to take medication, or stop taking it, to work with you?
No to both. I do not prescribe, and I never ask anyone to start, stop or change a medication; that stays between you and your prescriber. Some of my clients take medication while we work together and some do not. A basic blood panel is wise for anyone with anxiety, since a few physical conditions can mimic or feed it.
Is this psychotherapy or treatment?
I hold a license in psychotherapy, and though my work is deeply trauma informed, it happens outside that license. What I offer is spiritual guidance and coaching, so I do not diagnose or treat anxiety disorders, and I do not accept the idea that a worried nervous system is a broken one. For a diagnosed condition, see a licensed clinician; many of my clients keep one.
Do you offer online anxiety therapy?
I have an international practice, so most clients meet with me online and where you live makes no difference. I am also available in person to local clients in Longmont, Colorado, and to people traveling to this area. Some people come for an intensive personal retreat. The work itself is spiritual guidance and coaching, kept outside my license, which makes it a different thing from clinical care.