Anxiety therapists in Roanoke, Alabama AL
Anxiety or Fears
Roxy Zarrabi
Psychologist, Psy.D.
I help empower you to develop coping skills to manage your anxiety and overcome your fears.
9 Years Experience
Anxiety or Fears
Dr. Amanda Roberts
Psychologist, PhD Clinical Psychology, Masters in Marriage Family Therapy
Working with anxiety disorders requires a comprehensive knowledge of the biological, psychological and learned basis of these complex conditions and finding creative ways to navigate through them to obtain lasting relief.
39 Years Experience
Anxiety or Fears
Matthew Syzdek
Psychologist, PhD, LP, MBA
If you feel on edge, anxious, irritable, or just can't relax, there is a path forward towards a more fulfilling life. Don't gamble when choosing a therapist. You deserve a psychologist who will adapt the best science to your specific needs and goals. Many therapists themselves are burned out and can't give the best care to their clients. Dr Syzdek built a small boutique practice where he limits the number of clients he treats, so he can give his clients the time, thought, and dedication that they deserve. Dr Syzdek combines compassion with the science of behavior change to help you make the the difficult decisions in life and take action, so you can live a happier life, thrive at work, love your relationships, and have fun again. Dr Syzdek treats anxiety and related conditions typically using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and exposure therapies. These approaches combine mindfulness, acceptance, and cognitive strategies to help you live your life again and find relief from the the struggle.
12 Years Experience
Anxiety or Fears
Luke R. Allen
Psychologist, PhD
I received year-long supervised training in treating anxiety using exposure techniques.
8 Years Experience
Anxiety or Fears
Jayson L. Mystkowski
Psychologist, Ph.D., ABPP
While Cognitive-Behavior Therapy (CBT) is highly effective in the treatment of anxiety disorders (e.g., Panic Disorder, Social Phobia, and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder), clinicians do see some “return of fear,” or partial relapse, in some patients due to a variety of factors. Over the past two decades, treatment researchers, with whom Dr. Jayson Mystkowski had the pleasure of working with at UCLA for over 10 years, have studied “return of fear” and discovered some key variables that may optimize the effects of learning during CBT for anxiety disorders (Craske et al., 2008).
First, evidence suggests that focusing on tolerating fear versus eliminating fear yields better clinical outcomes in the long term. Namely, teaching clients that fear and anxiety are normal feelings, rather than attempting to “down-regulate” such feelings all the time, is more realistic and seems to engender “hardier” clients. Second, helping clients to generate an expectancy that “scary things will not happen,” is very powerful. To do this, it is important for clinicians to create more complex exposure exercises (i.e., tasks in which a client confronts a stimulus of which they are afraid), using multiple feared stimuli instead of one at a time. Then, the lack of a feared outcome becomes particularly surprising and memorable for a client and fear reduction is more potent. Third, increasing the accessibility and retrievability of non-fear memories learned during treatment are powerful factors in mitigating against a return of fear. Craske and colleagues demonstrated that exposure to variations of a feared stimulus, using a random schedule across multiple contexts or situations, is more effective than exposure to the same stimulus, on a predictable schedule, in an unchanging environment. The former paradigm, it is argued, creates stronger non-fear memories that are easier for a client to access when subsequently confronting feared objects or situations outside of the therapy context, than the later scenario.
In sum, clinicians have long been aware that some fear or anxiety returns following very successful CBT treatment. As mentioned above, there are some clear, empirically supported ways to modify the therapy we provide to further help clients generalize the gains made in therapy sessions to the real world.
20 Years Experience