Anxiety therapists in Chester, New Hampshire NH
Anxiety or Fears
New England Pastoral Institute
Pastoral Counselor/Therapist, NEPI
All NEPI staff are multifaceted in treatment strategies and approaches, providing support and care for anxiety disorders.
41 Years Experience
Anxiety or Fears
New Hampshire Pastoral Psychotherapist
Pastoral Counselor/Therapist
Anxiety makes it difficult to get through your day. Symptoms include feelings of nervousness, panic and fear as well as sweating and a rapid heartbeat. Treatments include medications and cognitive behavioral therapy. We will design a treatment plan that’s best for you.
41 Years Experience
Anxiety or Fears
Sarah C. Benoit
Licensed Mental Health Counselor, LCMHC, LMHC, PLLC
Anxiety can feel like a nervous energy or come in the form of a debilitating and scary panic attack. Exploring the underlying thoughts and feelings that are causing the anxiety allows us to explore strategies that will help you feel grounded and over time provide more mental clarity. It is important to have a robust toolbox of skills and techniques to rely on when the anxiety starts to ramp up.
20 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
Anxiety or Fears
Dr. Traci Williams
Psychologist, PsyD, ABPP, CFT-I
In our work together, I help you identify the root cause of your anxiety and understand your triggers. You will learn coping mechanisms and relaxation techniques so you can manage your anxiety. We will challenge and reframe negative thought patterns that can contribute to your anxiety so you can regain control of your life.
11 Years Experience