Living with anxiety can be exhausting. Your mind may rarely seem to turn off, your body may stay on alert even when nothing is obviously wrong, or fear and worry may be interfering with parts of your life that matter to you. The good news is that anxiety disorders are highly treatable.
As a licensed clinical psychologist providing anxiety treatment in Los Angeles, I help adults understand not only how to manage anxiety symptoms, but also what may be driving them. My approach combines evidence-based treatment with an individualized understanding of your history, nervous system, relationships, beliefs, and goals.
Here, you can learn about my approach to anxiety treatment, the concerns I commonly treat, and what working together might look like.
Looking for Anxiety Treatment in Los Angeles? Book a free consultation today.
Anxiety Doesn’t Have to Control Your Life
Anxiety doesn’t always look like someone visibly panicking. Many of my clients appear successful and capable to the people around them while privately using enormous amounts of energy to manage worry, fear, overthinking, and uncomfortable feelings.
You may recognize experiences such as:
- Constant or chronic worry: Your brain continually searches for the next problem to solve, even when things are going relatively well.
- Racing thoughts: It can feel nearly impossible to quiet your mind or focus on what is happening right now.
- Panic attacks: Sudden waves of panic and intense bodily sensations may leave you afraid that something terrible is happening — or fearful of when the next attack will occur.
- Overthinking conversations: You replay interactions, wonder whether you said the wrong thing, or worry about how another person perceived you.
- Difficulty relaxing: Slowing down may actually make you feel more anxious rather than peaceful.
- Feeling overwhelmed by everyday responsibilities: Things that seem manageable to other people can feel disproportionately stressful when your nervous system is already overloaded.
- Trouble with sleep: Worry and physiological arousal can make it difficult to fall asleep or stay asleep.
- Physical symptoms: Anxiety can show up through muscle tension, gastrointestinal distress, rapid heartbeat, restlessness, dizziness, or other bodily sensations.
- Struggling internally despite external success: High-functioning anxiety can be particularly easy for others to miss.
Living in Los Angeles can add another layer. Traffic, financial pressure, career demands, social comparison, long commutes, and the sheer pace of life can compound an already overtaxed nervous system. Whether you’re in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, or elsewhere in California, therapy can give you a dedicated place to understand what is happening and begin changing it.
Why Anxiety Happens — and Why It Can Feel So Difficult to Break Free From
If you could simply reason your way out of anxiety, you probably would have done it already.
Anxiety disorders aren’t caused by a failure to think positively or a lack of willpower. Anxiety involves interactions between thoughts, feelings, behaviors, past experiences, and the body’s threat-detection system. That is one reason effective treatments address more than thoughts alone.
Your nervous system is designed to detect danger and protect you. Sometimes, however, it becomes exceptionally good at its job. Chronic stress, trauma, adverse experiences, and prolonged uncertainty can teach the brain and body to anticipate threat even in situations that are objectively safe.
Early relationships can matter, too. Attachment experiences help shape our beliefs about safety, trust, ourselves, and other people. If connection was unpredictable, criticism was common, or you learned that acceptance depended on keeping other people happy, anxiety may become intertwined with relationships.
Perfectionism and people-pleasing can function similarly. They can create an implicit rule: If I perform perfectly, anticipate everyone’s needs, or never disappoint anyone, I’ll be safe. My Therapy for High Achievers specialty page discusses these patterns in greater depth.
In this sense, many anxious behaviors are protective. Avoidance, excessive preparation, reassurance seeking, obsessive thinking, and attempts to control uncertainty may provide short-term relief. Unfortunately, they can also reinforce the belief that the feared situation really was dangerous.
Understanding why anxiety developed helps us choose treatment based on the mechanisms keeping it going — not just the diagnosis attached to it.
My Approach to Anxiety Treatment in Los Angeles
There are many effective treatments for anxiety disorders. Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most extensively studied approach, and talk therapy remains an important first-line treatment for many anxiety disorders. Depending on the person and diagnosis, treatment may also incorporate exposure, mindfulness, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), trauma-focused work, or medication prescribed and managed by an appropriate medical professional.
There is no single most effective treatment for every client. The best fit depends on your symptoms, their severity, your history, your preferences, and what is actually maintaining the anxiety. My goal isn’t to squeeze every person into the same protocol. It is to draw from evidence-based treatment while creating therapy around the individual sitting in front of me.
Personalized, Evidence-Based Therapy
I integrate approaches including cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT strategies, acceptance and commitment therapy, mindfulness, trauma-informed psychotherapy, EMDR, and attachment-focused work.
CBT helps us examine the relationship between thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and behaviors. Traditional cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety may include cognitive work, behavioral experiments, exposure, and structured practice between sessions. Research protocols for CBT commonly involve roughly 12-16 weekly sessions, although real-world treatment length varies considerably depending on the person, diagnosis, complexity, and goals.
ACT — or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy — adds another important dimension. Rather than making the elimination of every uncomfortable thought or feeling the goal, ACT develops greater acceptance of internal experiences while helping you choose behaviors consistent with your values. Acceptance doesn’t mean liking anxiety or resigning yourself to suffering. It means learning that difficult feelings do not always have to dictate what you do next.
Both CBT and ACT can therefore help loosen anxiety’s grip, but from somewhat different angles.
EMDR Therapy
Sometimes anxiety isn’t primarily about what is happening today. Current situations may activate fear, beliefs, or bodily responses connected to earlier experiences.
EMDR Therapy can be especially useful when anxiety is connected to trauma, distressing experiences, or deeply held negative beliefs such as I’m not safe, I’m powerless, or I have to be perfect.
Rather than relying exclusively on talk therapy, EMDR helps the brain process experiences that continue to feel emotionally “stuck.” For some clients, integrating EMDR with CBT, ACT, and other forms of psychotherapy allows us to address both present-day anxiety patterns and the experiences underneath them.
Attachment-Focused Therapy
Anxiety often shows up in relationships: fear of rejection, overanalyzing another person’s behavior, difficulty trusting, people-pleasing, or needing reassurance to feel secure.
Attachment-focused therapy explores how earlier relationships may have shaped your expectations of yourself and others. My work is also informed by attachment-focused EMDR, which can help address attachment injuries and the beliefs and emotional responses connected to them.
The goal isn’t to blame your childhood for everything happening in your life now. It’s to understand patterns compassionately enough that you can begin making different choices.
Nervous System Regulation & Mindfulness
Anxiety isn’t solely cognitive. You can intellectually know that you’re safe while your body is behaving as though you’re in danger.
Mindfulness, grounding, meditation, and nervous-system regulation skills can help you develop a different relationship with anxious feelings and bodily sensations. Like ACT, mindfulness emphasizes awareness and acceptance rather than automatically fighting or avoiding discomfort.
Regular exercise, adequate sleep, supportive relationships, and other everyday practices can also support clinical treatment. These aren’t replacements for therapy when an anxiety disorder is significantly affecting your life, but they can strengthen the work we do in sessions.
Together, these approaches allow treatment to address anxiety from multiple directions: what you think, what you believe, what you avoid, what your body has learned, and what experiences may be underneath it.
Compassionate Care for Different Types of Anxiety
“Anxiety” is an umbrella term. Different anxiety disorders — and related disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) — can require different treatment strategies.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Generalized anxiety disorder often involves persistent, difficult-to-control worry across multiple areas of life. CBT, ACT, mindfulness, and exploration of underlying patterns can all be useful for generalized anxiety disorder.
Panic Disorder
Panic disorder involves recurrent panic attacks and often the fear of having additional attacks. Evidence-based CBT for panic disorder may incorporate interoceptive exposure, which helps a person safely encounter feared bodily sensations rather than continually trying to prevent them.
Social Anxiety Disorder
Social anxiety disorder goes beyond ordinary shyness. Social anxiety can involve intense fear of judgment, embarrassment, rejection, or scrutiny. CBT treatment for social anxiety disorder may incorporate behavioral experiments and gradual real-world exposure. Social skills training can sometimes be appropriate, although many people with social anxiety already possess adequate social skills — the anxiety prevents them from trusting those skills.
Social anxiety disorder has historically also been called social phobia.
Health Anxiety
Health anxiety can involve heightened attention to physical sensations, catastrophic interpretations of those sensations, repeated checking, or reassurance-seeking behaviors. CBT and carefully designed exposure can help interrupt this cycle.
OCD, Phobias, and Related Disorders
OCD is not simply being organized or particular. Obsessive-compulsive disorder involves obsessions and/or compulsions that can cause substantial distress and impairment. Exposure and response prevention (ERP), a specialized form of CBT involving exposure while reducing compulsive responses, is considered a first-line treatment for OCD.
Specific phobias and other phobias are also commonly treated through paced, gradual exposure to feared situations or triggers. Agoraphobia may similarly involve carefully planned exposure work.
Because OCD treatment and exposure and response prevention require specialized training, clients seeking dedicated OCD treatment should work with mental health professionals or clinicians with appropriate ERP training. Some psychologists and therapists specialize almost exclusively in OCD and related disorders.
Trauma-Related Anxiety
Trauma can leave the nervous system expecting danger long after the original experience has ended. When trauma is an important part of the picture, treatment may incorporate EMDR and other trauma-informed approaches rather than focusing exclusively on present-day symptoms. You can learn more on my Trauma Therapy speciality page.
Anxiety can also emerge during major life transitions, relationship changes, grief, career changes, or other periods of uncertainty. Every treatment plan is individualized around the client’s experiences, symptoms, diagnosis when applicable, and goals.
What It’s Like to Work Together
Starting therapy can itself provoke anxiety. You don’t need to arrive knowing exactly what’s wrong, what diagnosis fits, or which type of treatment you need. We figure that out together.
Starting with a Consultation
We begin with a free phone consultation. This gives you an opportunity to tell me what has been happening, ask questions, and get a sense of whether I might be the right therapist for you.
If we decide to move forward, our early sessions allow me to conduct a more thorough assessment and understand your anxiety in the context of your life rather than treating a collection of symptoms in isolation.
Creating a Personalized Treatment Plan
Treatment is collaborative. We identify what you want to change and consider which approaches make sense for you.
For one client, CBT and behavioral work may be central. Another may benefit more from ACT, mindfulness, attachment work, or EMDR. Many clients benefit from a combination.
Although some structured CBT protocols involve 12-16 sessions, I don’t assume every person should progress according to the same timetable. Complexity matters. Trauma matters. Other mood disorders or related disorders can matter. Your preferences matter.
Building Lasting Change
The goal is bigger than becoming better at temporarily suppressing anxiety.
Over time, therapy can help you understand your patterns, question rigid beliefs, develop healthier coping strategies, increase acceptance of difficult feelings, reduce avoidance, regulate your nervous system, and respond differently to fear.
Effective treatment should ultimately give anxiety less authority over your life.
We move at a pace that feels safe and appropriate while still working toward meaningful change.
Why Clients Throughout Los Angeles Choose My Practice
Finding therapists in Los Angeles isn’t necessarily difficult. Finding someone whose experience, approach, personality, and specialized training fit what you need can be much harder.
My practice offers:
- Trauma-informed care: I consider how trauma and adverse experiences may interact with current anxiety rather than assuming every symptom exists independently.
- Evidence-based treatment: My work draws from established approaches including CBT, ACT, mindfulness, and EMDR.
- Individualized treatment: I don’t assume that everyone with the same diagnosis needs identical therapy.
- A warm, collaborative relationship: Good psychotherapy is something we do together, not something I do to you.
- Experience with anxiety and trauma: I regularly work with adults whose anxiety overlaps with trauma, perfectionism, relationship difficulties, shame, and chronic stress.
- LGBTQIA+-affirming care: My practice provides affirming therapy for LGBTQIA+ clients. You can learn more on my LGBTQIA+ specialty page.
- A focus on lasting change: Coping skills matter, but whenever possible, I also want to understand and treat what keeps the anxiety coming back.
I am a licensed clinical psychologist providing in-person therapy in the Los Angeles area and virtual therapy for adults throughout California, including clients in Beverly Hills and surrounding communities. I work with adults rather than children or adolescents; parents seeking treatment for children or adolescents should look for psychologists or other mental health professionals with age-specific training.
Is Anxiety Therapy Right for You?
You don’t need to wait until anxiety becomes unbearable to contact a therapist. Therapy may be worth considering if you:
- Feel anxious or on edge most days
- Experience panic attacks or fear having another panic attack
- Feel overwhelmed by chronic worry
- Avoid situations, people, places, or experiences because of fear
- Notice social anxiety affecting relationships or opportunities
- Find anxiety interfering with work, relationships, sleep, or daily life
- Have tried to treat or manage anxiety independently without lasting relief
- Understand your anxiety intellectually but still can’t seem to change it
- Want to understand where your anxiety comes from rather than only managing symptoms
Most people experience anxiety sometimes. The question isn’t whether you ever feel anxious; it’s whether fear, worry, avoidance, obsessive thinking, or other symptoms are restricting the life you want to live.
Schedule an Anxiety Therapy Consultation Today
You don’t have to figure out the right diagnosis, therapy modality, or treatment plan before reaching out.
If you’re looking for anxiety treatment in Los Angeles, I offer a free phone consultation where we can talk about what you’re experiencing, what you’re hoping to change, and whether working together feels like the right fit.
You can learn more About Me, review information about Consultations, or contact me to schedule an appointment. Whether we ultimately work together or not, the consultation can help you take the next step toward finding the support you need.