Anxiety Therapy in Guelph, Ontario
Counselling for teens and adults living with anxiety
Anxiety therapy is counselling for the anxiety you’ve been carrying for years.
You’ve probably gotten good at managing it. You prepare more than anyone asks you to, and maybe you can even talk yourself down when it spikes. Most days that works well enough. But all of that management takes up so much attention that there’s rarely any left for what’s sitting underneath it.
That’s usually where we start. Anxiety has a history, and what sets it off today often looks a lot like something from years ago. So we’ll work on the anxiety you’re feeling this week and on where it started.
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People often come to us with anxiety that looks like:
Worry that runs all day or night
Panic that seems to arrive out of nowhere
Perfectionism and impossible standards
People-pleasing
Anxiety that moves from topic to topic
Social anxiety
The way you feel around your family or close relationships can tell us something, too. If you’re a different person around your parents, that’s often where the roots turn up.
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Like every session at Golden Horizons, this mostly looks like a conversation. We’ll talk about the ordinary moments that got to you since we last met, like the meeting you dreaded all Tuesday or the email reply you rewrote and rewrote. Then we’ll slow those moments down and look at what the anxiety was doing.
Some of that work is practical, and sometimes we’ll go further back to find where a pattern started.
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You’ve lived with anxiety long enough that you’ve probably built your life around it by now. Learning a different way to live is what anxiety therapy is for. If that sounds like a relief, you’re in the right place.
Questions about anxiety therapy in Guelph
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Therapy is mostly talking, and you’ll decide how deep it goes on day one. You’ll tell us about your anxiety, and we’ll start sorting out together what you want from therapy.
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No, and you don’t need a referral either. If anxiety is costing you something, that’s reason enough to come. And if you’re not sure what you’re feeling even counts as anxiety, reach out and ask us.
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That’s common, and a lot of what we do here. Your anxiety may have its roots inside a family or a relationship.
Our trauma therapy page covers more.
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Yes. A tight chest or a feeling in your stomach can arrive long before the thoughts do, so what your body does with anxiety is part of what we talk about.
Our somatic therapy page explains that approach.
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Yes, because they often show up together. We’ll pay attention to both from the start.
Read more on our ADHD therapy page.
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For anxiety, we often use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It teaches you to spend less energy arguing with anxious thoughts and feelings, and more of it on the life you want. We also use Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), where you learn to spot an anxious thought as it arrives and test it against what’s really true. We might also rely on self-compassion-focused therapy, narrative therapy, or somatic therapy.
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There’s no set number of sessions that we tell people to do. Some people come for a few weeks or months about something specific, and some stay longer. You book one session at a time, so you can stop whenever you want to.
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Sessions are 50 minutes. We book the full hour, and the last ten minutes are for the practical stuff, like payment and booking your next session.
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Both. Our office is at 15 Surrey Street West in Guelph, and video sessions reach anyone in Ontario or Alberta. You can mix the two depending on your week.
