Anxiety therapy in Nelson, BC

Your chest tightens before an important meeting. A knot forms in your gut when you think about the future. Your breath becomes shallow, or you realize you've been holding it without noticing. Sometimes the world narrows, and you lose track of everything except the anxiety itself.

Whether you experience sudden panic attacks or a persistent hum of worry that never quite leaves, anxiety is exhausting. Life is stressful. Uncertainty is everywhere. You're not wrong for feeling this way, and you're certainly not alone.

You've probably tried the standard approaches—breathing exercises, challenging anxious thoughts, understanding where your anxiety comes from. These tools help, and they matter. For many people seeking anxiety therapy in Nelson BC, understanding isn't enough to change how it feels. The anxiety still lives in your body.

What if your body holds something that thinking alone can't reach?

The hidden intelligence of anxiety

Your nervous system is always trying to protect you, even when its way of 'helping' feels like the problem itself. This protective response can get stuck on high alert, scanning for threats that may not actually be present. This isn't a character flaw or weakness. It's your body doing what it believes it needs to do to keep you safe.

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. — Søren Kierkegaard

Anxiety carries information, but it's complex information. Sometimes it points toward what matters deeply to you—relationships you care about, work that's meaningful, your sense of integrity and safety. Sometimes it's signaling unprocessed trauma, attachment wounds from early relationships, or patterns of perfectionism and control that no longer serve you.

The intensity of anxiety often reflects not just what's happening now, but accumulated experiences your body never fully processed. Old threats your nervous system never completed its response to. Moments when you needed to fight or flee but had to stay still and quiet instead.

There's a difference between useful alertness—focused attention that helps you prepare for what matters—and overwhelming static that makes the world feel like it's closing in. Between anxiety that's proportionate and time-limited, and anxiety that persists regardless of whether you're actually in danger.

The goal isn't eliminating anxiety entirely. It's changing your relationship with it, learning to distinguish signal from noise, building capacity to stay present even when discomfort arises.

Anxiety is a universal human experience. As Kierkegaard wrote, "Whoever learns to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate." This is about learning to work with anxiety differently—not through willpower or positive thinking alone, but through your nervous system itself.

When anxiety is future-oriented and the foe isn't here

Anxiety lives in anticipation. Your mind spins through worst-case scenarios, trying to control outcomes that haven't happened yet. You can feel helpless fighting a threat that isn't actually present in this moment.

This is where body-centred work becomes powerful. Anxiety pulls you into an imagined future, but your body exists only right now. When you return attention to sensation—the ground beneath your feet, the temperature of the air on your skin, the weight of your body in the chair—you interrupt the future-focused spin.

We come back to what's actually here, what's tangible, what you can work with in this moment.

How somatic anxiety therapy works

Most anxiety treatment works from thoughts downward—identifying distorted thinking patterns, challenging catastrophic beliefs, reframing your perspective. This is valuable work, and for many people it provides real relief.

Somatic approaches work from your nervous system upward. They address the physiological state that generates anxious thoughts in the first place. When your body is stuck in threat mode, your mind will find things to be anxious about. As soon as one source of anxiety recedes, the anxiety often attaches itself to the next thing. Changing the underlying nervous system state changes your anxiety baseline rather than problem-solving one situation after another.

Both approaches have value. If you've tried cognitive strategies and found yourself plateauing—understanding your anxiety intellectually without it changing how you feel—body-centred work offers a different pathway. And if you've already done that foundational work with your thoughts and beliefs, you may find the somatic work builds on it naturally.

Your nervous system has an optimal zone where you feel regulated. Within this window of tolerance, you can think clearly, connect with others, and handle stress without becoming overwhelmed. Anxiety pushes you above that window into hyperarousal—racing heart, spinning thoughts, panic, hypervigilance.

Sometimes prolonged anxiety flips into shutdown—numbness, exhaustion, disconnection, a sense of collapse. Trauma and chronic stress narrow this window, making you more easily overwhelmed by experiences that others seem to handle without difficulty.

Body-centred therapy gradually expands your window of tolerance. Not by forcing you to "handle more," but by building capacity to stay present with discomfort without getting flooded or shutting down.

I work with Somatic Experiencing® principles, which approach anxiety through your body's own wisdom:

Working in small, manageable steps. We don't dive into the deep end. We work at the edge of what's bearable, building tolerance gradually. This allows your nervous system to integrate new experiences of safety without becoming overwhelmed.

Restoring the natural rhythm between activation and calm. Your nervous system wants to move between tension and ease, like breath or tides. Anxiety gets stuck in constant activation. We restore that natural rhythm, guiding your attention between what feels tense and what feels neutral or even calm, teaching your system it can return to ease after stress.

Building internal resources. Finding anchors—areas of your body that feel stable, memories of moments when you felt safe, present-moment sensations you can return to—that strengthen your sense of ground beneath the anxiety.

Grounding in the present moment. Techniques that anchor you in your body, in the room, in contact with what's actually here rather than the imagined catastrophe. Simple practices like feeling your feet on the floor, noticing what you can see and hear, bringing attention to the sensations of breath.

Research shows mindfulness practices strengthen communication between different brain networks—the parts that notice threat, the parts that regulate emotion, and the parts that engage socially. Through awareness of your body and inner experience, these networks can work together more effectively rather than leaving you stuck in anxious loops.

What becomes possible when you work with anxiety differently

This isn't about never feeling anxious again. Anxiety is part of being human, part of caring about things, part of being alive in an uncertain world. This is about fundamentally changing how anxiety moves through you.

I've witnessed long-standing physical tensions beginning to release—tightness in shoulders that seemed permanent, chronic knots in the gut, jaw clenching that had "always been there." Sometimes these patterns disappear entirely, even if just for moments, showing they're not immutable conditions but held patterns that can shift.

Panic attacks decreasing in frequency or stopping altogether. Not through white-knuckling or avoidance, but through your nervous system learning it doesn't need to sound the alarm so loudly.

Much greater tolerance for the sensations that used to feel overwhelming. You can feel your heart race without immediately spiraling into catastrophe. You can notice tension without it taking over everything.

The capacity to stay present during difficult conversations, in situations that used to trigger immediate anxiety, with uncertainty that used to feel unbearable. Not because you've become numb or detached, but because you've built actual capacity.

The shifts happen across multiple domains:

Self-perception changes. You're no longer someone fundamentally anxious or broken, but someone whose nervous system learned to protect in ways that became overwhelming. There's a tremendous difference between "I am anxious" and "I am experiencing anxiety."

Moment-to-moment experience in your own skin shifts. More ease, more access to pleasure and calm and connection. Less time spent bracing against the next wave.

Engagement with life expands. You can do things that mattered but felt too anxiety-provoking—taking risks, being vulnerable, pursuing what you actually care about rather than organizing your life around avoiding discomfort.

Is anxiety therapy right for you?

This approach is particularly helpful if:

You've tried breathing exercises and thought challenging, and they help in the moment but the anxiety keeps returning. You find yourself going through the same techniques over and over without lasting change.

You understand your anxiety cognitively—you can trace where it came from, analyze the patterns, explain it thoroughly—but that understanding hasn't changed how it feels in your body.

You've done talk therapy and it helped you make sense of things, gave you insight and perspective, but you've plateaued. Something still feels stuck.

Your anxiety shows up as much in physical symptoms as worried thoughts. Chronic tension, digestive issues, sleep problems, a sense of being constantly on edge even when nothing's actively wrong.

You're tired of managing symptoms and ready to address what's underneath. You want to build capacity, not just develop more coping strategies.

Whether you experience intense panic attacks or persistent background worry, whether this is recent or something you've lived with for years, whether you'd describe yourself as particularly sensitive or just dealing with a stressful period in life—this work is for anyone whose body holds anxiety that thinking hasn't been able to fully reach.

I offer both counselling and Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy (RCST®), and we can explore which approach—or combination of approaches—might serve you best.

Ready to explore anxiety counselling in Nelson, BC?

The best way to know if this approach fits is through conversation. I offer a free consultation where we can discuss what you're looking for and whether body-centred work aligns with where you are.

I work with clients in Nelson, Castlegar, Trail, Kaslo, and throughout the Kootenays, with both in-person and online counselling available for BC residents and some other provinces.