Anxiety therapy in the Seattle area, for a mind that won't stop

You know the loop. A conversation ends and you start it over from the beginning, checking your own sentences for anything that might have landed wrong. An email arrives with no context and your body reads it as a threat before your mind has caught up. It's eleven at night, you're exhausted, and your brain has chosen this exact moment to rehearse a conversation that may never happen.

From the outside, this often looks a lot like conscientiousness — you're prepared, you catch the things other people miss, and nobody sees what the preparation is costing you. After enough years, you stop seeing it yourself.

Anxiety of this kind is rarely about whatever you happen to be anxious about in the moment. Somewhere along the way, your nervous system learned that staying ahead of every possible problem was the price of feeling safe, and it never quite got the message that it's allowed to stop.

Anxiety is not one thing - see my specialized pages

Overthinking & Rumination — The 2am loop, the replayed conversation, the decision you've made and unmade six times.
Social Anxiety Therapy — The post-conversation replay, the fear of being perceived, the dread before speaking up.
People-Pleasing & Boundaries — For the reliable one, the eldest daughter, the person who says yes and resents it afterward.

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What therapy with me looks like

I work relationally and attachment-based, which, when it comes to anxiety, means we do two things at once.

The first is practical, because you need to sleep. We'll work on what actually interrupts a spiral in the moment: noticing it earlier, getting out of the argument with your own thoughts, settling a body that's already flooded, finding your way back to sleep at 3am instead of lying there problem-solving until the alarm goes off.

The second part is slower, and it's the part that lasts. Together we'll look at where the vigilance came from and what it's still trying to protect. For most of the people I see, the anxiety is doing a job (holding a family's expectations, keeping a career intact, making sure nobody ends up disappointed in them) and it doesn't loosen its grip until something else is there to hold that weight.

I'll be direct with you about what I'm noticing, and I'll ask about your family, because these patterns almost always have a history behind them. What I won't do is treat your anxiety as a malfunction to be deleted. It made sense somewhere, and understanding where it came from is usually what allows it to finally loosen.

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What happens next

You pick a time for us to meet, directly on my calendar. Fifteen minutes, free, by video or phone. You don't have to have the words ready or fill out long forms; I understand the first step can be difficult.
We meet virtually and talk about what's going on. I'll tell you honestly whether I'm the right fit, and if I'm not, I'll point you toward someone in my network who is.
If it feels right, we schedule your first full session, usually within a week. I see clients at my office in Edmonds on the waterfront, or virtually across Washington State.

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Book a free 15 min consult on my calendar

Common Questions

Do I need therapy, or am I just stressed?

It's a fair question, and the honest answer is that there's no bright line. What I'd pay attention to is how far it reaches rather than how intense it gets. Has it started to organize your life? Are you turning down things you'd genuinely want to do, avoiding conversations, sleeping badly for weeks at a stretch rather than the occasional bad night, snapping at the people you love and then lying awake feeling terrible about it? Has the thing you used to do to unwind quietly stopped working?

Anxiety that has settled into a background condition, rather than a response to something specific, is worth taking seriously, not because it's dangerous, but because you don't have to keep living inside it.

What about the anxiety that comes from work?

For a lot of my clients, that's the whole picture, and it needs its own frame, because the problem isn't only inside you. If your anxiety is mostly about your job, your capacity, and the standard you hold yourself to, it makes sense to start with therapy for professionals and burnout instead.

What about anxiety that's really about family and culture?

This is common too, and worth naming directly. If the anxiety is tied to being the child of immigrants, translating between two sets of expectations, or a family that doesn't have language for any of this, then bilingual and bicultural therapy is the better door. And anxiety in Spanish is welcome here too — terapia en español.