ANXIETY TREATMENT IN HOUSTON
Evidence-Based Care For Anxiety Disorders
At Houston OCD and Anxiety, we help people with anxiety disorders to live a life where you no longer make choices out of fear.
You Can Overcome Anxiety
When anxiety is a constant part of your daily life, it can create a level of distress that feels hard to explain to others. The physical, emotional, and mental symptoms of anxiety disorders can make it difficult to feel present, connected, or at ease in your own life.
At Houston OCD and Anxiety, we provide anxiety treatment that considers all of you: your background, your goals, and your life experiences.
With a flexible, collaborative approach, we’ll work toward understanding your distress, building skills that support you in real life, and helping you move from fear to freedom.
We Treat:
Anxiety Disorders
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Panic Disorder
Social Anxiety Disorder
Specific Phobias
Agoraphobia
Health / Illness Anxiety
Trauma
Houston OCD & Anxiety provides individualized, evidence-based treatment for children (ages 8 and up), adolescents, adults, and parents.
What’s happening in your body and brain when you’re dealing with an anxiety disorder?
Anxiety is a reasonable response to stress that we all experience sometimes. Anxiety disorders represent a heightened response of your brain and body to normal, everyday experiences, making them feel dangerous, threatening, uncertain, or unsafe.
Whether it’s social situations, a trauma reminder, or more generalized distress, when your anxiety is triggered, your sympathetic nervous system (the “fight-or-flight” part) takes over. Physically, you may notice your heart pounding, your thoughts racing, or a whole-body feeling of panic. This level of distress can interfere with sleep, eating, mood, and more.
Being hypervigilant due to an anxiety disorder can disrupt relationships, derail work and school goals, cause shame and self-loathing, and simply make life harder. This stress and exhaustion can then reinforce your distress, keeping you stuck in an anxious cycle.
With the right evidence-based treatment, you can disrupt anxiety cycles and overcome fear.
What’s the Connection Between Trauma and Anxiety?
Trauma is often an underlying driver of anxiety. It can be thought of as an extended or chronic state of nervous-system hyperarousal, which often results in anxiety around trauma triggers.
You may not fully recognize the ways trauma causes anxiety for you, but through the therapeutic process, you and your therapist can work together to uncover any underlying trauma.
Your therapist can then help you address the trauma and reduce distress with proven therapy techniques like Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for adults, and Trauma-Focused CBT for children (TF-CBT).
How Can Intensive Outpatient Sessions Help with Anxiety?
While many people benefit from one session a week for anxiety, some people benefit from a more intensive therapy approach.
If your anxiety symptoms are more severe and highly disruptive, longer sessions (2-3 hours vs. 30-60 minutes for conventional outpatient therapy) can help you more rapidly reduce the impacts of anxiety on your life.
Intensive outpatient sessions are also helpful for people on a timeline who need to fast-track symptom management.
This can be helpful for:
People whose lives are being repeatedly disrupted by missed school or work days.
Pregnant or postpartum women, new parents.
Teens and college students on summer break.
People who need to meet occupational mental health clearance requirements.
Children and teens whose social and mental development is being disrupted by mental health difficulties.
Ready to get started?
The fear and distress of an anxiety disorder can disrupt your life, impacting relationships, professional progress, and physical health. It can be an isolating experience, but it’s important to know that you don’t have to try to manage anxiety disorders on your own.
The therapists at Houston OCD and Anxiety are dedicated to using evidence-based, personalized mental health treatment to help children 8+, adolescents, and adults overcome the fear and stress of anxiety.
When you’re ready to get started, we’re here to help.
Frequently Asked Questions About Anxiety Treatment in Houston
Here are the answers to the questions we are asked most often about the anxiety treatment we offer. If you don’t see your question answered here, we welcome you to reach out. We’re here to help!
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After an intake evaluation, you’ll begin having regular individual outpatient sessions. These will be between 30-60 minutes long and can occur either virtually or in-person, at our Houston office.
Each session will be guided by your treatment plan and what’s going on in your everyday life. You will start with a review of your week and what was covered in the last session.
Your therapist will incorporate approaches from multiple therapy modalities like ACT and CBT to manage your anxiety and best help you to meet your therapy and life goals.At the end of the session, you’ll set goals for the week to review in your next therapy session.
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Acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, is a therapeutic approach that helps you learn how to manage the mental and physical experience of anxiety. Instead of avoiding life and trying to get rid of the distress and discomfort of anxiety, ACT helps you learn to live with it and empowers you to overcome it.ACT provides exercises to develop your ability to incorporate mindfulness, radical acceptance, openness to experience, and understanding your personal values as a way to manage difficult thoughts and feelings.
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Cognitive processing therapy, or CPT, is a therapy approach that helps you change how PTSD and trauma impact your life. By understanding the ways trauma has influenced the thoughts and beliefs you hold, you can then take a look at how those thoughts and beliefs lead to both emotions and behaviors.
Trauma, and the anxiety it can cause, can make you feel stuck, repeating the same thought, feeling, and behavior cycles over and over. CPT helps you understand these cycles, face how you feel, challenge beliefs that aren’t true to you, and finally process what has happened, so you can move forward to what you want to happen in your life.
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Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, helps you recognize the ways anxiety has led to unhelpful, inaccurate thoughts, emotions, and behaviors.
It can then help you exchange these for more accurate and supportive thought processes and more constructive behaviors that are in line with how you want to live your life.
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TF-CBT is a therapy approach for children and adolescents to help them with trauma-based emotional and behavioral challenges.TF-CBT incorporates both therapist and caregiver support to help children and teens develop coping skills for trauma triggers, to process their trauma through a written narrative, and to replace trauma-based beliefs with more supportive, realistic thoughts.
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Our therapists prioritize two things: believing you and believing in you.
You’re the one who knows what you’re experiencing. We aren’t going to judge or dismiss you, even when you’re struggling.
We also know that trusting your therapist is a big part of healing, so it’s our highest priority to make sure you feel comfortable and welcomed. We are here to work with you as collaborators, ready to listen and support you. We know you can take on anxiety, and we’re here to help you throughout the process. -
Anxiety disorders can show up at an early age and can persist for years. This can make being anxious feel like it’s part of who you are, especially if you haven’t had the right support to try to manage anxiety.
With our flexible, individualized approach to anxiety therapy, you’ll receive treatment that pulls from multiple evidence-based methods.You’ll start to see the ways anxiety has impacted your life, and you and your therapist will work together to uncover your values, so you can overcome fear and live a life aligned with your values.
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Anxiety can make it hard to take the courageous step of reaching out for help, especially when leaving a safe space like your home feels like too much.
With that in mind, our therapists can travel to you. Any of our therapy sessions can be conducted at your home.
We do not charge travel time to families living in Montrose (Zip Code: 77006). Home visits in other parts of Houston will include a travel fee, which varies based on the time it would take for us to drive to your home and back to our office. Please contact us for a travel time rate.If in-home sessions are not feasible, we can take small steps through virtual care and work up to in-person sessions at the office.
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It’s understandable if you aren’t sure how to classify or diagnose the distress you’re experiencing.
To differentiate between an anxiety disorder and OCD, our experienced clinicians can provide a diagnostic evaluation. By providing open, honest answers to diagnostic questions, you can help us determine what you’re experiencing and what treatment options will help you the most.
