Anxiety Therapy
in San Francisco and California
Struggling with constant worry, panic attacks, or anxiety that won't turn off? You're not alone. As a San Francisco-based psychologist specializing in anxiety therapy, I help women throughout California manage generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorder, and chronic worry through online therapy.
My Approach to Anxiety Therapy
My work is warm, direct, and integrative. I use a combination of attachment theory, relational psychodynamic work, and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) to address both the symptoms and the root causes of anxiety. Anxiety rarely exists in isolation—it's often connected to deeper patterns, early experiences, and learned ways of coping with uncertainty.
I offer online individual therapy and couples therapy for anxiety throughout California. All sessions are conducted via secure video platform (Zoom) from wherever you feel most comfortable. This work isn't about eliminating anxiety entirely (some anxiety is protective and normal), but about changing your relationship with it so it stops running your life.
Unlike approaches that focus only on symptom management, my goal is to help you make lasting change by:
Understanding the Roots
We explore why your anxiety shows up, connecting past experiences and learned patterns to your present challenges so you have more choice in how you respond.
Calming Your Nervous System
We integrate grounding techniques, mindfulness, and somatic practices to help regulate your anxiety in the moment
Building Long-Term Resilience
Therapy helps you develop skills for managing uncertainty, tolerating discomfort, and trusting yourself instead of seeking constant external reassurance.
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is your body's natural response to perceived threat or danger. It activates the "fight, flight, or freeze" response, releasing stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline to prepare you for action. While this response is helpful in genuine emergencies, anxiety disorders occur when this alarm system becomes overactive, triggering intense fear and physical symptoms even when there's no real danger.
Common anxiety symptoms include:
Excessive worry that's difficult to control
Racing thoughts and rumination
Restlessness, feeling on edge, or keyed up
Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank
Irritability and mood changes
Muscle tension, jaw clenching, or body aches
Sleep disturbances (difficulty falling asleep, staying asleep, or restless sleep)
Fatigue and exhaustion from constant vigilance
Physical symptoms: rapid heartbeat, shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea, sweating
Anxiety in Women
Women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with anxiety disorders. This disparity is partly biological (hormonal fluctuations affect anxiety), but also cultural and social. Therapy for women with anxiety addresses both individual symptoms and the broader context of gendered expectations and pressures.
Cultural Factors and Gender Roles
Women often face unique stressors that contribute to anxiety:
Pressure to manage emotional labor and mental load in relationships
Difficulty setting boundaries due to socialization to be "nice" and accommodating
Perfectionism in balancing career, relationships, and family
Body image anxiety and societal appearance standards
Caregiver burden and difficulty asking for help
Anxiety and Hormonal Changes
Hormonal changes during menstrual cycles, pregnancy, postpartum, and perimenopause can trigger or worsen anxiety. Many women experience:
Premenstrual anxiety or PMDD
Pregnancy and postpartum anxiety
Perimenopause anxiety and panic attacks
Types of Anxiety.
-
Generalized Anxiety Disorder is characterized by persistent, excessive worry about various aspects of life—work, health, relationships, finances, or daily responsibilities. This worry is difficult to control and often feels disproportionate to the actual situation.
GAD symptoms include:
Chronic worry lasting six months or longer
Difficulty controlling worry even when you know it's excessive
Physical tension, restlessness, or fatigue
Sleep problems and difficulty concentrating
Irritability and feeling overwhelmed
Therapy for generalized anxiety focuses on understanding worry patterns, developing tolerance for uncertainty, and building practical anxiety management skills.
-
Social anxiety disorder, also called social phobia, involves intense fear of social situations where you might be judged, embarrassed, or scrutinized by others. This goes beyond normal shyness—social anxiety can significantly impact work, relationships, and daily functioning.
Social anxiety symptoms include:
Fear of being judged or evaluated negatively
Worry about embarrassing yourself in social situations
Intense anxiety before social events
Avoidance of social situations or enduring them with extreme distress
Physical symptoms: blushing, sweating, trembling, nausea
Fear of showing anxiety symptoms in front of others
Treatment for social anxiety addresses core fears of judgment, builds social confidence, and uses gradual exposure to feared situations.
-
Panic disorder involves recurrent, unexpected panic attacks—sudden episodes of intense fear that trigger severe physical reactions. Panic attacks typically peak within minutes but can leave you feeling shaken for hours afterward.
Panic attack symptoms include:
Rapid, pounding heartbeat or heart palpitations
Sweating and trembling
Shortness of breath or feeling of choking
Chest pain or discomfort
Nausea or abdominal distress
Dizziness, lightheadedness, or feeling faint
Numbness or tingling sensations
Chills or hot flashes
Fear of losing control or "going crazy"
Fear of dying
Panic disorder develops when you become so worried about having another panic attack that this fear itself triggers more anxiety. Therapy helps you understand panic cycles, reduce fear of panic symptoms, and develop skills to manage attacks when they occur.
-
High-functioning anxiety isn't a formal diagnosis, but it describes people who appear successful and put-together on the outside while struggling with chronic anxiety internally. High-functioning anxiety often manifests as:
Perfectionism and impossibly high standards
Difficulty saying no or setting boundaries
Constant busyness and inability to rest
People-pleasing and fear of disappointing others
Overthinking and difficulty making decisions
Procrastination driven by fear of failure
Imposter syndrome despite external success
Therapy for high-functioning anxiety addresses the underlying beliefs driving perfectionism, helps develop self-compassion, and builds capacity for rest and vulnerability.
-
Persistent worry about physical symptoms or health-related fears.
-
High internal standards, fear of mistakes, and difficulty feeling “enough.”
-
Feeling emotionally and physically depleted from long-term pressure or responsibility.
Causes and Risk Factors for Anxiety
Biological and Genetic Factors.
Research shows that anxiety disorders have a genetic component. If you have family members with anxiety, you're more likely to experience it yourself. Brain chemistry, including neurotransmitter imbalances involving serotonin, dopamine, and GABA, also plays a role in anxiety disorders.
Trauma and Stressful Life Events
Past trauma, major life transitions, chronic stress, or significant losses can trigger or worsen anxiety disorders. Even positive changes like marriage, new job, or moving can activate anxiety in those predisposed to it.
Early Childhood Experiences.
Childhood experiences significantly impact adult anxiety. Inconsistent caregiving, trauma, neglect, or growing up in an unpredictable environment can create a sensitized nervous system that's hypervigilant for threats. Anxious attachment style, developed through early relationships, often underlies adult anxiety.
Learned Patterns and Conditioning.
Anxiety can be learned through observation (watching anxious parents) or through direct experience (having a panic attack in a specific situation and then avoiding that situation). These learned patterns become reinforced over time, making anxiety feel automatic.
How I Work With Anxiety.
I use an integrative approach, which means I pull from multiple modalities depending on what you actually need—not what a manual says should work. Here's what that looks like:
This is where we go beneath the surface. Psychodynamic therapy looks at the unconscious patterns and early experiences fueling your anxiety. Attachment-based work explores how your early relationships—particularly with your parents—shaped your beliefs about safety, trust, and self-worth.
If you're constantly anxious that people will leave, we explore where that fear came from. Usually, it's rooted in early experiences: an emotionally distant father, a parent whose love felt conditional, a childhood where being "good" was the only way to feel secure. We look at how these old patterns are showing up now—in your relationships, your work, how you treat yourself—so you can make different choices. When you understand why you default to hypervigilance or perfectionism, those patterns lose their automatic power.
Psychodynamic and Attachment Work
Exposure Therapy
Exposure therapy is about gradually facing what you've been avoiding—whether that's social situations, panic sensations, or anything else anxiety has convinced you is too dangerous. The principle is simple: avoidance keeps anxiety alive. Approaching what scares you, in a controlled way, teaches your nervous system it's manageable.
I'm not going to push you into situations that terrify you. Exposure works when it's gradual and collaborative. If you've been avoiding work events because of social anxiety, we're not starting there. Maybe we start with you speaking up once in a meeting. The goal is building your tolerance for discomfort slowly, in a way that feels empowering instead of retraumatizing.
CBT focuses on the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. It helps you identify anxious thought patterns—catastrophizing, mind reading, the mental spiral of worst-case scenarios—and develop more balanced perspectives. It's one of the most researched treatments for generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic disorder, and phobias.
But I don't do worksheet-based CBT. I'm not going to hand you a thought log and send you home. Instead, we look at your thinking patterns together in real time. When you say "I'm being crazy," I'll stop you and point out that your anxiety actually makes sense given what you've been through. The goal isn't just challenging anxious thoughts—it's understanding why your brain defaults to them in the first place.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
Mindfulness and Nervous System Work
Mindfulness helps you notice anxious thoughts and physical sensations without immediately reacting to them. Instead of trying to eliminate anxiety, you learn to observe it, make space for it, and respond with intention. This includes grounding techniques, body awareness, and practices that help regulate your nervous system when it's stuck in fight-or-flight mode.
Mindfulness isn't about sitting cross-legged trying to clear your mind—that's often impossible when you're anxious. It's about noticing where anxiety lives in your body. The tight chest. The clenched jaw. The shallow breathing. And learning to work with those sensations instead of fighting them. I teach you practical, in-the-moment techniques that actually help when your mind is spiraling.
Who Benefits from Anxiety Therapy
Women with Generalized Anxiety and Chronic Worry
If you experience:
Constant worry about work, health, relationships, or finances
Difficulty relaxing or "turning off" your mind
Physical tension, headaches, or digestive issues from stress
Exhaustion from overthinking every decision
Difficulty concentrating due to racing thoughts
Therapy helps you understand worry patterns, develop tolerance for uncertainty, and build practical skills for managing anxiety.
Women Experiencing Panic Attacks
If you experience:
Sudden episodes of intense fear with physical symptoms
Fear of having another panic attack
Avoidance of places where panic attacks occurred
Constant monitoring of physical sensations
Worry that panic means something is medically wrong
Therapy helps you understand panic cycles, reduce fear of panic sensations, and develop skills to manage attacks effectively.
Women with Social Anxiety
If you experience:
Intense fear of judgment in social or work situations
Avoidance of networking events, presentations, or gatherings
Difficulty speaking up in meetings or advocating for yourself
Excessive self-consciousness and self-criticism
Physical symptoms (blushing, sweating, trembling) in social settings
Treatment addresses core fears of judgment, builds social confidence, and helps you engage authentically without debilitating anxiety.
High-Achieving Women with Hidden Anxiety
If you experience:
Outward success but internal constant worry
Perfectionism and impossibly high standards
Difficulty delegating or asking for help
Procrastination despite external productivity
Imposter syndrome and fear of being "found out"
Work focuses on addressing underlying beliefs, developing self-compassion, and building capacity for imperfection and vulnerability.
Common Questions about Anxiety
-
If anxiety is interfering with your ability to rest, focus, feel present, or enjoy your life, therapy can help—even if it doesn’t feel “severe.”
-
Yes. Anxiety is highly treatable. Therapy helps you understand patterns, regulate your nervous system, and build tools that create lasting change.
-
Everyone experiences anxiety—it's a normal human emotion. Anxiety becomes a disorder when it's:
Excessive or disproportionate to the situation
Persistent (lasting weeks or months)
Interfering with daily functioning, work, or relationships
Causing significant distress
Not easily controlled despite efforts to manage it
-
It varies. Many people begin to notice shifts within the first few months, but deeper patterns often take longer to fully unwind.
-
Stress is typically:
Related to a specific situation or deadline
Resolves when the stressor is removed
Proportionate to the situation
Anxiety disorder is typically:
Persistent even without clear external stressor
Excessive relative to actual threat level
Interfering with daily life, work, or relationships
Accompanied by physical symptoms
Difficult to control despite efforts
If you're unsure, a consultation can help clarify whether what you're experiencing is normal stress or an anxiety disorder requiring treatment.
-
Anxiety disorders are highly treatable, and many people experience significant reduction in symptoms. However, "cure" isn't typically the goal. Instead, therapy helps you:
Manage anxiety effectively when it arises
Reduce frequency and intensity of anxious episodes
Change your relationship with anxiety so it doesn't control your life
Build resilience and coping skills for long-term wellbeing
Related Conditions We Can Work on:
Self-Esteem
Relationship Challenges
Relationship Anxiety
People Pleasing & Boundaries
Anxious Attachment
Fear of Vulnerability
Over-Giving in Relationships
Depression
Dating Anxiety
Communication
Life Transitions
Parenting (Young and Adult Children)
Burnout
Father Wounds & Partner Selection
Difficulties with Parents
Trauma
Women’s Issues Across the Lifespan
“Anxiety doesn’t empty tomorrow of its sorrow. It empties today of its strength.”
-Corrie Ten Boom
