Getting underneath the symptom
Anxiety and depression are usually how something else shows up.
Your symptoms are real, they're exhausting, and they deserve proper treatment. We'd just rather work with what's driving them than teach you to live around them.
What tends to be underneath
Beneath anxiety there's very often something that was never safe to feel: a fear, a grief, or an anger with nowhere to go, which turned into watchfulness instead. Beneath depression there's frequently something that was never safe to say, which turned inward and went quiet.
None of that means your symptoms are imaginary or that you're doing something wrong. It's a point about where the leverage is. Treating the surface helps, and treating what's driving it helps more.
What the work looks like
Some of it is immediate and practical. Sleep, regulating your nervous system, and the particular loop of thought that keeps a panic cycle closed all have workable answers, and your counsellor will get to those early.
Some of it is slower. Often there's a conclusion you reached quite young about what you have to be in order to be acceptable, and an enormous ongoing cost to maintaining it. Your counsellor will be clear with you about which of the two you're doing at any given point, and why.
A word about medication
We don't prescribe and we have no position for or against. For a lot of people medication is what creates the floor from which this kind of work becomes possible at all, and taking it isn't a failure of anything. If you're thinking about it, that conversation belongs with your doctor, and your counsellor can help you work out what you want to say.
Common questions
Before you begin
Is this CBT?
Parts of it, where CBT is the right tool. But we also draw on somatic therapy, depth psychology and presence-based work, because working at the level of thought alone often doesn't reach whatever is holding the pattern in place.
I've tried therapy before and it didn't help.
Please say so at the first conversation, and tell us what specifically didn't land. Very often the problem was fit, or pacing, or working with words when the work needed to happen in the body. That's genuinely useful information rather than a reason to expect the same again.
How long before I notice a difference?
Most people notice something in the first few sessions, though usually it's relief at being properly heard rather than a change in symptoms. Deeper change takes longer and doesn't happen in a straight line. You'll get an honest assessment once your counsellor knows you.
Ready when you are.
Fifteen minutes, free, no clinical intake. Just a conversation about whether this is the right room for what you're carrying.