Anxiety & Overwhelm
Anxiety isn't random. It's a signal that something important is trying to surface.
Most people who come to me for anxiety have already tried managing it. They've done the breathing, the mindfulness, the lifestyle changes. Some of it helped. None of it got to the root.
That's what we do here.
Sweetnam Psychology offers anxiety therapy in person in Miami on the Gold Coast and Pottsville NSW, and via Telehealth Australia wide.
Recognising the SignsHow anxiety shows up
Anxiety lives in the body. Most people know the obvious signs: restricted breathing, tension, restlessness, a racing mind. But anxiety goes further than that. It shows up as nausea, vomiting, migraine, diarrhoea, and the sudden urgent need to urinate. It can be ringing in your ears, tunnel vision, blurred sight, or a floating foggy sensation that makes the world feel slightly unreal.
You may recognise some of these:
Medically unexplained symptoms
You have headaches, nausea, dizziness, bladder urgency, stomach pain, chest tightness, but the doctors cannot find anything physically wrong.
Dissociated or derealised
A floating sensation, fogginess, visual distortion, or feeling far away. A sense you are watching your life, rather than being present in it.
Avoidance patterns
You find yourself avoiding situations, conversations, or decisions because the anxiety they trigger feels too big to face. Over time the avoided list grows, and life gets smaller.
Unhelpful coping mechanisms
Drinking, smoking, chronic scrolling, impulsive behaviour, worrying, exploding, over-exercising, detaching, flattening out. Sometimes it's subtler: intellectualising, keeping busy, turning the anxiety into self-criticism, or making a joke of it. Whatever the mechanism, it's costing you something.
My approach
Sometimes anxiety gets high enough that we need to bring it down before we can do anything else. Regulating strategies have a place and I'll use them when they're needed. However, we don't just stop here. In my clinical experience, people need to understand what is driving their anxiety as well as having the tools to bring it down when it gets high, in order for the anxiety to come within tolerable, normal limits. This is what makes psychodynamic therapy different. We work towards understanding the root cause of your anxiety.
Healing from anxiety isn't about never feeling it again. Anxiety is a necessary part of our internal world. It's about keeping it within tolerable limits, where it doesn’t become overwhelmingly high and impact your life. Where it instead becomes what it was designed as, a signal that something important has come into your awareness.
My work is primarily informed by Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP), an evidence-based approach with a strong research base for anxiety and related presentations.
Take The Next StepReady to look deeper?
Let's work together to bring your anxiety within tolerable limits, and understand what's driving it in the first place.