Slow down your
racing mind.

Anxiety Therapy in Milwaukee, WI

What does it feel like when the restlessness never rests?

Worrying about the smallest conversations or potential problems is exhausting. Anxiety can make life seem like a constant race, going nowhere fast. Is it hard to get to sleep at night? Do you ever wake up in the middle of night, worrying about how much sleep you’re losing while you can’t stop worrying about the sleep you’re losing?

You can barely remember a time when life was easy for just one entire day. Yet there is a yearning for that time. No one deserves to feel alone in worries that snowball like that. 

With help, it is truly possible to delight in the unknown.

Anxiety shows up differently in everyone’s life. Our work together will focus on calming and soothing those places, while also offering specific empirically validated therapies to fully process what is left stuck inside. The best part is the specifics don’t need to be shared by you.

Life without the struggles of anxiety brings a sense of calm and balance.

Each day feels more vibrant and filled with possibilities, free from constant worry and stress. Moments of stillness become more common, allowing for a deeper appreciation of the world around you. It’s easier to maintain your authenticity and navigate life’s inevitable challenges.

Meanwhile, as your sleep improves, so does your concentration, patience, and overall physical well-being. It’s not always an easy road … but I’ll be there to help you get there. Reach out to learn more.

To help you work through anxiety, I use a “bottom up approach.”

Bottom up approaches focus on the body and sensations, not the story of the past. Each one, in slightly different ways, recognizes that trauma and distress are often stored in the body. Manifesting as physical symptoms or sensations. Anxiety, many times, shows up as a racing heart, shallow breathing, pains in the chest.

Bottom up approaches are a means to feeling more alive, not trapped by your body, but fully engaged in it. Anxiety can be healed, and your body has all the tools it needs to do this, with time and patience, and respect for what you need. Joy is on the other side. 

It is time to enjoy life again, and maybe, in a deeper sense, for the first time.

Reach out today to learn how I can help.

Stop worrying about what is out of your hands

The weight of the worry slows you down and your time seems sucked up by what ifs..

  • You begin to value other peoples’ opinions over your own.
  • Life seems like a series of have-tos, not want-tos.
  • You’ve read a stack of self help books to no avail.

Is it hard to let go of the what-ifs?

Wanting to control reactions to things that haven’t even happened but holding on to what-ifs may seem somehow safer, just in case. It’s difficult to live with the constant up and down and focus outside of yourself. And yet turning inside seems counterproductive.

When you begin to listen to the little voice inside your mind without letting it control you, you become more present and worries don’t have the same power. 

Connect to your inner voice.

You’ll learn to trust it and trust you in a way that guides you to the right decisions, the right places. No one knows what you need better than you, deep down. Let’s find the ways for you to reconnect to your deepest self. You deserve to feel like the person you used to be. Learning to stay within your body and trusting your gut with specific exercises focused on feeling internally, not analyzing. Not trying to think your way out of it. There is a calm, still river each of us can access inside. Still waters run deep. It’s time to find that depth.

We will begin learning about how the body – your body, my body, all bodies – receive and take in experiences. To understand what you’ve been dealing with. On a deeper level. To connect to a deeper part of self. With bottom up approaches.

Make peace with yourself, for yourself.

Relax easier and just.be.here.

Does a wandering mind take you away from what is in front of you? Anxiety can make concentration nearly impossible. Noises or other people multiply it. You start something but don’t finish it. Or forget what it was that you wanted to do.

You can’t calm down long enough to notice the simple joys around you. Maybe it seems like they aren’t there anymore. Feeling anxious can blur what is right here, in front of you. Making it difficult to connect to others in a meaningful way.

To finish what you start, start with focusing inwards.

You will learn to slow down and teach your body that it’s okay to do just that. With patience and compassion. There are small places in you that do know what feels enjoyable. Let’s start there and expand upon them. What feels fun, delightful, light, cozy, exciting. Delicious even. This is the way to a life worth living.

Learning to focus on the body is like beginning an exercise routine, in a way. But this doesn’t have to leave you out of breath. Instead, I will help you find space from all that is outside of you. With your breath as an anchor. And your body as the container that can experience it. And enjoy the experience.

It’s time to regain that sense of enjoyment you once felt.

Does your body go on auto pilot?

Do you notice tightness in certain muscles or parts of the body? Fidgeting seems to help in the moment but doesn’t get rid of the excess energy once you stop. Sometimes it can make it feel even more powerful. Being critical about your inability to relax doesn’t make it any better. In fact, it can make it worse.

Dis-ease is a common state for many of us. It manifests in many ways. Sore neck or shoulders, digestive issues, jaw pain, increased heart rate. This is not the way you want to live. It’s not what your body wants either. What it needs is a new way to deal with all this energy.

Coupled with a more relaxed nervous system and help from someone skilled in somatic tools, you can heal, yourself.

Like a young child in need of compassion, our bodies can ask for that same quality of presence, now. Safety and security. Emotional regulation. Healthy boundaries and connection with healthy support. You needed it as a child, and you still do.

We will focus on and practice the skills to trust your innate capacity to self soothe and heal, through the body.

Through body awareness, creating safety in your body, tracking emotions in the body and re-membering goodness, you will begin to experience the past in a new way. Discharging is literally letting go of that old charge in the body. Thoughts and emotions will come forward, too, all leading to a newly integrated perspective.

Let’s work together to re-member the goodness you have always had, inside.

Do you find yourself peeking out, afraid to make contact?

Has it been difficult to get back to normal since COVID? Social gatherings or parties may feel overwhelming. Nothing seems as easy. And it can feel impossible to connect to new people. Or draining. Even with close friends or family.

Do you find yourself limiting eye contact with others? Wishing you could return to masking up to reduce the need to smile? You are not alone. And yet it feels like you are uniquely and endlessly separate from the world at times. Where did your desire to connect go?

Your desire to connect is still there, deep down.

Remembering the past, the good times, is a sign you want more. Finding where you fit in is important. You are not who you were, not exactly. It’s time to find a new part of you, a new way to connect. Life is much too short to watch the clock tick by. Let’s work on understanding yourself first and then opening up to a new way to experience life with other people.

Remember that time at the beach, the waves offering a steadiness and sense of connection? Or maybe it was under a large, beautiful oak tree. Wherever you remember yourself truly living, resourcing can take you back. Your body deserves to remember. Turning inward to find the places that never left you. I’ll help facilitate your return to that place. And we’ll create more.

Reconnect to your inner world first, to reconnect to the outer world.

Here is an easy grounding exercise to get yourself started.

This is an initial exercise that is central to learning how to connect to and trust in your body. It takes time, and it is worth it.

Just breathe and notice

Feeling grounded brings us to the here and now. Where we can do our best living. Taking your body back to nature is as simple as walking outside and connecting to the earth. Electricity needs to be grounded. So do we.

Take a few minutes to be with yourself.

Stand or even sit on the ground, in a comfortable position. Close your eyes and imagine yourself rooting deep into the earth. Listen to the sounds around you, and breathe.

Place one hand on your heart and one hand on your stomach. Allow your breath to do what it needs to do. Follow the rhythm for a minute or two.

When you’re ready, open your eyes and notice 10 things that are the same color.

That’s it. You’re now more connected to what is in the here and now. You are more connected to you.

Life is much too short to watch the clock tick by. Let’s work on understanding yourself first and then opening up to a new way to experience life with other people.

Hi. I’m Bonnie.

I want to help you heal what’s deeper.

These approaches focus on regulating our emotions through our bodies – through sensations and experiences our bodies offer us. Why don’t zebras get ulcers, as Robert Sapolsky wrote in his well known book of the same name, is because they know how to deal with day to day anxieties quite well. They don’t try to think their way out of it. They use their bodies.

Have you ever seen a dog “shake off” a loud noise, or a child getting too close to them? This is an effective “discharge” of their emotional pain. They recognize it is there, and they get rid of it. Likewise, bottom up approaches target emotional pain or fear that is stuck in the body and offer the space to process it. There is nothing to think through. In fact, we don’t even have to talk about the specifics.

Because it is what is going on in your body that matters, not what you think about it.

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