Generalized anxiety often occurs as a result of repressed emotions you may not even know you have.

Common causes include:

1. experiencing one or many difficult life changes. The stress is so great that it overloads your normal coping capacity and the body’s “fight, flight or freeze” stress response is activated (more on this in future articles).  Without tools to turn this stress response off, it continues and the anxiety then becomes long term and “generalized”. When this happens it can feel unrelated to anything in reality.

2. difficult experiences as a child such as stressful family relationships, death or illness of a parent, active addiction / alcoholism, divorce, emotional abuse or other highly stressful issues. During childhood we are unable to cope with intense emotions without help from an adult,

3. a continued coping style of avoiding highly charged emotions such as anger, grief, guilt, sadness, etc.  and

4. lack of time for self care or feeling guilty when taking time for self.

Psychotherapy identifies the underlying causes of anxiety and resolve these issues at the core level vs. just treating symptoms.  Tools for resolving anxiety in the moment are also helpful to break the cycle of anxiety.  Click here for information on new treatments for anxiety.