Calm your mind and breath free!

While feelings of stress & anxiety are completely normal for everyone to experience at times, living under the shadow of anxiety or panic disorder is not - especially when that anxiety or panic starts to become chronic and makes you ineffective at work, in relationships or in your personal life.

The chronic mishandling of emotions and life stresses that create panic & anxiety can also have serious health implications, reduce your life and create general discontentment if left untreated.

Conversely, a healthy state of mind, body and emotion is largely what creates a fulfilling and anxiety free life. Stress management skills create the confidence that we can take on the life challenges before us and emotional coping skills for thought and belief are central to such.

So, if simple breathing techniques haven't worked, perhaps Henze & Associates counselling for stress, anxiety & panic can show you how creating a foundation of health can bring real peace.

How counselling can help you with stress, anxiety & panic:

For most of the clients who seek counselling for stress, anxiety or panic disorder, the first goal is relief from the symptoms and gaining skills to cope with life. We first help you to:

• Gain skills at calming yourself: Counselling for panic disorder can help you identify the core beliefs that make you feel unsafe and may trigger a panic attack. In addition, we help you decrease your overall level of fear and allow you to feel confident in the face of former triggers.
• Learn to trust: Anxiety counselling can help you reevaluate the actions of others to determine if they are really rejecting or criticizing you, stop avoiding social situations and learn how to really enjoy other people. And, most of all, you can learn to trust yourself and the world you live in.
• Control your mind: Are you anxious because you worry and then worry because you are anxious? It's not enough to simply manage anxiety or panic disorder. We help you learn to gain control of obsessive thoughts and compulsive actions to develop a clear, worry free mind.
• Master the symptoms: Simply put, our clients learn how to generate and then stop an anxiety or panic attack at will. Anxiety and panic disorder is no mystery and taking the mystery out of it is essential to being able to pursue deeper and more permanent healing that can take you out of the tolerable recovery (which mostly passes for standard treatment) and into full freedom from generalized anxiety and panic disorder.

Learn more about first steps to managing the symptoms of stress, anxiety and panic disorders.




Stress, anxiety and panic management is not enough:

When life seems overwhelming, it's generally the result of past, "Programming," which has taught you to see it that way. We help you heal the past that causes burnout, anxiety and panic. In stress & anxiety counselling, our clients learn how to heal historical memories and sometimes the resulting Post Traumatic Stress Disorders related to loss, trauma or abuse. Our proven help for anxiety and panic disorders gives you skills at processing distress and healing from life circumstances yourself.

Stop denying and avoiding the past. Skills at healing the past are the first step towards learning how to live in the present. Real healing has to go beyond Cognitive Behavioural Therapy techniques and address the deepest parts of the soul. We also walk with you as you learn skills that include grieving the pain of the past, healing the false beliefs historical trauma caused you to steer your life by and restoring an accurate picture of who you truly are.




Specific stress, anxiety and panic disorders we address:

There are actually quite a number of different diagnosis under this subcategory of mood disorder - too many to list. But, some of the different issues we address in stress, anxiety and panic counselling include:

• Generalized Anxiety and Panic Disorder: Chronic anxiety and physical symptoms of racing heart, feeling short of breath, agitation and muscle tension are all symptoms of Generalized Anxiety and Panic Disorder and result from patterns of worry. We help you identify the thinking processes of worry, build psychological coping skills for life and relationships and redirect those thoughts towards strategies to create a life of strength and resilience.
• Phobias: Cognitive and behavioural skills of gradually engaging situations (instead of avoiding them) are a good start. Understanding the purpose those fixations serve and healing the root of the problem is so much better at creating real confidence in situations that used to paralyze you!
• Social Anxiety: False beliefs about whether other people are criticizing or rejecting you are the foundation of social anxiety. While it is helpful to learn to accurately gauge the behaviour of others towards you and develop new skills for interacting in an assertive manner, real healing in this area starts with addressing an identity based on shame or guilt and the associated beliefs which result in fear.
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: While all habitual behaviours, such as OCD is, are helped by reducing the frequency of the obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours, real healing in this area starts with understanding what the behaviours help you to avoid. Learning to address and heal the stress related, emotional and relational realities under OCD is essential to no longer having to unconsciously distract yourself using obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours.
• Post Traumatic Stress Disorder: Childhood sexual or other abuse, severe bullying and psychologically traumatic life experiences can all create involuntary, vivid, sudden and disturbing experiential-recall of past events that can seriously disrupt daily living. Standard techniques for reducing anxiety, changing negative emotions and developing a positive self concept can be helpful, but real healing starts with the ability to face memories and emotions, finally integrate them into who you are, replace the falsehoods you have accepted as part of your identity and come to hold all parts of your person well.




A spiritual perspective on anxiety and panic disorders:

Issues of anxiety and panic disorders are as much questions of habitual patterns as they are byproducts of spirituality and questions of ultimate safety in faith. Both here in Calgary and, through modern video technology, around the world, what Henze and Associates has offered for the last seventeen years is an additional layer of faith based treatment that adapts to your spirituality and helps you answer those questions of faith that, together with psychological knowledge, can come to free you from the deeper issues that cause anxiety and panic disorder.




Fixing the roots of stress, anxiety and panic disorders:

So much of this area of counselling is focused on techniques that simply mask the symptoms of stress, anxiety and panic disorders. They focus on distracting thinking, using meditative states to neutralize emotions about the past, flashing lights, taps on the hands and repeated recall in such strange environments that traumatic memories and thinking patterns eventually get somewhat walled off from daily life. Quick-fix techniques sometimes work for a little while - but they always collapse in those moments of pressure when you need them the most.

That's not real healing and we don't do Band-Aids. We go to the heart of the problem, teach you how to face and come through legitimate suffering, to go into your own flashbacks, to heal your memories, to hear a new voice about your identity and to transform the foundational thought and belief systems that have kept you trapped. We teach you how to heal yourself and then coach you as you take over the job of being your own therapist for life!

So, if you're tired of quick-fixes or Band-Aids and you want something far beyond tolerable recovery from anxiety and panic, then please contact us and see what stress, anxiety and panic disorder counselling at Henze & Associates can offer you today.

Learn more about our unique faith based perspective here.