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Anxiety often carries meanings rooted in personal history, relationships, and emotional conflict.

Psychodynamic therapy explores what anxiety protects against or struggles to communicate.

Greater emotional awareness can soften anxiety and expand our freedom to choose.

People generally use the word anxiety to refer to their feelings of excessive worry, fear, restlessness, or physical arousal. Most of my patients understand that “rationally” their fears are disproportionate or that there is no evidence of the catastrophe they fear, yet continue living in a state of alarm.

Anxiety may persist because it is not simply an “error” or a “distortion” in our thinking, but a meaningful response within our larger emotional life. Anxiety is created less by an external cause and more by our internal reaction to it and, in that way, it is tied to who we are and to our personal history.

Psychodynamic therapy approaches anxiety with curiosity. Rather than treating it only as something to eliminate or “fix,” it helps us understand what........

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