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Therapy for Anxiety & Stress

When your mind won’t slow down, and your body can’t fully rest

Anxiety and stress can make life feel smaller, faster, and harder to inhabit.

You may be functioning well on the outside—working, keeping up with responsibilities, showing up for others, and doing what needs to be done.

But internally:

  • Your mind may feel constantly busy

  • You may replay conversations, decisions, or mistakes

  • You may feel tense, restless, or on edge

  • You may struggle to relax without guilt

  • You may feel pressure to keep proving yourself

  • You may avoid decisions, conflict, uncertainty, or difficult emotions

  • You may feel disconnected from your body, your relationships, or your deeper sense of direction

This is often where people begin therapy for anxiety and stress.

Not because something is “wrong” with you, but because your system has been carrying too much for too long.

Forma Counseling offers anxiety and stress therapy for adults in Washington, DC, including neighborhoods like Dupont Circle, Adams Morgan, Capitol Hill, and surrounding areas.

Sessions are available in-person in Washington, DC and through telehealth across DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

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What Anxiety and Stress Can Feel Like

Anxiety is not always obvious.

For some people, it looks like panic, fear, or constant worry. For others, it shows up as perfectionism, overworking, irritability, avoidance, overthinking, or difficulty being present.

You may notice:

  • Racing thoughts that are hard to turn off

  • Fear of making the wrong decision

  • A need to prepare, plan, or control everything

  • Difficulty sleeping or relaxing

  • Tension in your chest, jaw, stomach, shoulders, or breathing

  • Feeling easily overwhelmed by emails, texts, work, relationships, or uncertainty

  • Irritability with people you care about

  • Trouble focusing because your mind feels scattered

  • A sense that you are never doing enough

  • A private fear that you are falling behind, disappointing others, or not living the life you are supposed to live

Anxiety is often treated as a symptom to eliminate. At Forma, we also understand it as a signal worth listening to.

The question is not only, “How do I feel less anxious?”

It is also:

What is my anxiety trying to protect me from, warn me about, or help me avoid?

Therapeutic Approaches We May Use

At Forma Counseling, therapy is tailored to the person rather than applied as a one-size-fits-all model.

For anxiety and stress, we may draw from:

  • CBT-informed therapy to examine anxious thoughts, rumination, avoidance, and patterns of interpretation

  • DBT-informed skills to strengthen emotional regulation, distress tolerance, mindfulness, and grounded decision-making

  • Existential therapy to explore uncertainty, responsibility, meaning, avoidance, and the deeper questions anxiety may be pointing toward

  • TIST and trauma-informed parts work when anxiety is connected to survival responses, shame, people-pleasing, shutdown, hypervigilance, or emotional overwhelm

  • Relationship-focused therapy when anxiety shows up in attachment, conflict, boundaries, rejection sensitivity, or fear of closeness and distance

  • Reclaiming Focus work when stress has made your attention feel scattered, fragmented, or disconnected from your values

  • Clinical assessment tools when a clearer map of your emotional, cognitive, relational, and stress-response patterns would help guide treatment

This integrative approach allows therapy to address both the symptoms of anxiety and the deeper structures that keep anxiety repeating.

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What You Can Expect

Clients often begin therapy feeling overwhelmed, uncertain, tense, or exhausted from trying to manage everything alone.

Over time, many develop:

  • Greater emotional steadiness

  • A clearer understanding of their anxiety patterns

  • More ability to tolerate uncertainty

  • Less rumination and self-criticism

  • Improved boundaries and communication

  • A calmer relationship with their body and emotions

  • More focus and presence

  • A stronger sense of agency

  • A deeper understanding of what truly matters to them

Therapy does not make life perfectly calm.

But it can help you become less controlled by fear and more connected to yourself.

Therapy for Anxiety, Stress, and the Life Beneath the Symptoms

Anxiety often asks for relief.

But it may also ask for attention.

It may point toward a pace of life that is unsustainable, a pattern of self-abandonment, a fear that has gone unnamed, or a deeper question about what kind of life you want to inhabit.

At Forma Counseling, we work with anxiety in both ways.

We help you develop tools to manage symptoms and create enough internal space to understand what your anxiety is connected to.

The work is calm, collaborative, and paced around your needs.

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Schedule Anxiety and Stress Therapy in Washington, DC

Forma Counseling offers therapy for anxiety, stress, overthinking, burnout, perfectionism, relationship anxiety, and difficulty feeling present.

Sessions are available in-person in Washington, DC and through telehealth across DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

Request a free 20-minute consultation to see if working together feels right.

Request a free consultation