How a Portland Therapist Helps You Work With Anxiety Without Turning Against Yourself
Calm is possible, even when anxiety feels overwhelming. With the support of a Portland therapist, compassion becomes a powerful path toward relief and confidence.
Anxiety is difficult enough on its own. What often makes it worse is the second struggle that follows: the part of you that decides you should be calmer, more rational, or better at handling it by now. As a Portland therapist, this is one of the patterns I pay attention to. Anxiety may already be trying to protect you from uncertainty, rejection, mistakes, or danger. Turning on yourself for feeling anxious can give it another problem to solve.
Anxiety can be responding to personal experiences, external pressures, or the current unfolding political horror show. It can make you question your safety, replay decisions, scan for what could go wrong, or treat uncertainty like something you need to solve immediately. A compassionate approach to therapy starts by getting interested in what is happening rather than assuming the anxious response itself is the enemy.
Why Anxiety Can Grow Stronger When You Turn Against It
There’s often a point where anxiety stops being only about the thing you’re anxious about. You notice yourself circling the same decision, rehearsing a conversation that hasn’t happened, or trying to get certainty from a situation that simply doesn’t have much certainty to offer. Then the frustration with yourself starts: Why am I still doing this? Why can’t I just let it go? By that point, you’re dealing with the original anxiety and the growing sense that you shouldn’t be reacting this way in the first place.
I’m usually more interested in understanding that anxious response than arguing with it. If your mind keeps scanning for what could go wrong, there is probably some reason it has become convinced that staying alert is useful. It may be trying to keep you from being blindsided, making the wrong decision, being rejected, or finding yourself unprepared for something painful. The strategy can become exhausting and wildly disproportionate to what is happening now, but that doesn’t mean it came from nowhere.
What Compassionate Anxiety Therapy Looks Like in Practice
By the time anxiety has become exhausting enough to bring into therapy, most people have already tried pretty hard to manage it. You may have reasoned with yourself, distracted yourself, made lists, replayed conversations, asked other people for reassurance, or promised yourself that this time you were going to stop overthinking. Some of those things can help. They can also become part of the pressure when the message underneath them is that you need to get rid of the anxiety before you can trust yourself again.
In therapy, I’m interested in what happens just before the anxiety ramps up, what it asks you to do, and what seems likely to happen if you don’t listen to it. Internal Family Systems (IFS) therapy fits naturally with this way of working. If a part of you is constantly rehearsing, anticipating problems, or trying to stay three steps ahead, I want to know what it thinks would happen if it stopped. There is often a logic to what it is doing, even when living with the strategy has become exhausting. A part that expects rejection, for example, may believe that analyzing every interaction will keep you from being caught off guard. Another may keep revisiting a decision because making the wrong choice once felt much more costly than it does now.
Understanding those parts doesn’t require agreeing with every anxious prediction or organizing your life around them. It gives us somewhere more useful to begin than adding another internal voice insisting that you really need to calm down already. If you’re still figuring out what kind of therapist might be a good fit, it can be useful to pay attention not only to the approaches they list, but to how they actually understand the problem you’re bringing into therapy.
How Mindful Self-Compassion Interrupts the Anxiety–Self-Criticism Loop
When anxiety shows up, the inner critic is often close behind. This is never going to get better. What’s wrong with you? Why are you still worrying about this? Before long, you’re not only anxious about whatever started the whole thing; you’re also having an argument with yourself about the fact that you’re anxious.
Self-compassion can be a hard sell if some part of you believes criticism is what keeps you functioning. If you stop pushing yourself, will you become careless? If you stop going over the mistake, will you make it again? And if you stop telling yourself to calm down, are you just giving in to anxiety? I don’t think those questions need to be brushed aside. The critical voice usually has a reason for being there too.
Mindful self-compassion gives us a way to notice both the anxiety and the criticism without immediately letting either one take over the conversation. When anxiety starts becoming evidence in a case against yourself — I’m too sensitive. I can’t handle anything. I should be over this by now — you can begin to recognize what is happening without turning the moment into a judgment about who you are.
Sometimes self-compassion sounds much less inspirational than people expect. It may simply be, Of course this is hard right now, or I’m anxious, and I don’t need to make myself feel worse for being anxious. You’re giving yourself another way to respond while the anxiety is still present, rather than waiting to deserve compassion until you’ve finally managed to calm down.
Why the Context Around Your Anxiety Matters
A compassionate approach to anxiety also means taking seriously the conditions in which the anxiety developed. For LGBTQ+ people, that can include discrimination, microaggressions, rejection, or the ongoing calculation of whether a particular person or space is actually safe. If you’ve had good reason to monitor how much of yourself is safe to show, therapy shouldn’t treat that vigilance as though it appeared in a vacuum.
As a Queer Portland therapist who offers LGBTQ+-affirming therapy, I don’t want you to spend half the session translating your life so I can catch up. We can look at anxiety in the context of identity, relationships, family, community, and the larger conditions you’re living in. Anxiety may sometimes be overestimating danger; at other times, it has learned from danger that was very real. Therapy has to leave room for both possibilities.
That distinction can matter quite a bit in therapy. I don’t want to help you become less responsive to situations where your caution is telling you something important. I also don’t want experiences of rejection or discrimination to leave you feeling as though you need to stay braced for danger everywhere. Part of our work can be figuring out which is which.
Ready to Talk With a Portland Therapist About Anxiety?
If anxiety has become a constant argument with yourself, we can talk about what it might be like to approach it differently with a Portland therapist. I offer online therapy for adults in Portland and throughout Oregon, along with a free 15-minute phone consultation to see whether working together feels like a good fit. Call (971) 533-5590 or schedule a consultation.
Frequently Asked Questions About Working With a Portland Therapist for Anxiety
What does a compassionate approach to anxiety therapy mean?
A compassionate approach does not mean pretending anxiety is pleasant or agreeing with every anxious thought. It means becoming curious about why anxiety is showing up and what it may be trying to protect you from before immediately treating it as something that needs to disappear. That can make it easier to respond thoughtfully instead of adding frustration or shame to an already difficult experience.
Why does criticizing myself for being anxious sometimes make anxiety worse?
When you’re already anxious, criticizing yourself gives your mind something else to manage: now the anxiety itself starts looking like evidence that you’re failing at coping. You may spend as much time evaluating your reaction as dealing with whatever started it. Therapy can help you notice when the mind has shifted from responding to a problem to judging you for having a response at all.
How does IFS therapy fit into a compassionate approach to anxiety?
IFS therapy can help us become curious about the parts of you that worry, anticipate problems, rehearse conversations, or try to keep everything under control. Instead of assuming those reactions are simply irrational, we can explore what they are trying to prevent and whether they still need to work quite so hard. Once we understand the job a part is trying to do, we have somewhere more useful to begin than simply telling it to stop.
Can I work with a Portland therapist if I live elsewhere in Oregon?
Yes. I provide online therapy to adults located throughout Oregon. You do not need to live in Portland to work with me; you simply need to be located in Oregon during your therapy sessions.
Eric Goodwin is a Licensed Professional Counselor in Oregon and offers online therapy in Portland and throughout Oregon.
Eric works with adults navigating anxiety, harsh self-criticism, high internal pressure, and identity-related stress. His approach is warm, affirming, and focused on helping people better understand themselves while creating more room for ease, clarity, and self-trust.
He offers support for anxiety, LGBTQ+ affirming counseling, and Internal Family Systems, IFS. You can learn more about Eric here.