A helpful question in therapy isn’t looking for the “right” answer. It can help us notice what happens when anxiety takes hold and understand what some part of you is trying so hard to protect.
If you already spend a lot of time thinking about your anxiety, the idea of going to therapy and answering more questions doesn’t sound especially promising. You know some of your patterns. You understand at least part of where they came from. What’s frustrating is that all that insight hasn’t necessarily changed what happens when anxiety takes over.
What isn’t always clear is what a therapist can add when you’ve already spent a lot of time trying to understand yourself. If you’ve analyzed the problem from six different angles and you’re still caught in it, more analysis for its own sake probably isn’t what you’re looking for.
Say you tell me you spent half the night replaying a conversation from work. At the time, it seemed ordinary enough. Later, something you said starts bothering you. You wonder whether your tone came across differently than you meant it to. By midnight, you’ve gone through the conversation enough times that you could practically submit a transcript.
By the time you bring it into therapy, you know you’re overthinking it. You may even be annoyed with yourself for caring this much. Telling you to stop overthinking, or helping you come up with a more reasonable interpretation of the conversation, doesn’t really address why your mind keeps returning to it.
So I might ask, “What are you trying to make sure didn’t happen?”
That shifts our attention from the conversation itself to what all that reviewing is trying to accomplish. You’re not really expecting to remember some crucial new detail. You’re trying to get certain that the other person didn’t think badly of you. The problem is that certainty never quite arrives. As soon as one detail feels settled, your mind finds another one to inspect.
Now we have something more useful to explore. What makes it so hard to leave that uncertainty alone? What feels at stake if you stop reviewing before you know for sure? We don’t need a brilliant answer in the moment. Even recognizing, Oh, this is what my mind is trying to do for me, can change the way you relate to the whole pattern.
The questions I ask in anxiety therapy grow out of moments like this. They aren’t a script, and I’m not just waiting for you to discover an answer I already have in mind. I want us to understand what your anxiety is asking you to do, why that response makes sense, and whether following it is actually helping. From there, therapy becomes less about explaining your anxiety one more time and more about changing what happens when it shows up.
What I’m Listening for When You Tell Me You’re Anxious
When you tell me you’re anxious, I’m not only listening to the thing you’re worried about. I’m paying attention to what your mind starts doing once the worry shows up.
In the conversation we’ve been following, you notice a flicker of doubt about how you came across and start reviewing what happened. By the time you tell me about it, you’ve already spent hours trying to decide whether there is actually something to worry about. We could spend the session doing more of that together (examining the conversation, looking for evidence, trying to settle whether your coworker was upset…) but that risks turning therapy into one more place where you ask your anxiety for certainty.
I’m more interested in the moment when the uncertainty becomes something you feel responsible for neatly resolving.
That’s where a question like “What happens if you don’t figure this out?” can tell us something useful. Not because there is a hidden answer I’m trying to pull out of you, but because your response helps us see what makes the reviewing feel necessary in the first place.
You might recognize that somewhere along the way, I’m not sure how that conversation went became I need to know I didn’t do something wrong before I can relax. Now we’re no longer just talking about whether your interpretation of the conversation is accurate. We’re beginning to understand why uncertainty itself has become so hard to leave alone.
This is often the part that gets missed when you’ve already thought about your anxiety extensively. You can understand the pattern afterward and still get swept into it the next time something feels off. In therapy, we can start getting closer to the moment when the pattern takes hold: what changes inside, what suddenly feels urgent, and what your anxiety insists has to happen next.
As you get more familiar with the pattern, you can start recognizing it before you’ve spent the whole evening inside it. Instead of discovering at midnight that you’ve been trying to resolve a conversation that ended eight hours ago, you notice much earlier, I know what my mind is asking me to do right now. Now there’s a real decision in front of you about whether you want to keep following it.
What Happens Inside When Anxiety Takes Over
When anxiety gets hold of your attention, it becomes hard to tell where the worry ends and your response to it begins.
In the conversation we’ve been following, I wonder if I sounded weird quickly becomes I need to figure this out. Once that happens, reviewing feels less like a choice and more like something you need to finish before you can relax.
That’s the part I want to understand with you. What makes figuring it out feel so urgent? What does some part of you believe will happen if you leave the question unresolved? When we stay close to that moment, the reviewing starts to make more sense. It may be trying to keep you from being embarrassed, rejected, blindsided, or left wondering whether you missed something important.
Once we understand what the reaction is trying to protect you from, it makes a lot more sense why “just stop doing this” hasn’t worked.
As the shift from something feels off to I have to solve this becomes more familiar, the easier it becomes to recognize it while it’s happening. Over time, you can catch yourself ten minutes into the replay and recognize, I know what this is. I’m trying to get certainty that isn’t coming. Then there is an actual choice in front of you: keep working the problem, or let the question stay unanswered and get back to your evening. Anxiety can protest, but it no longer gets to decide by default how much of your night this one conversation deserves.
How One Question Leads to the Next
Suppose I ask, “What happens if you don’t figure out whether your coworker was upset?” You sit with it for a moment and say, “I don’t know. I just hate not knowing.”
That changes what I’m listening for. A minute ago we were talking about the conversation with your coworker. Now something else has come into view: the uncertainty itself is hard to leave alone.
So I ask what happens when you try. As you answer, you catch yourself going back over the conversation again, checking the wording and trying to picture the other person’s reaction. The thing we’ve been talking about is happening right there in the session.
I can point that out: “You went back to the conversation just now.” That gives us something much more useful than another theory about why you overthink. We can look at what happened in those few seconds. The uncertainty showed up, and your mind immediately went back to work trying to settle it.
The next question comes from there: “What were you hoping you’d find when you went back over it?” Your answer may take the conversation somewhere neither of us could have planned at the beginning of the session. That is the point. I’m not moving through a list of questions designed to lead you toward a conclusion. I’m listening to what happens as we talk and letting what we notice together shape where we go next.
Over time, you start noticing these shifts too. The reviewing no longer feels like one long, mysterious bout of anxiety. You can recognize the moment your mind takes a question it cannot answer and turns it into a problem it feels responsible for solving.
When You Start Noticing the Pattern Earlier
At first, you recognize the pattern once you’re already well inside it. You look at the clock and realize you’ve spent most of the evening going back over a conversation that ended hours ago.
As we keep noticing how this happens together, you start catching it earlier. The doubt appears. You feel the familiar pull to go back over what you said. And somewhere in there comes a small recognition: Oh. I’m trying really hard to make sure I’m okay.
That changes how you meet the urgency. Of course some part of you wants to know for sure. It’s trying to keep you from the embarrassment of having missed something, gotten something wrong, or been caught off guard.
The next time you catch yourself going back over the conversation, your response can sound a little different. Instead of Seriously, why am I doing this again? there can be some recognition of what’s happening: Of course I want to know. I’m worried I got something wrong.
You still don’t know what your coworker thought. The uncertainty is still uncomfortable. But you’re no longer adding a fight with yourself on top of it, and you don’t have to keep reviewing until the discomfort finally goes away. You can leave the question unfinished and return to the rest of your evening.
Over time, some of the questions we first explore together start becoming familiar to you outside of therapy. You catch the pull toward certainty and recognize what your mind is reaching for. You know this particular road a little better now; where it tends to lead, what it promises, and how much time it can take from you.
And sometimes you decide not to follow it all the way down.
When You’re Tired of Being Pulled Around by Anxiety
You can understand a lot about your anxiety and still find yourself caught in the same patterns and ruminations when something hits a tender spot. Therapy can give us a chance to work much closer to those moments, notice what takes over, understand what it is trying to protect, and find a way of responding that doesn’t require another round of fighting with yourself.
My approach to anxiety therapy in Portland draws from IFS therapy, mindfulness and self-compassion, and LGBTQ+ Affirming Therapy. In practice, that means I’m less interested in handing you the right answer than in noticing what actually happens when anxiety shows up and what helps you relate to it differently.
I offer online therapy for adults in Portland and throughout Oregon. If this way of working sounds like something you’ve been looking for, you can request a free 15-minute phone consultation, by calling (971) 533-5590 or clicking here, to talk about what’s been going on and see whether working together feels like a good fit.
FAQs: More About How This Works in Anxiety Therapy
If I already overthink everything, how is talking about it in therapy supposed to help?
When you’re alone with anxiety, the thinking can become very closed-loop: you ask yourself the same question from slightly different angles and keep hoping one of them will finally settle it. In therapy, there’s another person in the room who can notice when you’ve started disappearing into that loop and help bring your attention back to what is happening underneath it.
Sometimes what changes is not the amount of insight you have, but the way you’re relating to yourself while you’re anxious. You hear how quickly you turn uncertainty into self-criticism. You notice how hard some part of you is working to protect you from getting something wrong. And instead of immediately pushing that reaction away, we can understand it well enough that you don’t have to keep fighting with yourself on top of everything else.
For someone who has already done a lot of thinking, that can be a very different experience from simply understanding yourself better. It can become practice in being with yourself differently when anxiety shows up.
Will you actually tell me what you’re noticing, or will I mostly be doing the talking?
I’ll tell you what I’m noticing. If something in the way you describe an experience stands out to me, I’ll bring it into the conversation rather than quietly keeping a theory about you in my head.
I may hear how quickly your tone changes when you start blaming yourself, or notice that something you just described as “not a big deal” seems to carry a lot of feeling. I can tell you what I’m hearing and see whether it fits.
And sometimes I’ll get it wrong. You can tell me that too. I want the conversation between us to help you understand yourself more clearly, not leave you trying to figure out what your therapist secretly thinks about you.
What if there really is something to worry about?
Sometimes there is.
A difficult relationship can actually be difficult. A work situation can carry real consequences. Queer and trans people sometimes have very good reasons to pay attention to safety, visibility, or how another person may respond.
I don’t want to talk you out of your own perception just because anxiety is involved.
Instead, we can separate what needs your attention from what anxiety keeps asking you to do after you’ve already paid attention. There may be a real conversation to have or a boundary to set. There can also be the extra hour spent trying to predict every outcome before you let yourself act.
Taking your concern seriously does not require handing anxiety unlimited time to solve what cannot be made completely certain.
What happens when anxiety shows up before I can even put it into words?
Sometimes your body gets there before your mind does. You’re in the middle of a conversation and notice your stomach has dropped, even though you can’t yet say what happened. By the time you’re trying to make sense of it, some part of you is already bracing for something.
I’m interested in that reaction before we rush to explain it.
There is often a part of you responding to something it recognizes as dangerous, even when the rest of you has not caught up yet. Rather than forcing an answer to “Why am I anxious?”, we can get to know what that part is reacting to and what it believes needs to happen next.
A person can discover, for example, that the urge to leave is not random at all. As we pay attention to that moment, you may realize that something about the other person’s tone felt familiar before you had consciously made sense of it. Some part of you was already preparing for what it had learned might come next.
When we approach those reactions with interest instead of immediately correcting them, they become easier to understand. You start learning the language of your own nervous system and the parts of you that have been trying to keep you safe, sometimes for a very long time.
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.