Fears can be specific or abstract. With phobias, you have a fear of, for example, an animal such as a spider, a situation such as fear of flying. In more abstract forms, it can be a generalized fear façade or fear of interfering with people.
The fears can play such a major role that they get in the way of your daily functioning.
Read more about anxiety on our diagnosis page.
First, we look with you at exactly what you have anxiety about and in what situations. The important thing here is to pay explicit attention to those situations or moments where you do not experience anxiety.
With these insights, we can work out the next steps in counseling specifically and more purposefully.
Attention will be paid to learning new associations with stimuli so that conditioning for fear is modified.
This translates into, among other things, recognizing moments where the fear need not be present.
Similar to trauma treatment, we install your “safe place. This is usually (but not always) an imaginary place, state, color, feeling etc. where you feel completely safe, can be yourself, feel complete. You teach yourself to go here anytime easier and easier.
The actual treatment now follows in desensitization. We do this in two phases.
The first stage is desensitization in vitro. This has the advantage that it can take place in the safe setting of counseling.
We guide you step-by-step imaginatively through the experience of your anxiety. This can be through conversation, cognitive, but especially hypnosis and psychodrama related techniques.
Similar to trauma treatment, we often do this first through double dissociation. When the anxiety is experienced as less here, we move to a more direct imaginal experience until the anxiety also reduces and subsides here.
Often this first stage is enough to already overcome your fears in vivo (in reality).
In a second stage, we take the step to in vivo. Here we guide you with an equally indirect confrontation in reality with your fear. Then we make the confrontation more intense and direct. Always you are guided so that nothing can happen to you.
For counseling children and adolescents, it is a strict condition for Walsha that both parents (and plus parents where necessary) are willing to actively participate in the counseling process.
For children work on the same topics as adults. The main difference is in the methodology and techniques that will be adapted to the age of the child.
An important factor in this is the developmental stage (age) of the child we are charging. After all, the child is not an adult in a small format, but experiences and interprets the world adapted to the developmental age it is in. Children are so much more dependent on adult supervisors (parents, educators) and therefore more vulnerable.
To this end, various therapeutic techniques are combined, tailored to the child’s age. This includes play therapeutic, relaxation and behavioral work.
Most effective is working on-site for such things as focused observations, experiential exchanges, psychoeducation and providing tools to respond appropriately to the child’s (problem) behavior.
Anxiety experiences always have a direct and profound impact on the family. A counseling program is complete only when working with the entire family. With regard to insights into negative family dynamics, understanding personal frustrations, division of attention and so on, new interactions are discussed and implemented. We pay attention to the place each family member deserves and make sure destructive coalitions disappear. This is how the family will function most optimally.
Living with a partner with anxiety is quite a challenge. How does anxiety affect your relationship? Should you just accept it or should you also do something with it? What to do and what better not to do? Know that your partner, too, is probably left with many unanswered questions. Psychoeducation is appropriate here, together or separately. Then we will work with you to create the desired change in the way anxiety gains visibility in your daily lives.
Where appropriate, we work with group sessions, which include exchanges of experience, recognition and new ideas.
Medication is primarily aimed at symptom relief. However, medication alone is not enough. It is only one part of a much broader and sustained care pathway. In many cases, medication-assisted interventions are indicated to promote adherence and thus treatment effectiveness.
Medications can also have unwanted effects. Only a specialized physician can decide on dosage and further monitoring. When using medications, risk assessment regarding substance abuse and inappropriate use is always recommended.
Plan je afspraak in via ROSA,
het digitaal agendaplatform