Summit Counselling Services — Specialty
Anxiety TherapyAnxiety is your nervous system's alarm — designed to protect you. The problem is when it won't turn off.
Anxiety disorders are among the most common mental health concerns in Canada — and among the most treatable. With the right support, most people see significant improvement. You don't have to keep white-knuckling through it.
The Scale of Anxiety
You are not alone — and you are not broken.
Understanding Anxiety
What anxiety actually is — and what it isn't.
Anxiety is your nervous system's built-in alarm — designed to detect and respond to threat. In the right doses, it's useful: it sharpens focus, drives preparation, and helps you meet challenges. The problem isn't anxiety itself. The problem is when the alarm fires too often, misreads situations as dangerous, or refuses to switch off once the threat has passed.
When anxiety becomes chronic or disproportionate, it stops being a protection and starts being a prison. It shapes what you do and don't do, what you avoid, how you read other people, how you interpret your own body, and how much of your mental energy gets consumed by worry, vigilance, or dread.
Anxiety disorders are not a sign of weakness or a character flaw. They are a pattern in the nervous system that has become dysregulated — often for understandable reasons related to past experience, temperament, environment, or genetics. And like most patterns, they can be changed with the right kind of help.
What makes anxiety particularly difficult to live with is that the things people do to manage it — avoiding triggers, staying safe, seeking reassurance — often make it worse over time. Therapy interrupts this cycle rather than accommodating it.
"Anxiety is not the enemy. Avoidance is. The goal of therapy is not to eliminate anxiety — it's to stop letting it run your life."
Signs you might benefit from anxiety therapy
- Persistent worry that's difficult to control or turn off
- Avoiding situations, places, or people because of fear or dread
- Panic attacks — sudden, intense physical surges of fear
- Physical symptoms — racing heart, chest tightness, shortness of breath, nausea
- Sleep difficulties driven by an overactive mind
- Irritability and difficulty concentrating
- Constant scanning for things that could go wrong
- Seeking reassurance repeatedly without relief
- Social withdrawal or difficulty being around people
- Intrusive or unwanted thoughts you can't stop
- Feeling "on edge" or unable to relax even when things are objectively fine
- Anxiety that has begun to significantly affect work, relationships, or daily functioning
Types of Anxiety
Anxiety takes many different forms
Our therapists work with the full range of anxiety presentations — whether you have a specific diagnosis or simply know that anxiety is significantly affecting your life.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Persistent, excessive worry about a range of everyday concerns — work, health, finances, relationships, world events — that is difficult to control and accompanied by physical tension, fatigue, and sleep disruption. The worry often shifts from topic to topic and rarely resolves fully.
Social Anxiety
Intense fear of social situations, performance contexts, or being observed by others — driven by fear of judgment, embarrassment, or humiliation. More than shyness, social anxiety significantly restricts what people are willing to do and how freely they can be themselves with other people.
Panic Disorder
Recurrent, unexpected panic attacks — sudden surges of intense fear accompanied by physical symptoms (racing heart, chest pain, dizziness, shortness of breath) — often followed by persistent worry about having another, and avoidance of situations associated with them.
Health Anxiety
Preoccupation with having or developing a serious illness, with significant distress despite reassurance from medical professionals. Health anxiety can consume enormous mental energy through body checking, googling symptoms, and seeking reassurance — creating a cycle that maintains rather than resolves the fear.
OCD & Intrusive Thoughts
Obsessive-compulsive disorder involves persistent intrusive thoughts, images, or urges — and compulsions performed to neutralize the distress they cause. Contrary to popular understanding, OCD often has nothing to do with tidiness and frequently involves disturbing thoughts that are completely at odds with the person's actual values.
Specific Phobias
Marked fear of a specific object or situation — flying, heights, medical procedures, animals, vomiting, and many others — that is disproportionate to the actual danger and leads to significant avoidance. Highly treatable with structured exposure-based approaches.
Trauma-Related Anxiety
Anxiety that is rooted in past traumatic experiences — appearing as hypervigilance, startle responses, intrusive memories, or pervasive fear that doesn't map neatly onto present circumstances. When anxiety has a traumatic root, therapy needs to address that root, not just the surface symptoms. See our trauma therapy page.
Separation & Attachment Anxiety
Anxiety centred on separation from attachment figures — expressed in children as school refusal or clinging, and in adults as significant distress around relationship insecurity, fear of abandonment, or difficulty functioning when separated from key people.
Performance & Test Anxiety
Fear of failure or negative evaluation in performance contexts — academic, professional, athletic, or social. Performance anxiety can significantly undermine actual ability, creating a gap between what someone is capable of and what they're able to demonstrate under pressure.
Why Avoidance Doesn't Work
The things you do to manage anxiety often maintain it.
Avoidance is anxiety's closest ally. When you avoid the thing that scares you — the social event, the medical appointment, the difficult conversation — you get short-term relief. But the anxiety doesn't learn that the threat isn't real. It just learns that avoiding kept you safe, and it gets a little stronger.
Reassurance-seeking works the same way. Getting someone to tell you it'll be okay feels better in the moment — but the relief is temporary, and the need for reassurance tends to grow over time.
Therapy for anxiety works differently. Rather than accommodating the anxiety, it gradually dismantles the avoidance patterns that maintain it — building your nervous system's actual tolerance for uncertainty and discomfort, rather than just managing around it. The result isn't the absence of anxiety. It's anxiety that no longer controls what you do.
What Therapy Offers
What actually changes in anxiety therapy
Anxiety therapy is not just talking about what makes you anxious. These are the concrete changes most people experience.
Understanding the Pattern
Mapping exactly how your anxiety works — what triggers it, how it escalates, what maintains it, and what keeps you stuck — is often the first meaningful shift. Understanding the cycle doesn't eliminate it, but it changes your relationship to it.
Nervous System Regulation
Building practical skills for managing anxiety in the moment — breathing techniques, grounding, somatic regulation — so that when anxiety activates, you have something to do with it that actually works.
Challenging Anxious Thinking
Identifying the thought patterns that amplify anxiety — catastrophizing, overestimating threat, underestimating capacity — and developing more realistic and flexible ways of interpreting situations.
Exposure & Avoidance Reduction
Gradually and systematically reducing avoidance — approaching rather than avoiding the situations, sensations, or thoughts that trigger anxiety. Done carefully and collaboratively, this is one of the most effective interventions available for anxiety.
Addressing the Root
For anxiety connected to past experience, trauma, or attachment history — addressing what's underneath the surface symptoms, not just the symptoms themselves. This is where longer-term change often lives.
Building a Life
The goal isn't symptom management — it's getting your life back. Therapy works toward a life that is larger than your anxiety currently allows: relationships you can fully show up in, work you can engage with, risks you can take, experiences you can have.
Therapeutic Approaches
How our therapists work with anxiety
No single approach works for every person or every kind of anxiety. Our therapists draw on a range of evidence-based methods matched to you — not applied generically.
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT)
The most extensively researched treatment for anxiety disorders. CBT addresses both the thinking patterns that fuel anxiety and the behavioural patterns — particularly avoidance — that maintain it. Practical, structured, and skill-focused. Includes Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) for OCD.
Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Rather than trying to eliminate anxious thoughts, ACT changes your relationship to them — reducing their power to drive your behaviour. Particularly effective when avoidance is deeply entrenched, or when CBT alone hasn't been sufficient. Builds psychological flexibility and values-based living alongside anxiety.
Somatic Experiencing
Anxiety lives in the body — in chronic muscle tension, the racing heart, the shallow breathing, the activated nervous system that won't downregulate. Somatic approaches work at a physiological level, helping the nervous system complete its stress response and return to regulation.
EMDR
When anxiety has roots in specific traumatic experiences or overwhelming memories, EMDR can address those roots efficiently — reducing the charge attached to the underlying memories and removing much of the fuel that feeds the anxiety.
Mindfulness-Based Approaches
Building the capacity to observe anxious thoughts and physical sensations without being swept away by them — present-moment awareness that interrupts the rumination and catastrophizing cycles that amplify anxiety over time.
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT)
When anxiety is accompanied by intense emotional dysregulation, DBT's distress tolerance and emotion regulation skills offer a structured framework for managing overwhelming internal states — building capacity before moving into deeper work.
Book a Session
Find us in Edmonton, St. Albert & Windermere
Anxiety therapy is available in person at all three Summit locations, and virtually for clients anywhere in Alberta.
Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver)
Grandin Plaza, 2nd Floor
Edmonton, AB
Common Questions
Anxiety therapy — your questions answered
Our Therapists
Therapists who specialize in anxiety
The clinicians below specialize in anxiety. A free 15-minute consultation is always available — no commitment required, just a conversation about fit.
Related Support
Other areas we work with
Anxiety doesn't have to be in charge. Let's change that.
Your first consultation is free — no commitment, no pressure. Just a conversation about where you are and whether we're the right fit.
We acknowledge that our practice is located in Treaty 6 territory, on the traditional lands of the Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux Peoples, including our Brewery District office in Wîhkwêntôwin ᐄᐧᐦᑫᐧᐣᑑᐃᐧᐣ (Oliver). We recognize that healing and reconciliation is a responsibility shared by all.
Summit Counselling Services is a counselling clinic located in St. Albert and the Brewery District in Edmonton. We provide psychotherapy for anxiety to children, adolescents, adults, seniors, couples, and families. We have a talented team of Edmonton psychologists, therapists and counsellors with a wide range of specializations and training at Summit Counselling Services who would be honoured to walk beside you on your journey. At Summit, we believe in therapy your way. Our goal is to customize your psychotherapy and counselling sessions to best suit your needs. We believe in the differences and unique perspectives each person brings to therapy and incorporate these into our work with you. Our therapists are just as unique as you, and we celebrate that by creating an anxiety counselling treatment plan that best suits your needs.