High-Functioning Anxiety Therapy in Calgary
The alarm is not broken. It has never been told the emergency is over.
Outwardly Calm. Inwardly Sprinting.
Yours looks like a colour-coded calendar. Arriving early to everything. Triple-checking the email, then rereading it at 11 p.m. anyway. From the outside you are the reliable one, the prepared one, the person who never drops a ball. Inside, your mind treats every ordinary Tuesday like a final exam. You replay conversations from 2019. You rehearse conversations that haven't happened. You are exhausted in a way that sleep doesn't touch, because the part of you that scans for problems never clocks out. Nobody at work would believe you're anxious. That's sort of the problem.
We get underneath the symptom instead of just managing it. Using IFS and attachment-informed approaches, we get to know the part of you that stays vigilant, and what it is afraid would happen if it stopped. We work with the catastrophizing and with the perfection math, where 99 good outcomes are luck and one mistake is proof.
We also practise tolerating calm. For many women, ease itself is dysregulating, unfamiliar, undeserved. Learning to let good moments simply be good is a skill, and it is one we practise deliberately. We review progress openly, and when the work is done, we say so.
Why This Happens
The alarm is not broken. It has never been told the emergency is over.
Somewhere along the way, being three steps ahead started working. Vigilance kept you safe. Being prepared meant nobody could criticize you. Anticipating the problem meant the problem never arrived. It worked, which is exactly why it never stopped.
That is also why "just relax" has never once helped. You cannot reason a smoke detector out of going off. Your alarm system is not defective. It is doing precisely what it learned to do, on a schedule nobody ever cancelled.
HOW WE WORK TOGETHER
Common Questions
Will therapy make me less driven? No. The goal is not to remove your engine. It is to stop running it on dread.
You will see Chanelle or Kia, RSW, regulated by the Alberta College of Social Workers and currently accepting new clients. In person in Calgary's Kensington neighbourhood and online across Alberta. Individual sessions are $190 for 50 minutes. We direct bill most major insurers. Every fit starts with a free 15-minute consult.
You don't have to keep carrying it alone. Book a free 15-minute consultation to find your fit, and take the first step.