Setting New Year’s Resolutions When You Have Anxiety: Examining the Year Ahead with an Anxiety Therapist in Denver, CO.
By Jordan Kurtz (she/her), MA, LPCC, Anxiety Therapist in Denver, CO.
Anxiety manifests in two forms- eustress and distress. Several of the CZ Therapy Group blogs (and mainstream media and research) address distress - behavioral, emotional and mental responses to a negative subject. Learn more about anxiety as a protection in response to distress in one of our recent blogs.
Eustress - sometimes called “positive stress” – refers to bodily and emotional reactions to a positive subject (i.e. a marriage or birth of a child).
Both eustress and distress can serve as catalyzing forces for change, as both prompt consideration of our tolerance level for stress and how we navigate responding to stress.
Many of us view the dawn of a new year as an opportunity for evaluation surrounding questions such as, What is serving me in life, and what’s not? Oftentimes, it is areas of anxiety in our lives that dictate the answer to this question and point us towards routes for alternatives.
At CZ Therapy Group, our Denver anxiety therapists want to meet you wherever you are on this journey of consideration. Perhaps you can pinpoint areas of anxiety but don’t know how to address them. Perhaps a loved one has brought to your attention the impact of your stress responses and you’re seeking new ways to manage them. Perhaps your ways of coping with depression and anxiety feel like they have plateaued and you’re looking for deeper insight.
There are an infinite number of reasons that compel us to initiate change and an infinite number of ways to implement change; we at CZ Therapy Group want to speak to ways that therapy can serve as one of the most attuned, healing, and stable routes to change through a lens of common new year’s resolutions.
Unpacking New Year’s Resolutions with an Anxiety Therapist in Denver, CO.
Body & Food Related Resolutions
Your Resolutions
“I want to change my diet”
“I want to be stronger or more active”
“I want to become more confident in how I look”
“I want to feel more energized”
Your Therapist’s Curiosity
Our relationship with our bodies and food are not created in isolation. Societal pressures, familial norms, our physiological makeup, and more contribute to how comfortably we can move our bodies, our acceptance with our bodies, our definition of “healthy”, and what we consider exercise. Holding these goals, a Denver therapist on our team is likely to collaborate with you to also understand:
Rules around food growing up
How you define an “ideal” body type and the impact of that standard in your daily life
The function of exercise in your life
How others around you discuss bodies, movement, and food
Awareness of these elements will allow you and your therapist to understand the driving forces and accompanying emotions that color your relationship with food and body acceptance and/or neutrality. If it comes to light that goals are driven by shame, guilt, anxiety, rigid expectations, and/or a system of punishment, your therapist will cultivate insight with you about the origin of these emotions and how to dictate your own compassionate and balanced relationship with your body
Self/Identity Related Resolutions
Your Resolutions
“I want to develop a faith/sense of purpose/meaning”
“I want to connect to a community of people like me”
“I want to learn more about a culture I belong to”
“I want to understand myself better”
Your Therapist’s Curiosity
Identity exploration can only occur in spaces of safety, acceptance, and autonomy. Many of us growing up were told by family members, religion, economic or cultural geography that some part of us wasn’t welcome, wasn’t tolerated, didn’t/shouldn’t exist, or should be different- race, ability status, gender orientation, or sexual orientation are just a few. At CZ Therapy Group, we will identify what or who these barriers were and how you have adapted to a non-inclusive world. Validation for how you have endured and permission to fully embody all parts of yourself in a non-judgmental space will help deepen your self-discovery path.
Relationship Related Resolutions
Your Resolutions
“I want to feel more connected to my partner(s)”
“I want to prioritize more intimacy with my partner(s)”
“I want to be open to being vulnerable in a relationship”
“I want to be able to have tougher conversations in a healthier way with my partner(s)”
Your Therapist’s Curiosity
Relationships are interconnected systems that hold the capacity for positive cycles of connection and negative cycles of disconnection. Disentangling our own individual contributions to the cycle (i.e. how we respond to negativity from our partner) and how we are impacted by our partner (i.e. things they do that trigger us) is challenging to do in isolation, even when partnerships have strong foundations of communication. In anxiety therapy at CZTG, we hold space for parts of your experience that influence how you show up (consciously or unconsciously) in relationships, - including sexual history, familial and cultural norms about intimacy and vulnerability, and coping mechanisms – to bring empathy and awareness towards core needs beneath emotions in conflict. In couple’s therapy, a CZTG helps redirect blame to the cycle of conflict itself versus individual partners to undo shame. Once the cycle is identified and can be labeled and caught by both partners when conflict emerges, a therapist will then help formulate language for each partner to express what they need to deescalate tension.
Habit Related Resolutions
Your Resolutions
“I want to quit ____”
“I want to start going to/doing ____ weekly or monthly”
“I want to strengthen this part of myself…”
“I want to be free of this part of myself…”
Your Therapist’s Curiosity
Habits that we are quick to label as “destructive”, “useless”, or “unhealthy” are not often approached with wondering: How did this habit arise? What did it arise in response to? What does it offer us? How do we feel when we do it and when we don’t do it? Freeing ourselves of a habit or developing an alternative without exploration of the emotional origins of that habit can create difficulty in maintaining change as we are addressing symptoms, not causes.
Your CZTG therapist will guide you to the catalysts for developing a habit and reframe them as protections against painful emotions. Once these emotions are identified, your therapist will help you process them safely in ways that don’t require leaning on our protective habit.
Experience Anxiety Therapy in Denver, CO.
Anxiety therapy in Denver, CO can offer so much support as we start off the new year! Our team of anxiety therapists would love to connect! Follow these three simple steps to get started:
Reach out to schedule a free 20-minute consult call to see if couples therapy is right for you
Connect with the Denver anxiety therapist of your choice via a phone consult.
Begin the process of healing in anxiety therapy!
Meet The Writer: Jordan Kurtz, Anxiety Therapist in Denver, CO.
Jordan Kurtz (she/her) is a Denver anxiety therapist, couples counselor, and staff writer at CZTG. Jordan focuses on therapy for anxiety, trauma, adolescence, and relationships. Her approach is authentic, warm, and affirming, which she interweaves throughout her use of advanced evidence-based modalities, including EMDR, Emotion Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT), and somatic therapy. She provides anxiety therapy in Denver and virtually throughout the state of Colorado. If you’d like to work with Jordan, feel free to reach out to schedule a consultation call.