Specialties · Anxiety
Anxiety Therapy
Anxiety is rarely just a feeling. It is a set of habits your nervous system has learned in order to stay ahead of something, and it usually has company: the relationships, expectations and household rhythms that keep it running.
60-Minute Sessions · $200 · In Person or Telehealth in Utah
What It Looks Like
How Anxiety Shows Up
People come in describing very different things and call all of it anxiety. There is the version that lives in the body: a chest that will not loosen, shallow breathing, a jaw held tight all day, a stomach that reacts before you have consciously registered what is wrong. There is the cognitive version: loops of planning, rehearsing conversations that have not happened, drafting the reply nine times, scanning for the thing you have forgotten. And there is the behavioral version, which is often the most expensive, because it quietly removes options. You stop driving on the freeway. You stop volunteering in meetings. You stop saying yes to dinners where you do not know who else is coming.
Panic has its own logic. It arrives faster than thought, convinces you something is medically wrong, and then teaches you to fear the places it happened. Social anxiety works in the opposite direction, arriving early and slowly, so that by the time you are in the room you have already spent three days being judged by an imaginary audience. Generalized worry tends to be the least dramatic and the most tiring, because it has no single subject and therefore no resolution.
What these share is a bargain: short-term relief in exchange for a slightly smaller life. Avoidance works, which is exactly why it is so hard to give up. Every time you cancel, the dread drops, and your nervous system files that away as evidence that the cancellation was necessary.
The Systemic Part
Anxiety Is Held in Place by Relationships
Athena is licensed as a marriage and family therapist and works systemically, which changes what gets looked at. Anxiety almost always has helpers. A partner who answers the hard email for you is being kind, and is also confirming that you cannot do it. A parent who calls the school on a teenager’s behalf removes today’s distress and removes this year’s practice. A workplace that rewards your over-preparation is paying you to stay anxious.
None of that makes anyone the villain. It makes anxiety a pattern with more than one participant, which is useful news, because a pattern with several participants has several places it can be interrupted. Often the fastest change is not inside your head at all: it is a renegotiated agreement with the person who has been absorbing your discomfort.
So the early questions tend to be relational as well as internal. Who knows how bad it is? Who does not? Who gets the reassurance-seeking, and how many times a day? What happens in the household when you say you are not up to something: relief, irritation, silence? The answers map the system the anxiety lives in.
Seeking help for your problems means you’re taking action.
The Work
What the Sessions Actually Do
The first session is mostly history and orientation: what brought you in now rather than last year, what you have already tried, what your week genuinely looks like, and what you want to be different. Anxiety has a habit of presenting itself as permanent, so part of early work is simply establishing a timeline: when it was quieter, what was happening then, and what changed.
From there the work is usually practical and specific rather than abstract. You will look at particular episodes in detail, because generalities cannot be worked with, not “mornings are bad” but what happened at 7:15 on Tuesday, what you told yourself, what you did, and what it cost. You will look at where avoidance has been accumulating, and choose re-entry points small enough to actually attempt. You will look at sleep, food and the substances people quietly use to take the edge off, because anxiety worsens on an unslept, unfed nervous system regardless of insight.
Where relevant, partners or parents are brought in for part of the work. That is not a referral to couples or family therapy by stealth; it is a recognition that a change in the pattern is easier to hold when the other people in it know what is being attempted and why. Pace and frequency are decided together rather than prescribed, and the aim is not a life without anxiety: it is a life that anxiety has stopped organizing.
Athena is not a prescriber. She worked for three years under a psychiatrist and is familiar with how medication decisions get made, but medication questions belong with your physician or a psychiatrist. She also does not treat substance abuse, grief, or OCD, and will point you toward a better-suited referral if one of those is the central concern.
Common Questions
Anxiety Therapy Questions
- Do I need a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder to come in?
- No. Most people arrive describing symptoms rather than labels: they cannot sleep, they dread Sunday evenings, they reread messages before sending them. That is enough to start with.
- Can Athena prescribe medication for anxiety?
- No. Athena is a licensed marriage and family therapist, not a prescriber. If medication is a question worth asking, that question belongs with your physician or a psychiatrist, and therapy continues alongside whatever you decide with them.
- How long are sessions and what do they cost?
- Individual sessions are 60 minutes at $200. Couples and family sessions are 60 minutes at $250. Select Health, BCBS, UBH and University of Utah Health Plans are accepted.
- Can we meet by telehealth?
- Yes. Sessions are offered in person at the Salt Lake City office or by telehealth. Athena is licensed in Utah only, so telehealth clients need to be located in Utah at the time of session.
Start With the Contact Form
Anxiety work is individual therapy here, sometimes with a partner or parent joining for part of it. Send the contact form before anything is scheduled.