What type of therapy helped with anxiety in a young adult?

[Fogwood]

I'm trying to find a therapist for my DD who suffers with anxiety - she's a young adult. She has low self esteem and panics when she has to do something or go somewhere new.

I don't hink anyone who meets her would know she suffers with anxiety. She holds down a job and is seen as a sociable person when at work. However, she didn't have many close friendships growing up and now she's left school doesn't have much of a social life at all. Her anxiety is holding her back from doing things she wants to do and from thinking about a career.

She's agreed she needs some therapy and we are looking at private provision since I don't think CBT is going to be helpful.

I think I am procrastinating finding someone because A) it's quite difficult to find someone who is right and B) because it all sounds a bit vague.

Has anyone here suffered with similar type of anxiety and has a type of therapy helped? If so what and how long did you see a counsellor for? How did you know it was helping?

This video may be a good starting point;

She can contact her local Talking Therapies service for free therapy. It will probably be CBT (which is recommended for anxiety). There's no harm starting with this, and then if she doesn't find it helpful she can explore other options.

Why doesn't she thinks CBT would be good?
I don't have an answer, just curious (and that's what she'll get on the NHS as a PP has said).

She had some CBT phone therapy before.

Did it not work because she didn't do the homework, or because she did it but didn't feel any better, or another reason?

Buy "self help for your nerves" by Claire weekes. Read it cover to cover and support your daughter in following the plan the author gives. It changed my life.

Most therapy is CBT really, not all but it's the most common by far.

I would say to try and have it in person or at least on teams/zoom.

Sertraline might also help her but appreciate worth trying therapy first.

It’s more about the therapist tbh than the type of therapy. There are 3 main groups of therapy:
psychodynamic
behavioural (CBT, DBT)
humanistic (gestalt, TA, person centred)

integrative will depend on the therapist, but includes a mix of more than one type of therapist.

personally I think person centred therapy is not always helpful. Look for the depth of training of the therapist.

decide whether you want in person or online, and then have a look for who she might connect with. Honestly, as a young adult, it’s better she looks herself

The most important thing in terms of talking therapy is to find a therapist who gets her, and who she feels comfortable with. Someone who won’t patronise her or needlessly pathologise her, or present themselves as an exalted expert or authority figure.

If she’s open to taking anxiety meds that might help her out of the rut just enough to be more open to therapy or making changes to habitual assumptions and perspectives.

I was a very anxious 20-something and came out the other side thanks to a spell on Sertraline which paved the way for me to make big changes.

The meds gave me my first ever physical experience of not feeling anxious all the time, so I learned what it felt like, and that it was possible. I really got for the first time that my mood and was a separate thing from objective reality, that feeling OK and even positive in the face of difficulty didn’t mean a person was delusional, and that 99.9% of things I worried about really not any kind of big deal at all.

I don’t think I could have engaged fruitfully with therapy without it.

Other things that helped with anxiety were:

1. changing careers to something that didn’t push all the buttons of literally everything that stresses me out
2. actively developing friendships I made in adulthood, with people more temperamentally similar to me than many of my uni friends.

Turns out I’m not a basket case when I’m in an environment that suits me, surrounded by people whose company I enjoy!

Half of what troubles most anxious people I know is that they don’t have a mental model that it’s OK to do things they enjoy with people they actually like, as they are fairly rule-bound people who internalised the narrative at school that only the hardest and most gruelling and unpleasant things are worth doing, and everything else is laziness and self-indulgence.

I love Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). It's a third wave CBT type therapy, but instead of battling your thoughts, you accept you'll have them but commit to working towards what's important despite them. Look up videos on YouTube by Russ Harris to see if it clicks for your daughter. I did some ACT courses in my 40s and I wish I'd had the skills they taught in my younger years. It would have alleviated a lot of suffering. Wishing your daughter all the best.

CBT phone therapy is very different to an extensive course of therapy with a CBT therapist
just like not all forms of person centred therapy being the same
She needs to try out different therapists

Why in the hell would you avoid CBT which is the most evidence based treatment for anxiety disorders that exists in favour of options that have much less of an evidence base. Just get a good in person CBT therapist and take some escitalopram.

Look I’m a fan of ACT and CFT too but they aren’t first base. She’d honestly be best advised to give CBT another try plus it’s going to be much easier to get a reliable therapist with that training than something else. Make sure they are BACP registered and that they have training in a proper therapy and are not just a ‘counsellor’ which anyone can say they are.

Thanks everyone. I'm not completely against CBT I just know there are other therapies out their like ACT and compassion based therapies. I'd just like to hear stories of people having had therapy for anxiety and it helped them.

Thank you for mentioning taking meds and realising for the first time what it feels like to not feel anxious. That is a good point and I will out it to DD again and see what she thinks. One of my older DDs friends took medication for anxiety and it helped her. My DD has told me recently that she feels anxious all the time but does not show it.

Also, if you’re looking for a CBT therapist it’s the BABCP, the BACP may have some but they are more a wider range of modalities whereas BABCP is specifically CBT.

I am going through my own crazy mental health problems, but would recommend CBT (previously tried). I would also recommend exercise, it really helped me through multiple episodes of post natal anxiety - helped me to work through anxious energy. I play really happy music and jog in the morning.