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Anxiety Therapy in Washington, DC
Anxiety is often the brain over-predicting threat and under-predicting your ability to handle it.
That is a flat description of something that does not feel flat at all from the inside. It shows up as the 3 a.m. replaying of a conversation, the email you have opened nine times without answering, the low hum under an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.
I am Ariel VanDoren, a licensed professional counselor in Washington, DC. My practice, True North Psychotherapy, is on Connecticut Avenue NW near Dupont Circle.
Getting specific about what you are afraid of
Anxiety operates through headlines. It screams that something terrible will happen and that you won’t survive it. Because these fears are so broad and loud, they leave very little traction to actually address them.
My approach is to zoom in: What is the exact worst-case scenario? What is its actual probability? And most importantly, what agency would you still hold if it came to pass?
Anxious thinking usually cuts off right at the catastrophe. It ignores the part where you survive it, adapt, and navigate forward. Walking through the whole story out loud—rather than replaying it privately at night—interrupts that self-reinforcing cycle and gives your brain a way out of the noise.
The goal is not simply feeling calm
Rumination and avoidance fuel each other. Interrupting that pattern is far more effective than trying to chase down tranquility.
Rumination promises that enough analysis will eventually yield certainty. Avoidance promises that stepping back from the uncomfortable moment will keep you safe. They both offer brief, temporary relief, but ultimately hand the problem back bigger than they found it.
In fact, striving for calm can subtly become its own compulsion—monitoring your body, noticing you aren’t relaxed, and feeling new anxiety about the anxiety itself. In our work, we focus on the core mechanism instead: recognizing where you get stuck in rehearsal, facing what you’ve been navigating around, and learning how to take meaningful steps forward before the feeling completely settles.
When anxiety arrives with a major life change
I want to work with clients who are experiencing pain caused by major life events we experience: a death, the end of a relationship, the birth of a child, a career change such as going back to school or retirement, or family of origin trauma.
Washington is a city where many of these arrive on a schedule that is not yours. Work turns over. A contract, a program, a fellowship ends. You moved here for someone and the relationship did not hold. You have a first child in a city where your family is several states away.
The way our brain and body experiences these shifts causes our emotions to feel chaotic and our nervous system needs to reset. We can work on that reset in therapy.
The body and the story you are telling about it
Much of how I practice ties our somatic experience to the narrative we use to process what has happened.
Anxiety is not only a thought. It is a jaw, a shallow breath, a stomach that knows before you do, a body braced for something it cannot name. Running underneath it there is usually a story: about what happened, about what it says about you, about what you are supposed to be able to withstand.
I pay attention to both, and to how they talk to each other. Sometimes the body settles once the story finally gets said accurately. Sometimes the story only becomes tellable after the body has somewhere to put what it is holding.
Working together here in the District
I am licensed as a professional counselor in Washington, DC (LPC #PRC 14494), and I see clients who are located in the DC Metro Area. My office is at 1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A.
This is a solo practice. You work with me, not with an intake team, and you are not handed off to someone else after the first appointment.
If you want to talk
You do not need to arrive with a diagnosis or a tidy summary of what is wrong. Plenty of people start with some version of “this has gone on long enough and I would like it to be different”.
A first conversation is mostly about whether the way I work fits what you are carrying. If it does not, I will say so and try to point you somewhere useful.
Call 202.599.0522, or come see me at 1555 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 401A, Washington, DC 20036. There is no pressure on the other side of that call. When you are ready, reach out.
