Help with Fears and Anxieties

On this site, we – the team from Consultation House Vienna – offer a general orientation regarding anxieties, fears and phobia, the topic of anxiety disorders. It is however important to acknowledge, that every person and life situation is unique and different. How people develop and experience fears and anxieties will hence be different. Anxieties and fears need thus to be appreciated and understood in the respective specific, local and personal context.

Although it is not possible to consider here such individual circumstances, we find it useful to share some general ideas about anxieties and fears. Nevertheless, personal and unique contexts and experiences are of central importance and will be considered in any psychotherapeutic intervention to help with anxieties and fears.

Understanding fears and anxieties

1. Most fears and anxieties are useful 

Fear is an involuntary, emotionally and physically sense-able reaction to a situation or an idea. This response can be vital to survival and can regulate all of our brain and physical activity.  Useful fear activates and orients body and mind at moments when this focus makes an important and essential difference.

2. Fears and anxieties are subject to lifelong learning

Some fears and anxieties may have been familiar to us since our early childhood. We might even have accepted these fears and anxieties, and the associated behaviours, as part of our personality. Additional fears or anxieties may have developed later in life based on other significant experiences.

3. Anxieties and fears can be dysfunctional 

Not all anxieties and fears that we have acquired are helpful; instead, we may notice that anxieties can limit our lives.  We then tend to avoid related situations or activities or can no longer enjoy them.  We are anxious in such situations to no benefit.  Feelings of fear and anxiety make these situations even more unpleasant and these in turn amplify the anxiety further.  We then increasingly avoid these situations or even similar situations.  If this leads to anguish and distress, we can speak of an anxiety disorder.

4. Untreated fears and anxieties can spread

Anxieties and fears have a tendency to expand.  To illustrate, a person who has been bitten by a large dog, may be reasonably afraid of medium-sized dogs.  The person may however also experience fear in response to even small dogs, which may not be justified in the same way.  A man or a woman, who feels anxious and stressed in an overcrowded bus, may not even find comfort in half-empty busses and in consequence, stops bus travel or public transport altogether.  Untreated anxieties and fears thus have a tendency to spread and take over our lives.

5. Fears and anxieties affect our behaviours

Because of fears or anxieties, we decide not to try the other job, not to go to the cinema, not to shop, not to go to the dentist, not to engage in a conversation with an interesting person.  Such avoidant behaviours can become habitual and increasingly run automatically and unconsciously.

6. It takes courage to deal with anxieties and fears

Everyone has fears that are in some ways limiting, we can consider this normal.  However, there exist social expectations of being free from fears and anxieties, of not allowing fears or anxieties to be of influence in our lives.  As a result, people are ashamed of their anxieties and fears and only few dare to speak freely and openly about these emotions.

Help with fears and anxiety disorders

Psychotherapy provides you with a safe place to deal with anxieties and fears.  For instance to consider from where these emotions originate and how they affect you.  Perhaps some anxieties and fears have been useful at a time and are no longer so.  Maybe you want to let go of some anxieties and fears. 

Which fears you are okay with and which you want to face is your decision.  Generally treatment of fears works well and it is recommendable to find a therapist with experience in this area.

In our practice in Vienna we offer psychotherapy to help overcoming fears and anxieties

In our practice in Vienna, we offer psychotherapy to treat fears and help with anxieties. We work with our clients to overcome fears and can fully enjoy the life they are hoping for. We offer this psychotherapy in English and German language.

Anxiety disorders are also one of the most common mental illnesses among children and adolescents (source: Bella study on child health). Further information on diagnosing and helping with anxiety disorders can be found at the Gesundheitsportal Österreich.

Please feel free to contact us. We welcome your call.