Anxiety is a normal human experience. Every person feels it, and for good reason. Through the lens of evolutionary psychology, anxiety evolved to keep us alive. The humans who felt fear in dangerous situations survived. The ones who didn't, didn't. We are all hard-wired to experience anxiety when our brain perceives a threat.

The challenge is that our world has gotten dramatically safer since the days of hunter-gatherers, but on an evolutionary timeline, that shift happened about ten seconds ago. We still carry the same threat-detection system we always have, wired for a world that mostly no longer exists.

Our task is made more complicated by the fact that the brain doesn't distinguish well between physical threats and reputational ones. The anxiety you feel before giving a presentation, or when you're talking to someone you're attracted to, registers with roughly the same intensity as being chased by a bear. The situation is different. The signal isn't.

Most of the time, these signals are manageable and work as intended. We experience anxiety when we sense danger, and when the situation passes it goes away. But sometimes those signals can fire incorrectly, going off in situations where there isn't anything wrong, or becoming unbearably loud when they were once more manageable. When that starts to happen often enough, the impact becomes noticeable. Anxiety changes from something that alerts you to danger into something that controls your life. this is when anxiety therapy can often help.

Located at 3 Sylvan Road South in Westport, CT, Gofman Therapy and Consulting provides in-person and virtual anxiety therapy to residents throughout Fairfield County, including Westport, Fairfield, Norwalk, and surrounding communities.

Our Work

We work primarily with young adults and young professionals dealing with social anxiety, health anxiety, generalized anxiety, panic disorder, and OCD. People who are functioning, sometimes functioning well, but paying a price for it that others don't see.

Anxiety therapy commonly integrates approaches like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with mindfulness-based strategies to help clients understand their patterns and develop the tools to manage them. CBT helps you identify and change the thought patterns that drive anxious responses, building more accurate ways of interpreting situations and gradually reducing the avoidance that keeps anxiety in place. ACT works differently — rather than focusing on changing thoughts, it helps you change your relationship to them, so anxiety stops making decisions for you even when it's still present.

When avoidance behaviors are particularly prominent, we also draw on Exposure and Response Prevention. ERP works by asking you to turn toward the experiences you've been avoiding, which interrupts the cycle that maintains anxiety, resulting in durable reductions in symptoms.

We also work with teenagers navigating anxiety. If you're looking for support for a teen, you can learn more on our teen therapy page.

Meet our Westport Anxiety Therapists