What anxiety can look like
Some people come to therapy because they have panic attacks and are frightened of the next one. Others have never had a panic attack, but live with a constant low hum of worry: about work, money, health, relationships, the future, whether they said the wrong thing, whether something is about to go wrong. They wake at five in the morning with their mind already running. They find it hard to concentrate, to read a page without drifting, to stay in a conversation without rehearsing what comes next.
Anxiety also lives in the body. A tight chest, a knot in the stomach, a jaw that is always clenched, shoulders that never come down, a heart that races for no obvious reason. Sometimes the body is what finally brings someone to therapy, when sleep or digestion or exhaustion make it impossible to keep pretending that everything is fine.
And then there is the quieter kind of anxiety that looks, from the outside, like competence. The person who plans everything, checks everything, holds everything together, and cannot remember the last time they felt at ease. They are not falling apart. They are simply never off duty.
Why it can be sharper when you live abroad
Living in another country adds load. The practicalities, the constant translating, the absence of the people who usually ground you, the feeling of starting from zero: none of this causes anxiety by itself, but it lands on top of whatever you were already carrying. Worry that was manageable at home can become harder to bear when the ordinary supports are missing and life is happening in a language and a culture that are not fully your own.
Many of the people I work with are capable, resourceful adults who built a life in Barcelona on purpose. That does not make them immune to anxiety. If anything, it can make it harder to admit.
How I work with anxiety
I do not start from a diagnosis or a technique. I start from you: what the anxiety is like for you, when it is loudest, what it seems to be protecting you from, and what it costs you.
Most anxious minds are trying very hard to keep something bad from happening. In therapy we slow down enough to look at that effort with curiosity rather than frustration. What is the worry for? What would happen if it stopped? Often there is something underneath the thinking: fear, grief, anger, loneliness, a need that has not been named. Thinking harder rarely reaches it. Being accompanied while you feel it sometimes does.
Because anxiety is physical as well as mental, we pay attention to the body: breathing, tension, where the activation sits, what helps it settle. This is gentle work. For someone already on high alert, more focus on sensation is not always helpful, so we go at a pace you can sustain, with the brakes available before the accelerator. The aim is not to feel more, but to feel safe enough to feel what is already there.
My training is person-centred and Gestalt-informed, with influences from body-oriented and trauma-informed approaches and from parts work. In practice that means I listen before I explain, I ask open questions, I notice what happens in the room, and I offer hypotheses rather than verdicts. I will not give you a list of techniques in the first session, and I will not tell you that nothing is wrong. We will look together at what is going on, in your life and in your body, at this particular moment.
If a physical symptom is new, persistent or worrying, it deserves medical attention. Therapy is not a substitute for that, and I will say so.
What tends to change
People often describe the first shift not as the anxiety disappearing, but as having a little more room around it. They notice it sooner. They are less frightened of it. They understand what tends to set it off and what helps. Over time, as the fear underneath becomes something that can be said rather than managed, the body usually follows: sleep improves, the chest loosens, the mind has somewhere else to go.
That is not a promise. It is what I see, when the work is given time.
