Anxiety Care
We provide specialized telehealth therapy for anxiety across Maryland, DC, and Pennsylvania. Our team works with adults, adolescents, and children navigating generalized anxiety, social anxiety, panic, health anxiety, and performance anxiety. We use evidence-based approaches including CBT, ACT, exposure therapy, mindfulness, and trauma-informed care, with neurodivergence-affirming support for clients whose anxiety intersects with autism or ADHD.
Anxiety Care at Juniper Blu
Anxiety is the most common mental health condition in the United States, affecting more than 40 million adults and a significant portion of children and adolescents. It's also one of the most treatable. The work isn't about eliminating anxiety entirely (some anxiety is part of being human and helps us stay safe), but about reducing the kind of anxiety that's taken over too much of your life.
At Juniper Blu, anxiety care is one of our broadest specialty areas. Most of our clinicians work with anxiety in some form, because anxiety so often runs underneath everything else (eating disorders, trauma, OCD, depression, ADHD, autism). Whether your anxiety is the main thing or part of a bigger picture, we can help.
Types of Anxiety
Anxiety isn't one thing. Different anxiety conditions look different, feel different, and respond to slightly different treatment approaches. Knowing which kind you're navigating helps you and your therapist build a treatment plan that actually fits.
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
Persistent, excessive worry about a wide range of everyday concerns (work, health, family, finances, the future), often paired with physical symptoms like muscle tension, fatigue, and sleep disruption. The worries shift, but the worrying itself is constant. People with GAD often describe feeling like the volume on their brain is permanently turned up.
Social Anxiety
Intense fear of being judged, evaluated, or negatively perceived in social situations. This can show up in obvious ways (avoiding parties, dreading public speaking) or in subtler ways (rehearsing conversations afterward for hours, replaying small interactions with shame). Social anxiety often gets misread as introversion or shyness, but it's a clinical condition with effective treatment.
Panic Disorder
Recurrent, unexpected panic attacks (intense surges of fear with physical symptoms like racing heart, shortness of breath, dizziness, and a sense of impending doom), often followed by fear of the next attack. Panic attacks themselves are not dangerous, but the experience is terrifying, and the fear of having another one often becomes its own problem.
Health Anxiety
Persistent worry about having a serious illness, often accompanied by frequent body-checking, repeated reassurance-seeking from doctors, or compulsive online symptom-searching. Health anxiety has clinical overlap with OCD and often responds to similar treatment approaches. Reassurance helps temporarily but tends to make the cycle worse over time.
Performance Anxiety
Anxiety specifically tied to performing in front of others (work presentations, athletic events, musical performances, exams, intimacy). Performance anxiety can be situational (only in specific high-stakes moments) or pervasive enough to limit careers and relationships. It often responds well to exposure-based approaches combined with skills for nervous system regulation.
Most people don't fit neatly into one category, and that's normal. Anxiety conditions frequently overlap, and many people experience features of multiple types. Treatment is shaped to what you're actually living with, not to which label fits best.
What Anxiety Feels Like in Your Body
One of the most useful things to understand about anxiety is how much of it lives in the body, not just the mind. People often come to therapy expecting to talk about their worried thoughts, only to realize that what's been driving them is actually a nervous system stuck in alarm mode. Some of the most common somatic experiences of anxiety:
Cardiovascular and respiratory:
- Racing or pounding heart
- Shallow or rapid breathing
- Chest tightness or chest pain
- Feeling like you can't get enough air
Muscular and physical:
- Chronic muscle tension, especially in jaw, shoulders, and neck
- Trembling, shaking, or restlessness
- Tension headaches or migraines
- A persistent low-level feeling of being on edge
Digestive:
- Stomach pain, nausea, or "butterflies"
- IBS-like symptoms (bloating, diarrhea, constipation)
- Loss of appetite or anxious overeating
- Acid reflux
Cognitive and sensory:
- Racing thoughts that won't slow down
- Difficulty concentrating, brain fog
- Heightened sensitivity to sound, light, or touch
- Dissociation, derealization, or feeling "outside yourself"
Sleep:
- Trouble falling asleep due to racing thoughts
- Waking in the middle of the night
- Sleeping but waking exhausted
- Nightmares or vivid anxious dreams
When anxiety lives in the body, talk-only approaches often don't reach it. This is why we integrate somatic and body-based work alongside cognitive approaches, especially for people whose anxiety has been chronic.
High-Functioning Anxiety
"High-functioning anxiety" isn't a formal clinical diagnosis, but it describes something real that's missed by traditional assessment because the person looks fine from the outside.
If you're a high-performer at work, a reliable friend, the person other people lean on, the one who has it together (and yet you're privately exhausted, can't quiet your mind, can't shut off the worry, can't sleep, can't relax, can't stop preparing for what might go wrong), you may be carrying a form of anxiety that providers and even loved ones routinely miss. The performance is the protection. The worry is the engine.
Many of the people we work with come in for "stress" or "burnout" and discover the actual underlying pattern is anxiety they've been compensating for so well that even they didn't fully recognize it. This is common, and it's treatable. You don't have to be falling apart to deserve help.
How We Approach Anxiety Care
Anxiety responds well to treatment when the approach matches what's actually driving it. Some anxiety is cognitive (the thoughts are the engine). Some is somatic (the body is the engine). Some is rooted in trauma. Some sits underneath neurodivergence. Most is a combination. We work across modalities so the approach fits the person, not the other way around.
Depending on what you need, our therapists draw on:
- Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT): the most well-researched treatment for anxiety, focused on identifying and shifting the thought patterns that fuel anxious cycles
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): for clients who benefit from working with values, defusion from anxious thoughts, and building psychological flexibility
- Exposure-based therapies: particularly for panic, social anxiety, phobias, and health anxiety, where avoidance is keeping the anxiety alive
- Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): for clients whose anxiety is tied to emotion regulation, distress tolerance, or interpersonal patterns
- Mindfulness-based approaches: for noticing anxiety as it arises without getting hooked by it
- Somatic and body-based practices: for anxiety that lives in the nervous system more than in cognition
- Trauma-informed care: for anxiety that developed alongside or after traumatic experiences
- Neurodivergence-affirming care: for clients whose anxiety intersects with autism, ADHD, or sensory processing differences
For some clients, medication is also part of the treatment plan. We don't prescribe directly, but we coordinate closely with psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, and primary care providers when integrated care is helpful.
Other places to look
Anxiety overlaps frequently with other concerns. If you want to read about how we work with a related condition, our OCD, PTSD, Trauma Therapy, Eating Disorder Therapy, and Neurodivergence-Affirming Therapy pages might be useful.
Signs of Anxiety
Anxiety can be hard to recognize, particularly when it's been chronic enough that it feels like just "who you are." Some of the most common signs:
Cognitive and emotional signs:
- Persistent worry that's hard to control or quiet
- Catastrophizing or assuming the worst will happen
- Difficulty making decisions due to fear of the wrong choice
- Rumination, mental rehearsal, or replaying past interactions
- Irritability or feeling on edge
- Difficulty concentrating or feeling "scattered"
- Anticipatory anxiety about future events, even good ones
Behavioral signs:
- Avoidance of specific situations, places, or people
- Excessive reassurance-seeking from others
- Overpreparation, list-making, or "just in case" planning
- Compulsive checking (texts, locks, work, body sensations)
- Restlessness, fidgeting, or inability to sit still
- Procrastination driven by fear of failure
Physical signs:
- Racing heart or chest tightness
- Shallow breathing or feeling unable to take a deep breath
- Muscle tension, especially in jaw, shoulders, or neck
- Stomach issues or appetite changes
- Sleep disturbance
- Fatigue that doesn't resolve with rest
- Sensory hypersensitivity
When to Reach Out
If anxiety is taking up significant space in your life, narrowing what you do or where you go, disrupting your sleep, your relationships, or your sense of yourself, those are reasons enough to reach out. You don't have to be in crisis to deserve help.
You also don't need a formal diagnosis to start. Plenty of people who reach out aren't sure whether what they're experiencing fits a category, and figuring that out together is part of the early work.
If you've been quietly managing anxiety for years (high-functioning, getting things done, looking fine on the outside) and you're tired, that's also a reason. Performance is not the same as wellness.
What to Expect from Anxiety Care
Understanding your anxiety
The first few sessions are about understanding what kind of anxiety you're navigating, where it shows up, what's been making it worse, and what's been helping. We map patterns together rather than rushing into change, and we start building the relationship that the rest of the work depends on.
Skill-building and exposure prep
This is where we build practical tools (cognitive skills, nervous system regulation, mindfulness, exposure planning) that fit your specific anxiety. For social anxiety or panic, this often includes planning gradual exposures together. For generalized anxiety, this often focuses on shifting the relationship with worry itself rather than trying to stop it.
Active treatment
This is where the work moves from understanding to applying. Practicing exposures. Building new patterns. Reducing avoidance. Working through the deeper layers if trauma, attachment, or perfectionism are part of what's driving the anxiety. Progress often comes in waves rather than a straight line.
Generalization and life integration
As anxiety becomes less central, the work shifts to consolidating what you've built, planning for setbacks (anxiety can flare during stress and transitions), and reclaiming parts of life the anxiety had narrowed. Many of the people we work with continue with less frequent sessions to stay grounded long-term.
Therapists Who Work with Anxiety
Most of our clinicians work with anxiety. The therapists below have specific training and experience with anxiety as a primary focus. To meet our full team, visit the Our Team page.
Jamie L. Jones
Founder · LCPAT, LCPC, ATR-BC
Certified Anxiety, OCD, and Panic Specialist with advanced DBT training and 17+ years of clinical experience. Works with adults and adolescents across the full anxiety spectrum, including the high-functioning anxiety that often hides behind perfectionism and performance.
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Annie M. Sousa
Licensed Graduate Professional Counselor
EMDR-trained with extensive somatic trauma training. Specializes in anxiety that intersects with trauma, ADHD, autism, and burnout. Draws on ACT, IFS, EMDR, and body-based approaches. Bilingual in English and Spanish.
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Batya H. Erickson
Licensed Graduate Professional Counselor
Attachment-based, mindfulness-informed support for anxiety alongside life transitions, burnout, grief, and the relational patterns that often fuel it. Works with children, adolescents, young adults, and adults.
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Stacey C. Cooperman
Licensed Graduate Professional Counselor
Certified Trauma, Mindfulness, and Grief-Informed Professional with specialized training in anxiety, depression, and trauma. Bilingual in English and French, supporting adolescents through older adults.
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Megan M. Herbets
Licensed Professional Counselor
Advanced DBT training combined with ACT, IFS, and trauma-informed approaches. Works with adults and adolescents on anxiety, panic, OCD, and the mood and personality concerns that often co-occur with chronic anxiety.
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Jenna D. Howard
Licensed Graduate Professional Counselor
National Certified Counselor drawing on attachment-based therapy, CBT, DBT, and mindfulness-based approaches. Works with anxiety alongside depression, grief, life transitions, and relationship concerns.
View full bio →Insurance, Cost & Where We Work
We see people via secure telehealth across Maryland, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania. We accept CareFirst directly, and for other insurance plans we offer concierge support to help you get the most out of your out-of-network benefits, including most PPO, HMO, POS, and federal plans.
For full details on insurance, payment, and telehealth delivery, visit our Insurance & Payment Options page.
Anxiety-Specific Questions
No. You don't need a diagnosis to start therapy at Juniper Blu. Many people reach out because they recognize a pattern (constant worry, panic, social fear, racing thoughts) without being sure what kind of anxiety they're experiencing. Your therapist can help you understand what you're navigating as part of the early sessions.
Stress tends to resolve once the stressful situation ends. Clinical anxiety persists even when there's nothing concrete to be anxious about, or shows up disproportionately to the situation. Stress and anxiety also feel different in the body: stress is usually more situational, while anxiety has a kind of underlying hum that doesn't fully settle. That said, the distinction isn't always clean, and you don't have to know which one you're experiencing to come in. Sorting that out is part of the early work.
Maybe, depending on what kind of anxiety you're navigating. Exposure is the gold-standard treatment for panic disorder, social anxiety, phobias, and health anxiety, because avoidance is what keeps these anxiety types alive. For generalized anxiety or anxiety rooted in trauma, exposure may not be the right approach. We'll talk through what would actually help for your situation, and exposure work (if we do it) is structured, paced to you, and never done in a way that floods you with anxiety.
The most common reason previous anxiety therapy didn't help is that the approach didn't match what was actually driving the anxiety. Generic talk therapy often helps you understand your anxiety without fully shifting it. CBT alone works well for some types of anxiety but doesn't reach anxiety rooted in trauma, attachment, or neurodivergence. We work across modalities (CBT, ACT, exposure, somatic, IFS, EMDR, trauma-informed care) so the approach fits the person. If you've felt "stuck" before, that's often a modality mismatch, not a sign that you're untreatable.
Yes, and a significant portion of our anxiety work is with high-functioning clients. People who look fine on the outside, perform well at work, are reliable in relationships, and are privately exhausted from the work of holding it all together. High-functioning anxiety is real, and the fact that you're managing well doesn't mean you should have to keep carrying this alone.
Yes. Several of our therapists work with children, adolescents, and young adults experiencing anxiety. Treatment is adapted to developmental stage, and family-based work is often integrated when it supports the child's progress. We work with school-related anxiety, social anxiety, separation anxiety, performance anxiety, and the anxiety that often accompanies neurodivergence.
We don't prescribe medication directly, but many of our clients benefit from medication alongside therapy, particularly for moderate-to-severe anxiety, panic disorder, or anxiety that's been chronic. With your written consent, we coordinate closely with psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, and primary care providers so the medication and therapy work together rather than in parallel.
Treatment length varies based on the type of anxiety, how long it's been there, and what else is going on. CBT for specific anxiety conditions (panic disorder, social anxiety, specific phobias) often produces meaningful change in 12 to 20 sessions. Generalized anxiety or anxiety rooted in trauma typically takes longer. Your therapist will discuss a realistic timeline during the assessment phase.
You can begin by visiting our contact page or calling (202) 244-0818 to schedule an initial consultation. We'll talk through what you're experiencing, answer your questions, and help you decide if one of our therapists feels like a good fit, with no pressure to commit before you're ready.
Start Anxiety Care with Juniper Blu Collective
If anxiety has been narrowing your life or quietly exhausting you, you don't have to keep figuring it out alone. Reach out today and we'll talk through what specialized care could look like for you.
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