Healing Anxiety: Why It Keeps Coming Back, and What Actually Helps

Why it keeps coming back

You’ve tried the breathing exercises.

Maybe the journaling. The therapy. The app that tells you to name five things you can see.

And still – the anxiety comes back. The moment you step back from the modality, so does the relief.

That’s not a personal failing. It’s a signal.

Anxiety isn’t primarily a thinking problem. It lives in the body – in a nervous system that learned, usually a long time ago, that it needed to stay on high alert. The worried thoughts (“What if I fail?”, “What do they think of me?”) aren’t the cause. They’re the symptom.

The thoughts aren’t the problem. They’re the smoke. The fire is somewhere else.

In my work, anxiety sits inside the Fear family. Think of it as a spectrum of intensity – nervousness at one end, panic at the other, with overwhelm and anxiety living somewhere in the middle. Your deep inner knowing summons exactly the level of fear the situation calls for. Which means if anxiety is what you named – overwhelm, panic, or that low hum of dread might feel familiar too.

This work creates that access. When you can finally be in touch with your deep inner knowing, the fear stops being the enemy. It becomes information.

What I work with instead

Anxiety doesn’t just show up randomly. It’s a protective response that the nervous system is still running – long after the original threat is gone. The body never got a clear signal that it was safe to stop.

That’s where Emotional Liberation® is different from standard anxiety management. We’re not trying to suppress the feeling or think our way out of it. We’re helping the nervous system complete what it started – and build genuinely new patterns in its place.

Three things make that possible:

• Psycho-Spiritual Inquiry – guided inner exploration that helps you locate and name what’s actually driving the anxiety. Not analyzing it from a distance. Getting underneath it.
• Expressive and active movement – your body holds what your mind has been trying to manage. Moving with intention – and using breath to support the process – helps the body release what it’s been holding. We draw on Eastern practices that have been working with the body and breath for thousands of years.
• Conscious plant medicine – used in the right context, with proper preparation and integration support, plant medicine can lower the defenses enough for deeper emotional material to surface safely. More on this below.

In practice: I help you read what your emotions are signaling. Then you experientially work with my Psycho-Spiritual Inquiry, expressive movement, and specific breath support – stirring up the emotions tethered to trauma stored in the tissues and nervous system. Some call what we do composting – bringing the old material to the surface, processing it consciously, and releasing it. The body is wise. It knows how to heal when given the right conditions.

What the research says

The science is catching up with what body-based healers have known for a long time. The landmark ACE study ,one of the largest public health studies ever conducted, established a direct link between adverse childhood experiences and long-term physical health. The body doesn’t forget. And a 2024 meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials confirmed that practices integrating intentional movement with inner awareness consistently reduce anxiety and depression.[1,2]

The research is moving fast. A Phase 2 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 73 adults with generalized anxiety disorder, reported in August 2025, showed statistically significant improvements across every key measure assessed. (Full results pending peer-reviewed publication.)[4]

A real-world study of 115 patients receiving psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in routine clinical care in Switzerland found significant improvements in mental health outcomes across multiple conditions.[5]

“The nervous system doesn’t respond to reasoning. It responds to experience. That’s why we work the way we do.”
– Becca Williams

Plant medicine and anxiety – what’s worth knowing

This isn’t simple. And I won’t pretend it is.

Cannabis can relieve anxiety – or make it significantly worse. It depends on the strain, the dose, the context, and what’s happening inside the person using it. High-THC cannabis taken without intention, in a state of existing anxiety, often amplifies everything. Low-dose cannabis in a ceremonial container, with clear emotional intention and a skilled facilitator, can open access to material that has been defended against for years.

Psilocybin has shown particular promise for anxiety — including existential anxiety, anxiety alongside depression, and anxiety in people facing life-threatening illness. One of the mechanisms researchers point to is a temporary quieting of the default mode network , the part of the brain associated with rumination and the constant inner monologue. When that quiets, something else can move.[3]

What the research says

The research is moving fast. A Phase 2 randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 73 adults with generalized anxiety disorder, reported in August 2025, showed statistically significant improvements across every key measure assessed. (Full results pending peer-reviewed publication.)[4]

A real-world study of 115 patients receiving psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy in routine clinical care in Switzerland found significant improvements in mental health outcomes across multiple conditions.[5]

Where healing meets real life

Whether the starting point is Psycho-Spiritual Inquiry, movement, Kundalini breath, or plant medicine – what makes change last is what happens after.

Understanding why you’ve been shrinking, over-giving, or tolerating what you shouldn’t – that’s the breakthrough. But insight alone doesn’t change a relationship.

It doesn’t tell you what to say when your partner dismisses you again. It doesn’t show you how to hold a boundary when everything in you wants to collapse it. It doesn’t prepare you for the moment your friends expect the old you to show up – and you’ve outgrown that version of yourself.

This is what we call the shaken snowglobe. You’re changing on the inside. But the outside hasn’t caught up yet. That gap – between who you’re becoming and the world that still expects the old version of you – can feel destabilizing. Even lonely.

This is where most healing work stops.

We don’t stop there.

Once the emotional root starts to shift, we work on what that looks like in your actual life. How to communicate what you need. How to set a boundary and hold it. How to navigate relationships that were built on the old you – and decide what stays and what goes.

The inner work and the outer work. Together. That’s what makes it last.

 

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Sources

1. World Health Organization. (2025). Anxiety disorders. WHO Fact Sheet. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/anxiety-disorders – In 2021, 359 million people worldwide had an anxiety disorder; only 27.6% received treatment.
2. Felitti, V. J. et al. (1998). Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults: The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 14(4), 245-258. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0749-3797(98)00017-8
3. Dong, Y., Zhang, X., Zhao, R., Cao, L., Kuang, X., & Yao, J. (2024). The effects of mind-body exercise on anxiety and depression in older adults: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. Frontiers in psychiatry, 15, 1305295. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2024.1305295
4. Incannex Healthcare. (2025, August 26). Incannex Reports Positive Results from Phase 2 Clinical Trial of PSX-001 (Psi-GAD) for Generalised Anxiety Disorder. https://ir.incannex.com/news-releases/news-release-details/incannex-reports-positive-results-phase-2-clinical-trial-psx-001
5. Aboulafia-Brakha, T., Buchard, A., Mabilais, C., Alaux, S., Amberger, C., Furtado, L., Seragnoli, F., Briefer, J. F., Thorens, G., Sabé, M., Szczesniak, L., Iuga, R., Zullino, D., & Penzenstadler, L. (2026). Real-world effectiveness and safety of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy: Outcomes from a large-scale compassionate use cohort in Switzerland. Psychiatry Research, 358, 116992. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2026.116992