How Anxiety Therapy in Missoula, MT Can Help You Feel Like Yourself Again

Anxiety doesn’t always show up as panic or obvious distress. Sometimes, it’s the constant tension in your shoulders. The way your mind races when you try to rest. The sense that no matter how hard you try, you’re never fully at ease—not even with yourself.

If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. Many people in Missoula are quietly carrying the weight of anxiety every day. Whether it's related to work, family, past experiences, or simply the stress of being human in a rapidly shifting world, anxiety can gradually erode your sense of well-being. Over time, you might start to feel disconnected from the person you used to be.

Anxiety therapy isn’t a quick fix. But for many, it’s a steady path back to clarity, calm, and self-trust. Here in Missoula, anxiety therapy offers space to slow down, understand what’s happening inside, and learn how to meet yourself with more compassion.

What Does Anxiety Really Feel Like?

Anxiety can look different for each person. You might find yourself:

• Constantly overthinking or catastrophizing

• Avoiding social situations, decision-making, or even small tasks

• Struggling to sleep, eat regularly, or focus

• Feeling irritable, restless, or numb

• Living in a constant state of “what if”

It’s not just “being stressed.” Anxiety can affect how you move through your day, how you relate to others, and how safe you feel in your own mind and body. Many people describe feeling like they’ve lost their internal anchor—that grounded sense of who they are. Others say they’re functioning on the outside but feel exhausted and disconnected inside. This is where therapy can help.

Understanding the Root Causes of Anxiety

While anxiety can sometimes feel like it comes out of nowhere, it often has deeper roots. Exploring these underlying causes in therapy can be an important part of the healing process—not to dwell in the past, but to make sense of your patterns with greater compassion and clarity. Some common contributing factors to anxiety include:

• Early Attachment Wounds
  Experiences of inconsistency, neglect, or emotional invalidation in childhood can shape how safe we feel in relationships and within ourselves. These early patterns often echo into adulthood, especially in times of stress

• Perfectionism and High Self-Expectation
  Many people with anxiety hold themselves to impossible standards. You might find yourself driven to “get it right” all the time, even when no one is asking that of you. This internal pressure can become exhausting—and isolating.

• Chronic Stress or Burnout
  Long-term exposure to work pressure, caregiving demands, or lack of support can wear down your nervous system. Over time, what starts as manageable stress can morph into constant anxiety or emotional shutdown.

• Trauma (Big or Small)
  Traumatic experiences—from acute events like accidents to more subtle, ongoing situations like emotional neglect—can leave the body in a heightened state of alertness. This often shows up as anxiety, even years later.

• Life Transitions or Identity Shifts
  Even positive changes—becoming a parent, graduating, changing careers, or ending a relationship—can stir up anxiety. Transitions tend to bring uncertainty, which can trigger old fears or insecurities.

Understanding where your anxiety comes from doesn’t mean blaming yourself or others. It’s about seeing the full picture more clearly so that you can respond to your anxiety not just with tools, but also with insight, compassion, and self-trust.

How anxiety Therapy Can Help You Reconnect With Yourself

Therapy for anxiety in Missoula, MT isn't about “fixing” you. It’s about understanding the patterns you’ve developed to cope with, survive, and make sense of overwhelming emotions. Some of the approaches used in anxiety therapy in Missoula include:

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

CBT focuses on the relationship between your thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. You’ll learn how to recognize unhelpful thought patterns (like worst-case-scenario thinking) and gently shift them over time.

Mindfulness-Based Approaches

Practices like breathwork, body scans, and present-moment awareness can help calm an overactive nervous system. These tools support regulation and help you stay connected to your body.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Rather than fighting anxious thoughts, ACT teaches you to observe them and make space for them—while still choosing to live in alignment with your values. This can be especially helpful when anxiety feels sticky or persistent.

Relational and Attachment-Based Work

Anxiety is often connected to how we learned to relate to others. A relational therapist can help you understand these patterns and develop more secure, supportive relationships—including with yourself.

What to Expect in Your First Session

If you’ve never been to anxiety therapy or if you’ve had mixed experiences with therapy in the past, it’s completely normal to feel uncertain about starting. Many people worry they won’t know what to say, or that their problems aren’t “big enough” to justify therapy. The truth is, there is no one right way to approach this process. 

In your first session at Bridger Peaks Counseling, the therapist’s primary goal is to get to know you—not to diagnose or analyze you, but to understand what you’re carrying and how it’s affecting you. They’ll likely ask about your current struggles, what brings you to therapy now, and what you hope might feel different over time.

It’s okay if you don’t have clear answers to those questions. Many people come in feeling overwhelmed, scattered, or unsure. Figuring things out together at a pace that feels manageable is part of the process. A good anxiety therapist will respect your boundaries, check in on how you’re feeling, and collaborate with you to build a sense of safety and trust. This relationship becomes the foundation for change. 

A Gentle Path Forward: Anxiety therapy in missoula, mt

You don’t have to be in crisis to start therapy. In fact, many people begin simply because they’re tired of feeling stuck, overwhelmed, or like a stranger in their own life.

If you're in Missoula and considering therapy for anxiety, know that help is available—and that reaching out doesn’t mean something is wrong with you. It just means you’re ready to live with more intention and less fear. No matter where you are in your process, you deserve to feel whole again.

1. Reach out to us here to get paired with a compassionate therapist.

2. Learn more about anxiety treatment by exploring our blogs.

3. Start feeling like yourself again, free from burnout, stress & anxiety.

Additional Services We Offer in Bozeman & Missoula, MT

At Bridger Peaks Counseling, we’re dedicated to offering a diverse range of mental health services to support your unique needs. Our therapists provide teen counseling, depression therapy, medication management, and body image counseling. We also offer postpartum anxiety and depression counseling, grief and loss therapy, and online therapy options. Other services include EMDR, trauma therapy and more. 

Understanding and Responding to Your Child’s Behaviors

“There’s usually an ‘inside’ story to every ‘outside’ behavior. Though we may not be able to know that ‘inside story’, there’s generally some inner reason for what children do”.
A quote by Fred Rogers to hold onto as a reminder for every big behavior that your child may be presenting, there is usually an emotion and need that they are trying to communicate with us.
If we can keep this in mind when a child is giving us a big behavior, you are already getting through half the battle in how to respond to your child. First let’s define big behaviors, when I am referring to big behaviors this could be hitting, throwing objects, yelling at others, lying, stealing, property destruction, etcetera.. All of these behaviors are not totally uncommon across different developmental stages in childhood, I’m sure all of us can think of a time or two in our own childhood that we engaged in these behaviors in some way.

However, that does not mean that it is not incredibly difficult, frustrating, overstimulating, and overwhelming when trying our best to respond to these behaviors. This is why regulating your own reactions and emotions to the behaviors will be critical and beneficial for you and your child. After we are more regulated we can understand what may be underneath these big behaviors to more effectively respond to them. With a reminder that we are discussing general big childhood behaviors, not diagnoses, if you are curious about possible diagnoses that may be contributing to big behaviors or needing support please seek professional help through therapeutic services for yourself, your child or in family therapy.

Often parents want their children to learn the lesson of why this behavior is not okay, however there are many steps that are equally as crucial that we must attend to before. The first step and possibly the most crucial is your own regulation, “a dysregulated adult cannot regulate a dysregulated child”, a quote by Dr. Bruce Perry. Sometimes we can regulate ourselves in the moment while being present with our child and sometimes we cannot and that's okay. If it means that you need to walk away for a brief moment to regulate before responding to a behavior, do it (when the situation allows). This can look like saying “I am going to give us both 5 minutes to calm down then we will talk about this” or “we are both upset right now but safe, I need to take a couple of minutes to myself before we figure out what to do about this”. In using these simple short phrases it highlights the importance of your own needs, provides a clear time frame, reassures your child and models healthy emotion regulation.
Then take those few minutes to self-soothe and get grounded, this can look like deep breathing strategies, crying, releasing built up energy physically through vigorous movement, going outside, listening to music, finding safety cues in your environment that bring you back to the present moment and much more; Find what works best for you and it is recommended that you figure out what works best for you prior to this moment. Then turn inward, ask yourself what triggers are coming up for me right now? What stressors or emotions are being pushed at this moment? What does my self-talk look like right now? Am I personalizing this big behavior? Once you have taken that time to regulate yourself you can now take the time to understand the big behaviors that are coming up.

Understanding big behaviors can be difficult to do for many parents because we have been socialized to believe that our child’s behavior is a reflection of being a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ parent. Which highlights the importance of your own regulation to get through those uncomfortable feelings to attempt to understand what our children are communicating with us through their behaviors. Many times a big behavior is a result of a strong emotion without the skills to manage them. Please remember the strong emotion isn’t the issue here, the lack of skills is what is resulting in the big behavior.  Sometimes our child’s big behavior is telling us a basic human need, or in other words, they are tired, hungry, or needing to use the restroom. Often kids don’t have the language or the skills to recognize this in themselves therefore, it can be beneficial to talk through this with your child to support them making this connection with emotion regulation and basic human needs. Other times a child's big behaviors can be what a lot of people call attention seeking. There is often a negative connotation with the phrase ‘attention seeking’ and that is why I often rephrase it to connection seeking. This is because your child is trying to connect or get your attention with you but again is lacking the skills to do this appropriately. Kids also often can’t differentiate between ‘good’ attention or ‘bad’ attention, in other words if they are getting yelled at by their caregivers for a big behavior, they don’t love it or enjoy it but it is also still attention and that is what they are craving. We can support them in finding new ways to bid for connection and attention and that is where responding to these big behaviors come in.

The general universal steps for responding to big behaviors is to:

1. Validate the emotion that is behind the behavior
   Sometimes validating the emotion can look like asking your child how they are feeling or other times it can look like making your best guess on what they are feeling. This can sound like, “I know you really love going to the park and have so much fun here, you are feeling really sad and disappointed that it is time to leave”. In this example you are providing genuine and authentic empathy for your child and modeling emotional literacy through giving them the language for the chaos that is going on inside of them.

2. Set the boundary for the big behavior
   What is important to remember about boundaries is that you need to follow through on that boundary once you set it and be consistent on the boundary over time, this shows your child that no matter what big behavior they engage in it will not change the rules. To add on the boundary for the above example it could sound like, “I know you really love going to the park and have so much fun here, you are feeling really sad and disappointed that it is time to leave and it still is time to leave now”. With setting boundaries with kids you can also add option giving to reduce chances of a power struggle, an example of this can be, “I know you really love going to the park and have so much fun here, you are feeling really sad and disappointed that it is time to leave and it still is time to leave now. Would you like to walk yourself to the car or do you want me to carry you to the car?”

3. Find/teach new skills that manages the emotion.
   Once the boundary is set and followed through on we can then discuss skills that can manage those strong feelings. An example of this for the kiddo leaving the park is, “You were so sad and disappointed when you had to leave the park and that is okay. I get really sad sometimes too and what can help me when I am sad is box-breathing. It tells my body that it is okay for me to be really sad and that I can get through it. I am going to practice it right now, will you join me?”. In this example you are also joining your child in the regulation skill, making it co-regulation and therefore can support healthy attachment between you and your child. As a reminder, you will not get these steps completed perfectly every time your child has a big behavior and that is normal. What is more important is to continue to work towards building your skills in those hard moments over time and your child will as well.

Some helpful resources to look into if you are interested in learning more about children’s big behaviors and effective ways to respond to them include, Good Inside book or podcast by Dr. Becky Kennedy, seeking therapists that can provide parent-child interaction therapy, parent management training, or engaging in Behavioral and Emotional Skills Training.