Anxiety Therapy that Identifies and Heals the Root Cause
You know, intellectually, that you’re safe. You’ve tried breathing exercises, mindfulness and maybe therapy. You understand your triggers. And still the anxiety persists – the tightness in your chest, the racing thoughts, the low-level sense of dread that follows you through the day.
This isn’t a failure of willpower or self-awareness. It’s your nervous system. When the autonomic nervous system is dysregulated, the body becomes locked in a persistent physiological threat response. Stress hormones flood the system, heart rate increases, muscles brace, and the brain’s threat-detection centre stays on high alert. In this state, the thinking brain has very limited ability to override what the body believes is happening.
This is why talking about anxiety often isn’t enough on its own. Understanding the pattern at the level of mind doesn’t automatically release body and nervous system from it.
Anxiety is your nervous system’s warning light – it’s not your enemy, it’s a message. Most approaches to anxiety try to silence that message, which is like disconnecting a warning light in your car instead of fixing the problem it’s alerting you to. When the underlying issue is identified and repaired, the warning light turns off automatically. It’s the same with anxiety – when the root cause is identified and healed, the anxiety fades away naturally.
The seeds of anxiety almost always took root in early childhood, when your sense of self was forming. A deep emotional wound shaped the core of your psyche, and since then you’ve been working – often subconsciously – to keep that pain and overwhelm at bay. Anxiety and panic are warning signals that this core wound is being reactivated by something happening now. The things you think you’re anxious about – failure, social situations, health, finances – may have activated your anxiety, but they didn’t cause it.
Hi, I’m Lee Bladon, and as an anxiety therapist, I can help you to heal your anxiety it at its core. Having suffered from anxiety myself for almost 20 years, I know how real it feels – and I know what it takes to resolve it. Together we’ll gently and safely explore your anxiety – with body, heart and mind – to identify and heal the underlying cause, so it naturally softens and fades away.
My approach as an anxiety therapist goes far beyond nervous system regulation and symptom management. Your anxious thoughts, uncomfortable feelings and avoidant behaviours aren’t the real problem – they’re symptoms of a deeper root cause. Most therapists focus on managing these surface-level symptoms, and while that may bring some temporary relief, it doesn’t address what’s actually generating your anxiety.
When we explore what lies beneath the anxiety, we typically find a deficient feeling that your nervous system is afraid of re-experiencing – caused by a core emotional wound that’s linked to a core belief such as “I’m unlovable”, “I don’t matter” or “I’m not enough.” Together, the core wound, core belief, deficient feeling and fear of re-experiencing it, all subconsciously fuel your anxiety.
By identifying your core belief, deepening into the deficient feeling, and healing the core wound, your anxiety will naturally soften and dissolve. It sounds straightforward – but it takes time, because we have to work through the layers of psychological defences that have built up around it. This is deep, careful work – and it’s worth every step.
For anxiety therapy to be truly effective, the entirety of that core wound – including any associated feelings and beliefs – must be identified and healed. When this inner threat has been resolved, your nervous system can finally relax, and your anxiety will naturally soften and fade.
Different Types of Anxiety
Anxiety can take many forms, and is different for everyone. Understanding which type of anxiety you’re experiencing is the first step towards truly resolving it. Here are some of the most common anxiety patterns I work with as an anxiety therapist:
- Generalised Anxiety: Pervasive unease not tied to anything specific. It reflects disconnection from your grounded, essential self, leaving you scanning for threats.
- Relationship Anxiety: Insecurity that make closeness feel both desirable and threatening. It’s rooted in early attachment wounds where love felt conditional or unreliable.
- Social Anxiety: Acute self-consciousness and fear of judgment that makes it hard to relax around others. It stems from experiences where your true self wasn’t welcomed or accepted.
- Imposter Syndrome: Self-doubt and the belief that you’re not enough, despite evidence to the contrary. It’s linked to a sense of unworthiness from conditional love or impossible standards.
- Health Anxiety: Hypervigilance to bodily sensations, which are mis-interpreted as serious illness. It relates to unprocessed trauma or deeper fears about mortality and control.
- Panic Disorder: An intense fear of panic itself, which creates a vicious cycle where anticipating panic actually triggers it.
- Performance Anxiety: Fear of being exposed as inadequate. It’s tied to perfectionism and the belief that self-worth depends on performance.
- OCD: Attemps to create certainty through rituals and compulsions. It stems from an unpredictable or traumatic childhood environment.
Anxiety & Awakening – The Link
Anxiety isn’t just as a problem to fix – it’s often a doorway to deeper self-discovery. The root cause of generalised anxiety is an unstable sense of self. When we feel shaky and insecure on the inside, the outside world appears shaky and unsafe too.
This perceived lack of safety puts our nervous system into a permanent state of hyper-arousal (fight or flight), so we feel anxious about anything and everything. Our mind tries to make sense of things by projecting our anxiety onto things in the outside world. So, we think we’re anxious about something “out there”, but the real problem is inside of us – we don’t know who we are! Put simply – generalised anxiety is often our ego-self fearing for its own survival.
If this resonates with you, reconnecting with your true authentic nature is the key to resolving your anxiety, permanently. My unique approach as an anxiety therapist gently loosens your identification with this unstable sense of self, and helps you to reconnect with a deeper felt-sense of presence, groundedness and wholeness. So, rather than managing anxiety from the outside, we work to dissolve the inner instability that generates the anxious feelings. This involves:
- Feeling into, and dialoguing with, the conditioned aspects of your consciousness – wounded parts, fearful parts, protective parts, reactive parts, core beliefs, repressed emotions, deficient feelings and tension patterns in the body.
- Connecting with, and gradually embodying, the unconditioned aspects of your consciousness – presence, pure awareness, unique, and essential qualities, such as strength, love, peace and joy.
What causes anxiety and how to heal it?
Here are some common causes of anxiety and the best approaches to healing them:
- Emotionally Unstable Childhood: Growing up in an unpredictable or unsafe environment teaches the nervous system to stay on constant high alert, even when there’s no real danger. Gradually training the nervous system to feel that both our inner world and outer world are safe, is the key to easing this type of anxiety.
- Emotional Avoidance: Sometimes anxiety arises as a way of protecting us from feeling overwhelming emotions, like grief or despair, by diverting our attention away from that and onto bodily symptoms instead. Developing a felt sense of safety, then gently feeling into the painful emotion, is the key to healing this type of anxiety.
- Emotional Suppression: When emotions like anger, sadness or fear are pushed down instead of being expressed, they can surface indirectly as anxiety. The build-up of emotional energy creates imbalances in the body, heart and mind, which can manifest as anxiety or chronic disease. Gently feeling into the suppressed emotion and the deficient feeling beneath it – from a place of safety – is the key to resolving this type of anxiety.
- Unresolved Trauma: Past traumas, big or small, can leave the body primed to expect danger, long after the traumatic event is over. Trauma short-circuits the nervous system, which often results in chronic anxiety and panic attacks. Building a felt sense of safety and emotional capacity is essential before feeling into the trauma. When the trauma has been safely processed, the anxious feelings naturally fade away.
- Chronic Stress: Prolonged stress keeps the nervous system stuck in a hyper-aroused state. Nervous system regulation techniques may be sufficient to ease low level stress and anxiety. However, there’s often an underlying emotional root cause that needs identifying and addressing before the anxiety fully resolves.
- Mind-Body Disconnection: Living mostly in the mind – thinking, worrying, overanalysing – without feeling grounded in the body creates a sense of unease. Learning to feel safe in the body and heart, then gently feeling into the buried emotions that caused the disconnect, is the key to healing this type of anxiety.
- Shaky Sense of Self: When our sense of self feels uncertain or insecure, the world around us feels unsafe too. This is the universe compelling us to embark on a journey of self-discovery. Gradually freeing ourselves from the deficient feelings and beliefs of the ego-self, and rediscovering the felt sense of our true essential nature, are the keys to resolving this type of anxiety – and that’s exactly what set me on this path.
A Unique Anxiety Therapist
Your anxiety is unique, and so is my approach. I use a proven blend of highly effective modalities to address your anxiety at every level:
Anxiety Mapping: Your anxiety has a unique pattern. mapping and understanding that pattern is a key first step. It reduces the uncertainty that amplifies anxiety and gives you an immediate sense of agency and control.
The InCorr Method: A gentle yet effective, therapeutic approach that helps to identify, unpack and heal emotional issues at the root cause level.
Somatic Inquiry: Working with the body as the foundation for exploring emotions and sensations to access deeper insights and lasting healing.
Nervous System Regulation: Helping your nervous system shift out of chronic stress and survival patterns, building the safety, tolerance and capacity needed for deeper work.
Inner Child Healing: Connecting with and nurturing your inner child to heal the early emotional wounds that lie at the root of most anxiety.
Parts Work (IFS): Understanding and reintegrating the different “parts” of your psyche to dissolve inner conflict, resistance and reactivity.
Embodied Presence: A shared field of grounded, attuned awareness that creates the right conditions for inquiry, healing and genuine transformation.
Anxiety Therapist Sessions
Each anxiety therapy session is a safe embodied space for deep healing. You don’t have to carry your anxiety alone anymore.
- 60-minute one-to-one sessions via Zoom or in person in Grantham, Lincolnshire.
- Private, confidential, heart-led and trauma-informed.
- Somatic inquiry to explore what your system is ready to reveal and release.
- Safe and supportive anxiety healing at your own pace.
- Every session is tailored to where you are in that moment – there’s no fixed agenda, just a responsive, attuned process that follows what’s alive in your body and experience.
I work with clients all over the UK and beyond via Zoom. Online sessions are just as effective as in-person ones – being in the comfort of your own home often makes it easier to relax, drop in and go deeper. Many clients actually prefer it.
No special preparation is needed – just a comfortable chair and your device of choice. Click the Zoom link in your booking confirmation to join at the scheduled time.
You don’t have to download any software but it is better if you do so: Download Zoom. And if you want to check that your camera and sound are working before we start, you can try a quick automated Test Call.
Testimonials
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is what happens when our body’s threat detection system becomes overactive. Our nervous system is designed to keep us safe by scanning for danger, but when it gets stuck in a heightened state of alert, it sounds the alarm even when there’s no immediate threat. This creates a unique set of symptoms, such as dread, unease, nervous energy, worrying thoughts and light-headedness, which together we call anxiety.
What causes generalised anxiety disorder?
Generalised anxiety can be caused by a number of factors, including an emotionally unstable childhood, emotional avoidance or suppression, unresolved trauma, chronic stress, mind-body disconnection or a shaky sense of self. The common factor that underlies all of the above is a subconscious emotional wound or deficiency that your nervous system is terrified of. This fear and insecurity at the core of your being means your inner sense of self feels shaky and unstable, which makes everything you experience (including the outside world) feel shaky and unsafe. So, you’re not really anxious about the outside world, failure, social interactions or your health – you’re anxious because your inner experiencer feels unstable and afraid.
Where do other anxiety therapists go wrong?
Most anxiety therapist only focus on managing symptoms, e.g. nervous system regulation. They fail to identify and eliminate the underlying root cause of your anxiety – a specific deficient feeling that your nervous system perceives as an existential threat. Until that threat has been eliminated, you are going to keep experiencing your anxious thoughts and feelings, possibly for the rest of your life. I suffered like this for almost 20 years until I discovered how to heal it permanently.
How is your approach to anxiety therapy different?
Your anxious thoughts, uncomfortable feelings and avoidant behaviours aren’t the real problem – they’re just symptoms of a deeper core wound. Most therapists and coaches focus on trying to manage the surface-level symptoms, and while that may bring some temporary relief, it doesn’t address the underlying cause of your anxiety. When we explore what lies beneath your anxiety, we’ll find a deficient feeling that your nervous system is afraid of re-experiencing. The deficient feeling was caused by a core wound, and is linked to a core belief, such as: I’m inherently bad, unlovable or don’t matter. Together, the core wound, core belief, deficient feeling, and fear of re-experiencing it all subconsciously fuels your anxiety. By identifying your core belief, deepening into the deficient feeling, and healing your core wound, your anxiety will naturally soften and disappear, creating a lasting sense of calm and resilience. It sounds simple, but it takes time because we have to work our way through layers and layers of psychological defences to get there.
How to treat anxiety permanently?
How long does anxiety therapy take?
Well, like any journey – it depends on your starting point, i.e. your current level of consciousness, how supportive or distressing your childhood was, and your current level of emotional sensitivity, capacity and openness. The root cause of your anxiety probably lies at the core of your psyche, which is why it penetrates your entire life and sense of self. The core of your being is very well defended, psychologically speaking, so it takes time to get there. Deep work always takes time – several months minimum – but it is permanent.
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If you want to heal, grow, awaken and thrive, and you’re ready to experience real inner shifts, I’m here to guide and support you.
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