Generalized anxiety disorder is the form of anxiety that most closely matches the common image of an anxious person: someone who worries excessively about many different things, finds the worry difficult to control, and experiences chronic physical symptoms of anxiety including tension, fatigue, and difficulty concentrating. The pervasive quality of generalized anxiety, its tendency to migrate from one concern to the next rather than being contained within a specific domain, is one of its most clinically characteristic features and one of the most disruptive to daily functioning. Patients with GAD often describe feeling as though their mind is always running, as though they are perpetually waiting for something to go wrong, in a way that exhausts them and affects their relationships and their capacity to be present.
Dr. Steinbok's counseling for generalized anxiety at his Boca Raton practice begins with establishing the specific texture of the worry: what domains it focuses on, what thoughts or images it generates, and what the patient does in response to the worry, both behaviorally and internally. This mapping is clinically necessary because generalized anxiety counseling that does not account for the specific content and function of the worry tends to be less effective than treatment that is calibrated to what this particular patient is actually experiencing. Cognitive-behavioral approaches address the chronic worry patterns and the hypervigilance that maintains them, while psychodynamic work reaches the underlying concerns about safety, control, and catastrophe that give the worry its particular urgency and its resistance to reassurance.
