Anxiety Therapy & Emotional Regulation | Online Therapy in Md, Va & D.C.

You understand yourself. You just can't seem to stop the spiral.

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You've done the work. You know your patterns, you've read the books, you can explain your anxiety to your therapist in precise, articulate language. And somehow, in the moment that counts, something takes over anyway.

That gap (between what you know and what you feel) is exactly where I work. I'm Erin Reddinger, a trauma-informed therapist who helps high-achieving women close the distance between understanding their anxiety and actually experiencing something different.

LET'S TRANSFORM

I already know a few things about you.

You haven't said any of this out loud. But I'd be willing to bet you've rehearsed a hard conversation so many times in your head that by the time it actually happens, you're already exhausted. That you've sent a text, then reread it four times wondering if it came across wrong — even when you know, logically, it was fine. That you've snapped at someone you love and spent the next three hours replaying it, convinced you've permanently damaged something.

Maybe you've been told you're “too sensitive” or “too intense” enough times that part of you has started to wonder if they're right. Or maybe no one has said it out loud, but you've felt it. The subtle recalibration you do in every room, reading the temperature, adjusting your volume, making sure you're not too much.

You know you're capable of calm. You've felt it. But you can't always get there when it counts — and the shame of that gap is sometimes harder to carry than the anxiety itself.

If any of that landed, you're in the right place.

Anxiety doesn't always look like panic. Sometimes it looks like this.

01   Your mind runs laps before bed — replaying conversations, rehearsing tomorrow, searching for what you might have missed. Even when nothing is actually wrong.

02   You react in a way that surprises even you — and then spend hours in the aftermath trying to understand what happened. The reaction feels too big. The shame afterward feels bigger.

03   You know, intellectually, that you're okay. But your body hasn't gotten the message. Your shoulders are up. Your jaw is tight. Somewhere underneath the calm exterior, your nervous system is still braced.

04   You're highly attuned to other people — their moods, their needs, the subtle shift when something is off. It makes you good at your job, good in relationships. It also means you never fully relax.

05   You've been managing this for so long that it just feels like your personality. But lately you're wondering: what would it actually feel like to not be like this?

Your nervous system learned this. It can learn something different.

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Anxiety isn't a character flaw. It isn't weakness. For most of the women I work with, it's a nervous system that learned — usually a long time ago — that staying alert was the safest way to be. That anticipating problems meant you could prevent them. That being attuned to everyone else's needs kept things stable.

It worked. For a long time, it probably served you well. The problem is that your nervous system doesn't automatically update when your circumstances do. So even when life is objectively fine, your system is still running the old program (scanning, bracing, reacting) because that's what it knows how to do.

What makes my approach different is that we don't just work with your thoughts. We work with your nervous system directly, understanding what it's trying to protect you from, and building a new felt sense of safety that doesn't require you to stay on high alert to feel okay.

This is the work that creates lasting change — not just insight, not just coping strategies, but a fundamentally different way your system responds to the world.

LET'S TRANSFORM

Signs That Anxiety Therapy Could Help

For high-achieving women, anxiety rarely looks like visible panic. If any of these feel familiar, this work was built for you:

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  • Overthinking & Rumination — Your mind won't stop replaying conversations, analyzing outcomes, or preparing for things that haven't happened yet.

  • Emotional Reactivity — Your reactions sometimes feel bigger than the situation warrants — and the shame spiral afterward is exhausting.

  • Hypervigilance — You're always reading the room, anticipating needs, tracking the emotional temperature of everyone around you. You're rarely fully at rest.

Two young women laughing and sitting on a cream-colored sofa surrounded by green plants in a bright room.

  • The Head/Heart Disconnect — You can tell yourself you're fine. Your body doesn't believe you. The tension, the shallow breathing, the braced feeling — it stays regardless of what you know intellectually.

  • People-Pleasing & Boundary Difficulty — You say yes when you mean no. You apologize when you haven't done anything wrong. You shrink yourself to keep the peace — and resent yourself for it afterward.

  • Shame Around Emotional Responses — You feel too much, react too strongly, or care too deeply — and somewhere along the way you learned that was a problem.

How working with me is different.

Most anxiety therapy focuses on managing symptoms — breathing exercises, cognitive reframes, ways to talk yourself down from the ledge. Those tools have their place, and I use them. But if you've already tried them and you're still here, it's probably because managing the anxiety isn't the same as changing it.

My work goes deeper. I'm interested in why your nervous system learned to respond this way, what it's been protecting you from, and what it will actually take for it to respond differently — not just when you're calm, but when it actually counts.

  • 01 I help you understand what's underneath the reaction.

    Anxiety rarely appears out of nowhere. In our work together, I help you trace the patterns — the early experiences, the relational dynamics, the beliefs that formed when you were young and less equipped to question them. Understanding where your nervous system learned its current response is the first step toward changing it. My clients often describe this as the first time their anxiety has actually made sense to them.

  • 02 I give you regulation tools that work in real time.

    Drawing from DBT, I'll build with you a concrete set of skills for emotional regulation — tools you can actually reach for in the moment when something gets activated, not just in the calm of a therapy session. The goal isn't to suppress what you feel. It's to build enough capacity in your nervous system that you have a choice about how you respond, even when things are hard.

  • 03 I help your body catch up to what your mind already knows.

    For many of my clients, the hardest part isn't understanding their anxiety — it's that understanding it hasn't been enough to change how it feels. When anxiety is rooted in past experiences that still live in the nervous system, I use EMDR to process what's stuck beneath the surface. This is where the head/heart gap finally starts to close — not because you've thought your way out of it, but because your system has actually processed what it's been holding.

  • 04 I help you rebuild your relationship with your own emotional responses.

    Many of my clients arrive having spent years managing, minimizing, or apologizing for the way they feel. Part of our work together is restoring trust in your own inner experience — learning to read your emotions as information rather than problems to be solved, and building the kind of self-trust that lets you show up in your relationships and your life with more confidence and less second-guessing.

LET'S TRANSFORM

My Approach: What Changes, and How

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What makes my approach different isn't any single tool — it's how I use them together, in response to what you specifically need. I don't run the same protocol with every client. I track what's shifting, what isn't, and why — and I adapt accordingly.

You stop being hijacked by your own reactions. (DBT)

Using Dialectical Behavior Therapy, I build with you practical skills for emotional regulation — so that when something activates you, you have actual options in that moment. Not 'take a deep breath' — real tools for tolerating distress, communicating effectively, and making choices from your values instead of your fear response. My clients describe this as finally feeling like they have a lever to pull.

The old wiring finally starts to change. (EMDR)

When anxiety has roots in past experiences — early relationships, moments where you learned it wasn't safe to take up space, times your emotional responses were met with criticism or dismissal — I use EMDR to process what's still active in your nervous system. This isn't reliving the past. It's helping your system finally file it as over, so it stops showing up uninvited in your present.

The story you tell yourself about your emotions changes. (CBT)

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy helps us identify the beliefs driving the anxiety — the ones that tell you your reactions are too much, that you need to manage yourself more tightly, that other people's comfort matters more than your own experience. We work to replace those with something more accurate and more compassionate, because how you interpret your emotions shapes how intensely you experience them.

You understand where your patterns came from — and how to change them. (Family Systems)

The role you play in your family of origin — the peacekeeper, the responsible one, the person who holds it together — doesn't stay in your childhood home. It follows you into every relationship and every room. Family systems work helps you see those patterns clearly, understand what they were protecting you from, and start showing up differently without losing yourself in the process.

Questions people ask before reaching out

If you've been wondering about any of these, you're not alone.

  • The reaction and the shame are two separate things — and both make complete sense given what your nervous system has learned. When something activates you, your nervous system is responding to a perceived threat — often one rooted in older experiences, not just the current situation. The shame afterward is usually the internalized message that your emotional responses are “too much.” In my work with you, we address both: the reaction at the nervous system level, and the belief that having strong feelings makes you a problem.

  • Because it is physical. Anxiety isn't just a thought pattern — it's a full-body state. Your nervous system activates a threat response that affects your heart rate, your breathing, your muscle tension, your digestion. That's why thinking your way out of it only goes so far. My approach works directly with your nervous system — not just your thoughts — which is why clients often describe the change as feeling different, not just thinking differently.

  • Anxiety is what happens in anticipation — the worry, the what-ifs, the bracing. Emotional dysregulation is what happens in the moment — the reaction that feels too big, the difficulty coming back to baseline, the intensity that surprises even you. Most of my clients experience both, and they often feed each other: the anxiety creates a hair-trigger, and the dysregulation creates more anxiety about having reacted that way. My work addresses both, because they share the same nervous system roots.

  • This is one of the most common things I hear — and one of the most important. The thinking brain and the nervous system don't communicate as directly as we'd like. You can genuinely know, logically, that you're safe — and your body can still be running a threat response because that response was learned before logic was available to you. Insight helps, but it doesn't reach the level where the anxiety actually lives. That's what EMDR and nervous-system-informed work is designed to address.

  • Yes — particularly when anxiety has roots in past experiences that are still active in the nervous system. EMDR was originally developed for trauma, but it's highly effective for anxiety because anxiety is often a nervous system response to perceived threats that were learned in the past. Rather than talking about those experiences, EMDR helps your system process and resolve them — so they stop triggering anxiety in the present. Many of my clients describe EMDR as the first thing that created change at the level where the anxiety actually lives.

  • Rumination is your nervous system trying to find safety through analysis. If you can just figure out what went wrong, what you should have said, what the other person really meant — your brain believes it can prevent something bad from happening. It's a protection strategy. The problem is that it doesn't work — because the threat isn't really in the conversation. It's in the underlying belief that you might have done something wrong, that someone might be upset with you, that you're not okay. That's what we work on in therapy — not the rumination itself, but what it's protecting you from.

  • A lot of anxiety therapy stays at the cognitive level — identifying distorted thoughts, challenging them, replacing them with more accurate ones. That work has value. But if you've already done it and you're still here, it's probably because thinking differently hasn't translated into feeling differently. My approach works at the nervous system level, not just the cognitive one. I use EMDR to process what's rooted in past experience, DBT to build real-time regulation skills, and a relational approach that addresses the interpersonal patterns feeding the anxiety. If insight alone was going to be enough, it would have been by now.

  • Burnout and anxiety can look similar from the outside, but they feel very different on the inside. Burnout is depletion — the system has been running so long it's shutting down. Anxiety is activation — the system is too loud, too fast, too alert. Burnout clients often describe feeling numb or disconnected. Anxiety clients often describe feeling everything too intensely, reacting too strongly, being unable to quiet the internal noise. My work with each is different because the nervous system states are different. If you're not sure which resonates more, the consultation call is a good place to start.

You've been managing this for a long time.

You don't have to keep doing it alone.

There are a lot of therapists who work with anxiety. What I offer is something more specific: a structured, trauma-informed process that works at the level where anxiety actually lives — not just the thoughts, but the nervous system patterns underneath them.

You've already proven you can manage this. You've been doing it for years. What we're working toward together isn't management. It's change — the kind that shows up in your body, in your relationships, and in the version of yourself you get to be when you're not spending half your energy holding yourself together.

If you're ready for therapy that goes beyond what you already know, I'd be honored to be part of that.

LET'S TRANSFORM