Anxiety is the nervous system's alarm system — a physiological state of high alert designed to protect you from threat. When the threat is real and present, anxiety is useful and appropriate. When the alarm stays activated in the absence of present threat, or activates in response to situations that the intellectual mind knows are not dangerous, anxiety becomes debilitating.
The key insight that changes how we work with anxiety is this: anxiety is almost never primarily about the things it appears to be about. The person who is anxious about their performance review is rarely anxious simply about the review. Beneath that anxiety is usually something older — a nervous system that learned, at some earlier point, that being evaluated meant something with far higher stakes than a workplace assessment.
Beneath most anxiety, if you follow it carefully and compassionately, you find one of a small number of fundamental fears: fear of abandonment, fear of annihilation, fear of being found fundamentally defective and unworthy of love. These are not rational fears — they formed before reason was available. And they do not respond well to rational reassurance alone. They respond to a different kind of work.
"Anxiety is not irrational. It is the body's rational response to an earlier experience that taught it the world was unsafe. Healing is not convincing the mind that the fear is wrong — it is giving the nervous system the evidence, at a somatic level, that it is safe now."
Depression is one of the most misunderstood experiences in human life. It is frequently treated as a purely neurochemical phenomenon — a deficit of serotonin to be corrected with medication. This understanding is incomplete. While neurochemistry is genuinely involved, depression is also a profoundly meaningful psychological event.
Depression often arises when the self has been suppressed for too long — when genuine needs, feelings, desires, or aspects of identity have been consistently denied, shamed, or forced underground. The psyche, unable to express what is true, eventually stops generating the energy required to engage with a life that does not feel like one's own.
Depression can also be the result of accumulated, unprocessed grief — losses that were never fully mourned, endings that were never honoured, parts of the self that were left behind at crucial junctures and never returned for. In this sense, depression is sometimes the body's way of refusing to continue pretending that everything is fine.
We work with depression not by trying to lift it artificially, but by listening to what it is saying. By asking what has been suppressed, what has been lost, what is wanting to be expressed. This is not a comfortable process — but it is a genuinely healing one.
"Depression is not nothing. It is something — something suppressed, something grieved, something that has been carrying too much alone for too long. When it is finally met and heard, it often begins to lift of its own accord."
Anxiety and depression are frequently experienced together, and there is a logic to this. Anxiety is often the experience of the alarm system being stuck in the "on" position — constant vigilance, constant bracing for threat. Depression can be what the system eventually collapses into when the sustained effort of hypervigilance becomes untenable.
There is also a characteristic cycle many people know intimately: anxiety about not being enough — followed by the exhausted collapse into depression — followed by the anxious attempt to climb back to adequacy — followed by another collapse. Understanding this cycle, and what is underneath it, is often the beginning of genuine freedom from both.
At Maitreya Counselling, we work with anxiety and depression through a combination of somatic awareness, depth psychological inquiry, and the direct recognition of awareness beneath the symptoms. We are not interested in managing symptoms indefinitely — we are interested in understanding their source.
This means we will slow down with you. We will ask what the anxiety is protecting. We will ask what the depression is withholding. We will attend carefully to the body's experience — the tightness, the heaviness, the contracted breath — because the body holds the map that the mind alone cannot read.
We also bring, where appropriate, the perspective of non-dual awareness: the recognition that beneath the anxious mind and beneath the depressed body, there is an awareness that is neither anxious nor depressed. Not as a spiritual bypass — but as a genuine resource that can hold the healing work from a ground of steadiness.
"You do not need to become a different person to be free from anxiety or depression. You need to become more fully the person you actually are — and allow what was suppressed in the service of survival to finally be expressed, integrated, and released."
Yes — a significant body of research supports the effectiveness of counselling for both anxiety and depression, often equalling or exceeding the effects of medication, with more durable long-term outcomes. The most effective approaches attend to both the cognitive and the somatic dimensions of these experiences.
This is a decision to make with your doctor. Many people do counselling alongside medication, particularly in the early stages when medication can provide sufficient stabilisation to allow the deeper work to happen. We work respectfully alongside whatever medical support you are receiving.
Please reach out. We begin wherever you are. The first work is often simply building enough nervous system regulation capacity that other work becomes possible. We do not require you to be well before you come — we work with you as you are.
Not necessarily — and certainly not before you are ready. We follow your process. Sometimes the most important work happens through attending to what is happening right now in the body, in the breath, in the present moment of the session. The past is addressed when and how it is ready to be addressed.
All sessions are 100% virtual via secure video call. Not sure where to start? The free 15-minute consult is the easiest first step.