Teen Anxiety Therapy in La Jolla & San Diego
Are you worried about your teen?
Is your teenager experiencing ongoing stress and anxiety?
Do struggles with perfectionism impact school work and possibly other activities, like sports?
Have the pressures of school or college preparation become so overwhelming that your teen second-guesses themselves or worries they’ll never keep up?
As a parent, it’s a helpless feeling to watch your child grapple with anxiety…
…especially at a time in their life when they should be happy and carefree.
Your teen may struggle with handling uncertainty
Maybe your child becomes easily upset and irritable, especially when faced with any uncertainty.
Something as seemingly inconsequential as taking a night off from homework for a family outing may cause them to worry about falling behind in school.
Or, they may be reluctant to seize a new academic or athletic opportunity due to their fear of failure or making mistakes.
Perhaps you worry they equate their self-worth to achievement and, as a result, feel compelled to strive for perfection at all costs.
Because you want to set your child up for future success, you may worry you’re failing them if you don’t intervene in some meaningful way.
Fortunately, therapy can provide your teen with the tools to thrive.
With customized approaches to address anxiety, we can help your child handle stressors more effectively and regain their confidence.
Teens are under more pressure than ever to succeed
Given how competitive the culture around school has become for today’s teens, it’s no wonder they’re stressed out.
In the pursuit of excellence, many schools have inadvertently created a high-pressure environment where academic success, performance, and perfection are instilled from an early age.
As a result, some teens believe
they’re expected to excel in all things
Keeping busy with structured social and extracurricular activities while simultaneously managing rigorous academic schedules.
But keeping their eye on the prize to eventually be accepted at a prestigious college takes a toll.
The ways parents try to help can sometimes have the opposite effect
To help our teens handle stress, we may inadvertently do more harm than good. That’s because the strategies that feel most intuitive, like avoiding anxiety-inducing situations and offering reassurance, can make their symptoms worse over time.
Every time our teen avoids a situation that makes them anxious…
such as taking a biology test in class or playing in the starting line-up of a high-stakes soccer game, they feel immediate relief.
However, that short-term relief makes them more likely to want to avoid that stressor again, and less likely to build the confidence that comes from facing and working through discomfort.
In therapy, your teen will learn about the nature of anxiety and master strategies to keep it in check.
With your support at home, your child can become more resilient and adept at handling stressors.
Therapy gives you and your teen support to build confidence
If your child is visibly stressed out and the ways you’ve tried to help them aren’t working, you’re not alone.
If your child is visibly stressed out…
and the ways you’ve tried to help them aren’t working, you’re not alone.
With many parents juggling work demands, burnout, and their own mental health challenges, even well-meaning caregivers may unintentionally pass on anxious patterns like over-accommodation, constant reassurance, or a fear of “getting it wrong.”
It's okay to admit that you could use some outside assistance—as therapists who specialize in working with children and teens, we understand how challenging it can be to know how best to help.
Don’t worry, we have your back.
What To Expect in Sessions
At Your First Session
Our priority in therapy is to establish trust and rapport with your teen, so they feel comfortable sharing their fears and worries.
In ongoing sessions, we will explore what drives their anxiety and, most importantly, identify the patterns that keep it in place.
This often includes examining avoidance behaviors, reassurance cycles, perfectionism, and how your teen currently copes with stress or the discomfort of uncertainty.
Ongoing Therapy Sessions
From there, we collaborate on setting specific long-term goals to alleviate cycles of anxiety and improve your teen’s quality of life.
Our focus will be on providing them the necessary skills to meet these goals at their own pace.
For example, this might look like practicing brave behaviors in a supportive environment, role-playing tricky social situations, or challenging anxious thoughts.
Your Role As Parents
For parents, a big part of the work is learning how to support your child’s growth without accidentally feeding their anxiety.
Either before or after sessions, their therapist will keep you in the loop on what your teen is working on, providing helpful recommendations for supporting them at home.
Parent Support
For example, we coach parents on how to reduce accommodations—the well-meaning habits that accidentally reinforce anxiety—and replace them with supportive, structured responses.
You will learn how to set clear expectations, respond to anxiety with calm confidence, and support your child’s growth without getting stuck in cycles of avoidance or over-reassurance.
Therapy for Teens Draws on Evidence-Based Modalities
Utilizing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), your teen will learn practical strategies like identifying anxious thoughts and challenging their "worry voice" to help their reactions to potentially stressful situations.
Additionally, we may incorporate exposure therapy to help them take small, supported steps toward things they’re afraid of and introduce mindfulness tools—like deep breathing and grounding techniques—to regulate their nervous system.
These strategies are often applied through role-plays, games, and in-the-moment coaching, allowing your child to gradually gain confidence before using them in real life.
The good news is that teenage anxiety is highly treatable.
And with the right therapy, they can learn to face fears, manage stressors, build confidence, and feel more in control of their emotions. By providing them with better coping strategies now, your teen will be equipped with tools they can use well into the future.
But keeping their eye on the prize to eventually be accepted at a prestigious college takes a toll.
But Maybe You’re Not Sure If Therapy Is Right For Your Teen…
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At SoCal Child Psychology, parent involvement is essential.
After all, what happens with your teen outside the therapy room is just as important as what happens within it. And since you spend vastly more time with your teen, we ensure you know how to reinforce what they’re working on in therapy.
Your teen’s counselor will help you understand the origin of their anxiety and give you the tools to support them in between sessions at home.
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It’s common for teens to be hesitant about trying therapy, especially if they’re uncomfortable with uncertainty and fear the unknown. As counselors who specialize in working with teens, we have taken special care to create a friendly, welcoming environment specifically catered to them.
We take our time building rapport initially so they are comfortable opening up about their challenges and fears. In fact, many of our teenage clients end up embracing therapy as something they look forward to.
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Understandably, you may worry that focusing on your teen’s anxiety and stress in therapy will reinforce their fear. But in reality, naming and understanding anxiety is one of the most effective ways of reducing its power.
In counseling for teens, their therapist will help them quiet critical self-talk and the “What if?” thinking that often leads to rumination. By reframing anxious thoughts and feelings, your teen can learn how to cope with stress more effectively.