Anxiety and Chronic Illness Therapy in New York, NY
Sometimes anxiety lives in the body. And sometimes the body's experience of illness creates anxiety. Either way, you've landed in the right place.
At My AP Therapy, we work with high-functioning adults in New York City whose anxiety and physical health are deeply connected — whether anxiety has expressed itself through chronic physical symptoms, or a chronic health condition has become a source of profound fear, hypervigilance, and loss of trust in the body. Our work is IFS-trained, trauma-informed, and built for the full complexity of what it means when the mind and body are both carrying something significant. Virtual therapy available across New York State.
Anxiety doesn't always show up as worry. Sometimes it shows up as symptoms.
Most people understand anxiety as a mental experience — the racing thoughts, the what-ifs, the inability to switch off. And for many people it is. But for a significant number of high-functioning adults, anxiety also lives in the body in ways that can be harder to name.
It might look like a nervous system that never fully powers down — chronic fatigue, persistent tension, digestive disruption, sleep problems, or physical symptoms that don't have a clear medical explanation. It might look like a body that has learned to stay on high alert so consistently that it has forgotten what it feels like to be at ease.
Or it might move in the other direction entirely. A cancer diagnosis, a chronic pain condition, a fertility struggle, an autoimmune diagnosis — a serious health experience can produce anxiety that is entirely understandable and entirely consuming. The hypervigilance of monitoring your body for signs of recurrence or worsening. The anticipatory anxiety before medical appointments. The loss of trust in a body that once felt reliable.
In both directions, the experience is the same at its core: the body and the mind are not working as separate systems. The anxiety and the physical experience are deeply intertwined. And the most effective therapy treats them that way.
You might recognize yourself in one of these experiences
If anxiety has expressed itself in your body:
You've been told your physical symptoms don't have a clear medical cause — or that stress is likely a contributing factor. You've noticed that your body carries tension, fatigue, or physical discomfort that seems to track with your emotional state. You've wondered whether what you're experiencing is "real" — and you're exhausted by that question.
If a health condition has produced anxiety:
You're living with a chronic illness, chronic pain, a cancer history, or a significant health challenge — and the anxiety that has come with it is as difficult as the physical experience itself. You monitor your body constantly. You brace for medical appointments. You've lost trust in a body that once felt like home.
If you're not sure which came first:
That's the most common experience of all. The relationship between anxiety and the body is rarely linear. For many people it's a cycle — physical symptoms producing anxiety, anxiety producing physical symptoms — and understanding that cycle is itself part of the work.
How IFS addresses the anxiety-body connection
Internal Family Systems understands both anxiety and physical experience as meaningful responses from parts of the internal system — each carrying something real and worth understanding rather than eliminating.
In this work, the parts we encounter most often are:
-
The Monitor
The part that tracks the body constantly. That is always calculating: how bad is it today, what can I do, what do I need to protect, is this getting worse. This part is doing an enormous amount of work and is rarely acknowledged for it.
Understanding what it's protecting — and what it would need to feel safe enough to ease its vigilance — is often where the most meaningful shift happens.
-
The Manager
The part that keeps functioning. That shows up, adapts, adjusts, and finds ways to get through it. That has learned to minimize, to not complain, to be fine. This part is carrying a tremendous amount and has been doing so largely alone.
-
The Part That Doesn't Trust the Body
The one that has learned the body is unpredictable, unreliable, or threatening. That approaches physical sensations with fear rather than curiosity. That has made the body something to manage rather than something to inhabit.
-
The Grieving Part
The one that carries the losses. The activities given up. The body that felt safe before it didn't. The life that existed before anxiety or illness reorganized everything. This part often has nowhere to go.
IFS doesn't ask any of these parts to think more positively, calm down, or adopt a better coping framework. It asks what they are carrying and what they actually need. And that is where the most lasting change tends to happen.
What anxiety & chronic illness therapy looks like at My AP Therapy
Our sessions focus on the relationship between your anxiety and your body — however that relationship has taken shape for you. We pay particular attention to:
How vigilance lives in the body — the chronic readiness, the monitoring, the physical tension that doesn't release even when things are relatively stable.
What the body's experience has cost emotionally — the grief, the anger, the loss of trust, the identity disruption of becoming someone who has to manage their physical experience so carefully.
What the physical symptoms might be communicating — not in a "it's all in your head" sense, but in the genuine IFS sense of asking what parts of you are carrying something that hasn't had another way to be expressed.
What it would mean to have a different relationship with your body — not a perfect one, but a less adversarial one. Less monitoring, more presence. Less bracing, more capacity to actually inhabit your life.
This is not the same as being told it's in your head
We want to name this directly because many people navigating chronic physical symptoms or illness have been told — explicitly or implicitly — that their experience is psychological. That if they just thought differently, stressed less, or had a better attitude, things would improve.
That is not what we believe and it is not what we do.
Physical symptoms are real regardless of their origin. The fact that emotional experience and physical experience are deeply interconnected does not mean the symptoms are imaginary or self-generated. It means that the emotional work we do has relevance to the whole person.
We work alongside medical providers, not instead of them. And we approach every client with the foundational assumption that their experience is real, valid, and deserving of serious care.
Anxiety & Chronic Illness Therapy FAQs
-
Yes. Many people navigating chronic illness experience significant anxiety as part of that experience — health anxiety, survivorship anxiety, anticipatory anxiety before medical appointments, or the hypervigilance of a body that has learned it needs to be constantly monitored. You don't need to identify primarily as anxious for this work to be relevant. If your health experience and your emotional experience are intertwined, that intersection is exactly what we work with.
-
Yes — and we won't spend our time trying to convince you of a particular explanation for your symptoms. Whatever the origin of your physical experience, there is emotional work that is meaningful and worth doing: the anxiety itself, the grief of not feeling well, the exhaustion of navigating the medical system, the loss of trust in your body. Those experiences deserve care regardless of the diagnostic picture.
-
CBT-based approaches to health anxiety typically focus on challenging catastrophic thinking patterns and reducing reassurance-seeking behaviors. That approach helps many people. Our work goes deeper — rather than asking anxious parts to think differently, we get curious about what those parts are carrying and what they actually need. For people who have tried CBT and found it didn't sustain, the IFS orientation often reaches something that CBT doesn't.
-
It doesn't need to be resolved before you reach out. The relationship between anxiety and the body is often genuinely unclear — that ambiguity is part of the experience rather than a problem to solve before therapy can begin. We start from wherever you are and let the work clarify what needs clarifying.
-
Yes. All sessions at My AP Therapy are conducted virtually across New York State. For people managing fatigue, pain flares, or unpredictable physical symptoms, virtual therapy removes the energy cost of travel without compromising the quality of the work. Many clients find that being in their own environment actually creates a sense of safety that supports the work.
ALSO RELEVANT TO YOUIf any of this resonated, these pages may speak to something else you're carrying.
Anxiety & Burnout
For when anxiety is the primary experience.
If what resonated most here is the anxiety itself — the high-functioning presentation, the inability to fully exhale, the nervous system that never powers down — this page speaks directly to that experience and how we approach it.
Trauma
For when the body is holding something from the past.
Sometimes physical symptoms and chronic hypervigilance are connected to earlier experiences — patterns shaped by what the nervous system learned a long time ago. This page speaks to how we approach that dimension of the work.
Therapy for the Jewish Community
For when Jewish identity is part of how you're holding this.
The intersection of anxiety, physical health experience, and Jewish family systems — the cultural weight of suffering, the pressure to stay strong, the dynamics of a family organized around worry. This page speaks to that specific experience.
About Amanda
For when you want to know who you'd be working with.
If the approach described here resonates and you want to understand who holds this work before reaching out, Amanda's page gives you a clearer sense of her clinical orientation, her IFS training, and what working with her actually feels like.
You don't have to figure out which came first (the anxiety or the physical experience) to reach out.
A free 15-minute consultation is a low-pressure conversation to understand what you're carrying and whether this work feels like the right fit.
My AP Therapy serves adults across New York City and Westchester County. Virtual therapy available throughout New York State.
Testimonials