Chronic Stress Therapy
You Stopped Calling It Stress a While Ago. Now It’s Just Who You Are.
Stress is supposed to be a thing that happens to you. Typically, there’s a before, during, and a version of you on the other side of it.
At some point, your's stopped having an other side. There was no single crisis, which is exactly why it’s so easy to ignore. Just a long run of holding it together that never got a natural endpoint and now it just feels like like a personality trait. You’re not stressed about something. You’re just stressed. There’s a difference and it matters.
What It Looks Like When You’ve Stopped Noticing
Not the falling apart version. You’re still performing, still the one people go to, still handling it.
You’re also grinding your teeth in your sleep…if you sleep. Your jaw is tight and your stomach has opinions your doctor can’t explain. You’re either running hot or completely flat with nothing in the middle and you snapped at someone you love last week over nothing and are still a bit rattled by it.
You get through the day on a kind of low-grade vigilance, scanning for the next thing, already half-composing the response to a problem that hasn’t even happened. Rest doesn’t land, vacations are dreadful because you’re anticipating your return and all the bullshit you are going to come back to. Good things are registering as items completed rather than things enjoyed.
And underneath it, there’s usually a belief that showed up long before your current job did. That staying ahead of ‘it’ is what keeps you safe. Made up scenarios, anticipating, absorbing, handling it is the price of being okay. You did not wake up one more deciding that. You learned it, and you probably learned it young.
Why Knowing This Hasn’t Fixed It
You’re almost certainly sef-aware about all of it. You’ve read about cortisol and the nervous system. You can explain chronis stress to a friend with real accuracy while living inside it.
Insight hasn’t touched it because the pattern isn’t stored in the part of your brain that responds to insight. Prolonged stress appears to produce a real physiological adaptation, which is a clinical way of saying your body learned this and bodies don’t unlearn things by sheer reasoning. Trying harder just makes you more efficient at bracing for ‘it’.
That’s frustrating and it’s also the good news, because it means the way out isn’t more producitivty and discipline.
What Can Help Move It
EMDR is an evidence-based therapy that works with your nervous system rather than talking around it. It was developed for traum, and chronic stress in women who function well almost always has some version of that underneath: not necessarily a catastrophe, but a perio where staying alert was genuhinely the right call and your system never got the memo that it’s over.
Using bilateral stimulation, EMDR helps your brain reprocess the experiences and beliefs keeping you in that gear. We build stability first, then process. This is structured work with a direction, not open-ended venting.
What women tend to report:
Sleeping and feeling rested
Noticing they’re calm and they didn’t have to work for it
Saying no without a ton of guilt
Enjoying something without also monitoring it
You don’t lose the part of you that shows up for people and you even start showing up for yourself without adrenaline, fear, and full-blown guilt.
Who You’re Working With
I’m Tyler Dawneé Young, LCSW. I’m a therapist in Palm Desert who specializes in chronic stress, burnout, anxiety, and trauma in women who are functioning so well that no one knows that they’re running on fumes. Also, I’m a recovering people pleaser and perfectionist.
I’m direct and a little irreverent, and I’m interested in you actually getting better rather than getting more comfy in managing chronic stress. I provide EMDR online throughout California and Utah and in person in Palm Desert.
If This Read a Little Too Accurately
Most of the women I work with have been rolling with the stress for months, even years before they decided to pick up the phone. A 15- minute consultation costs you nothing and commits you to nothing. If I’m not the right fit, I’ll say so and point you in the right direction.
FAQs
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Both, usually, but not in the order you’d expect. Most women I work with already know which parts of their life are too much. Knowing hasn’t made it possible to change because the reason you can’t put anything down is doing it's own work underneath. That’s what we go after first. [EMDR is the piece that tends to make the rest possible.]
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Honestly, they overlap so much that the label matters less than you’d think. Burnout is tied to depletion, usually around work and caregiving. Anxiety tends to be future focused and specific. Chronic stress is the one with no clear edges, where you can’t point out what is wrong because nothing in particular is. You don’t need to figure out which one you have before calling me. Sorting that out is part of the first couple of sessions.
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Frequently, yes. Tension headaches, jaw and neck pain, digestive issues, disrupted sleep, and getting sick more often than you used to are all pretty common. Get anything persistent checked out by a physician first, because stress being a plausible explanation doesn’t make it the only one. But if your workup comes back clean and you still feel terrible, res result is information rather than a dead end.
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Depends on how long this has been running and what’s underneath it. Most people notice something shift within the first couple months, often sleep or a drop in reactivity before anything else. This isn’t years-long work. It’s structured and has direction. We will periodically talk openly about progress instead of leaving you to guess.
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No. EMDR was developed for trauma, but the mechanism works on any experience your brain filed in a way that’s still affecting you. For a lot of women with chronic stress, that’s not one terrible event. It’s a long stretch where staying alert was the correct move and their system never stood down.
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Yes — I see clients in person in Palm Desert, and online throughout California and Utah, so wherever you are, getting started is simpler than it might seem.