Anxiety can show up in many forms – a constant low hum of worry, sudden spikes of panic, a racing mind at 3am, or a body that won’t quite settle even when, on paper, everything is fine. For some people it’s connected to something specific. For many, it isn’t connected to any one thing at all – it’s just there, and it’s been there for a long time.
Counselling offers a space to understand what’s driving the anxiety, what it’s trying to tell you, and how to build a different relationship with it – one where it doesn’t get to run the show.
Anxiety often arrives with its own internal logic: it tells you that if you just worry enough, prepare enough, or stay alert enough, you’ll be safe – or you’ll avoid the thing you’re afraid of. In the short term, this can feel like it’s working. Over time, it tends to grow, narrowing what feels possible and making rest, presence, and ease harder to access.
Counselling isn’t about eliminating anxiety altogether – some anxiety is a normal and even useful part of life. It’s about understanding why it’s become this loud, this constant, or this disproportionate to what’s actually in front of you – and finding ways to reduce its grip without pretending it doesn’t exist.
Anxiety doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and the environment someone lives in shapes the kind of anxiety that develops. A few things come up often enough in my practice that they’re worth naming directly, because clients are sometimes relieved simply to hear that what they’re experiencing has a name and isn’t unusual.
Crime-related hypervigilance. Many South Africans live with a background level of alertness that has become so normal it’s almost invisible – until it’s named. Checking locks multiple times. Scanning a parking area before getting out of the car. A spike of adrenaline at an unexpected knock on the door. This isn’t irrational; it developed in response to a real environment. But when that alertness doesn’t switch off – when it’s present even in low-risk situations, or it’s exhausting in a way that’s disproportionate to the actual risk in the moment – it has become anxiety, and it’s worth addressing as such.
Load-shedding and infrastructure anxiety. The unpredictability of load-shedding, water outages, and general infrastructure strain creates a particular kind of background stress: a low hum of “what’s going to go wrong today” that many people have stopped noticing because it’s simply part of life. For some people, this contributes to a more generalised sense that the ground is never quite stable – which can amplify anxiety that originates elsewhere.
Anxiety about safety, politics and the future of the country. Many clients carry an ongoing, low-level anxiety about South Africa’s trajectory – economically, politically, in terms of safety – that sits alongside, and sometimes masks, more personal anxieties. This can show up as a persistent sense of needing a “plan B,” difficulty fully investing in long-term plans that depend on staying in South Africa, or a chronic low-grade dread that’s hard to separate from “just how things are” because so many people around you feel the same way.
None of these need a diagnosis to be worth talking about. They’re real responses to a real environment – but when they start to cost you sleep, peace of mind, or your ability to be present in your own life, that’s the point at which it’s worth bringing to counselling.
Anxiety is, among other things, a story-telling machine. It generates narratives – about what’s about to go wrong, what other people think, what you’re not capable of, what will happen if you get this wrong – and it tells these stories with a conviction that can make them feel like facts rather than predictions. I draw on two approaches: person-centred therapy and narrative therapy – both well-established for anxiety, and often more useful together than either is alone.
Person-centred therapy creates the conditions in which this work becomes possible. For people carrying anxiety, simply being in a space where they do not have to perform competence or manage how they are perceived can itself be a relief. Anxiety is often exhausting not just because of the worry, but because of the effort required to keep it hidden. The person-centred approach removes that effort from the room.
Narrative therapy asks whose story the anxiety is telling, and whether it is accurate. Anxiety is a skilled storyteller – it presents its predictions as facts and its worst-case scenarios as inevitable. Narrative work creates enough distance from those stories to look at them as stories rather than as truth, and to ask what else might also be true.
Practical tools emerge from this understanding: grounding techniques for when anxiety spikes, breathing and body-based approaches that work with the nervous system directly, ways of noticing anxious thought patterns without being consumed by them, and frameworks for making decisions when anxiety is making every option feel dangerous. These are worked through in sessions and adapted to your actual life, not handed to you as a generic list. A few of these tools are available on this site as free guides you can try in your own time.
Two specific forms of anxiety come up often enough with South African clients, both connected to movement across borders, that they deserve their own space.
The anxiety of leaving. For people in the process of emigrating, or who have recently emigrated, anxiety often shows up not as excitement-with-some-nerves but as something more persistent: a background hum of “did I make the right decision,” compounded by the practical anxieties of visas, finances, finding work, and building a life in an unfamiliar system. This is often accompanied by anxiety about people left behind – ageing parents, friends, the country itself – and a low-grade guilt that sits alongside the anxiety and makes it harder to simply enjoy what’s meant to be a positive change.
This anxiety can be particularly disorienting because it often arrives at a time when, from the outside, everything looks like it’s going well. New job, new country, the move people back home are congratulating you for. The mismatch between how the move is supposed to feel and how it actually feels can itself become a source of anxiety – a fear that something is wrong with you for not feeling more grateful or settled.
The anxiety of return. Less commonly discussed, but real: for South Africans who have been abroad for some years and are considering returning – or who do return – anxiety often resurfaces around re-entry. Will the country I’m coming back to be the one I remember? Have I changed too much to fit back in? Was leaving the wrong call, and is coming back an admission of that? Practical anxieties about safety, employment, and whether the systems and relationships left behind have moved on without you all compound this.
Both directions of this anxiety share something in common: they involve holding two places, two versions of a life, and sometimes two versions of yourself, at the same time – and anxiety often fills the gap where there isn’t yet a settled answer about which version is “real” or which life is the one that counts. If you’re based abroad, my pages for South Africans in the UK and Europe, Australia and New Zealand, and the UAE and Saudi Arabia go into more detail about the specific experience of each region.
I work with people experiencing:
Sessions are one hour, either in person in Jeffreys Bay or online via Zoom for clients across South Africa and internationally. I work primarily with individuals. For details on session pricing, see the pricing page.
Storme Brand is a Registered Counsellor with the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA Reg. PRC0023531) – you can verify this at hpcsa.co.za. Counsellors and psychologists are both registered with the HPCSA but have different scopes: psychologists can conduct formal psychological assessment and diagnosis and typically work with more complex clinical presentations, while counsellors work with the emotional and psychological difficulties most people experience – including anxiety – within a therapeutic relationship. See the About page for more.
For many people, yes – particularly for anxiety, where consistency of the relationship and the ability to practise new approaches between sessions matter more than the physical setting. See more about online counselling here. In-person sessions are also available in Jeffreys Bay if you prefer that format.
Most major South African medical aids recognise sessions with an HPCSA-registered counsellor. An invoice with the relevant ICD-10 codes is provided after each session for you to submit to your medical aid directly. For current session fees, see the pricing page.
Person-centred therapy as the relational foundation, with narrative therapy as the primary working lens. Practical tools are introduced alongside this deeper work and adapted to your specific situation.
If anxiety is affecting your sleep, your relationships, your ability to do things you’d otherwise want to do, or simply your day-to-day sense of ease – that’s enough reason to talk to someone. You don’t need a diagnosis, and you don’t need it to have reached crisis point.
Yes – this is a significant part of my practice. Both directions of this anxiety (leaving and returning) are covered in more detail above, and on the regional pages for clients living abroad.
