If your anxiety has stayed despite years of therapy, books and breathwork, you are not failing. Most of the wellness world has been answering the wrong question — and the better answer is older, gentler, and far more peaceful than another protocol.
By Abi Beri | Integrative Somatic Therapist & Nervous System Specialist · Dublin & Online
TL;DR. For a significant number of people, anxiety does not leave — no matter how many protocols, books or breathwork sessions they have completed. The mainstream wellness narrative — that anxiety is a malfunction to be evicted — has left many high-functioning, well-tried people feeling like failures. From a somatic therapy perspective, your nervous system is more like a weather system than a kettle. Some nervous systems simply run warmer, and the fight to remove that quality is often heavier than the quality itself. The peace on offer is not silence — it is coexistence: a way of living fully alongside an anxious nervous system, without spending your life at war with it. This is also how chronic anxiety is approached in integrative somatic therapy in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and online.
Key facts at a glance
- For many people, chronic anxiety is not a malfunction — it is the natural baseline of a more vigilant nervous system.
- Years of therapy, breathwork, supplements and lifestyle protocols can soften anxiety but rarely “remove” it in this group.
- Fighting anxiety — the “eviction effort” — often creates a second layer of suffering on top of the first.
- Somatic therapy offers a reframe: from elimination to coexistence.
- The reframe is grounded in polyvagal-informed practice, attachment theory and contemplative traditions — it is not a wellness slogan.
- Peace, in this view, is in the relationship to anxiety, not its absence.
- This is the basis of how chronic anxiety is approached in integrative somatic therapy in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge and online with Abi Beri.
Why does anxiety stay after years of therapy?
Quick answer: For many people, anxiety stays because the nervous system was never wired for low-baseline calm in the first place. Therapy, breathwork and lifestyle protocols can soften it — but they cannot rewrite the underlying weather system. What changes the experience most reliably is the relationship to the anxiety, not the anxiety itself.
If you are reading this, there is a fair chance you have done a lot. You have read the books. You have done the breathing. You have, at various points, become rather good at the breathing. You have probably had a therapist or two, possibly a meditation app subscription you feel slightly guilty about, and you may, in the last few years, have learned more about the vagus nerve than you ever expected to know about a nerve.
And the anxiety has not gone away. It is quieter, perhaps. You can manage it more days than you used to. The tools work, sometimes. But underneath the breathing and the books and the protocols, there is still a hum. A baseline. A weather system that has not been evicted by any of the eviction notices you have served on it.
There is a particular shame that comes on top of all of this — the sense of being a wellness failure. Because the industry has been telling you, in increasingly confident voices, that if you just did the right protocol, you would be one of those serene people in the advertisements. You have done the protocols. You are tired. And nothing about the persistent hum is your fault.
Your nervous system is a weather system, not a kettle
Quick answer: Some nervous systems run warmer, more vigilant and more reactive — by genetic predisposition, developmental conditioning, or both. This is the system’s working baseline, not a defect. The work is to live well with it, not to swap it for a different one.
Kettles have a switch. Nervous systems do not. Your nervous system has settings, predispositions, inherited patterns and early conditioning — the entire genetic and developmental hand you were dealt. Some people, through no fault of their own and no particular failure of effort, have a nervous system that runs warmer. That scans more vigilantly. That registers a busier internal sky. And no amount of breathing — and I say this as someone who deeply, sincerely loves breathing — turns that weather system into a different weather system.
You can soften it. You can learn its patterns. You can work with it. You cannot, however, replace it with somebody else’s nervous system, no matter how serene that person looks in the advertisement. They have their own weather. It is just possible you have not seen it.
The wellness lie: anxiety as a malfunction
Quick answer: The mainstream wellness narrative depends on the premise that anxiety can be optimised away. This is profitable, but for many people it is not true — and the belief that it should be true is itself a major source of additional suffering.
Let me name the lie directly, because it is going to need to be out in the open before we can do anything useful with it.
The lie is that anxiety is a malfunction, that it can — with enough effort, enough optimisation, enough protocols — be removed, and that the absence of anxiety is what mental health looks like. The wellness industry is built on this lie. If anxiety is a malfunction, then anxiety is a market, and there is always a new product, a new framework, a new five-step approach that promises to be the one that finally fixes you.
And here is what almost no one in that industry will say, because saying it would collapse the business model. For a large number of people — and you may be one of them — the anxiety is not going to leave. It is not malfunctioning. It is, in fact, doing exactly what it was built to do.
The cost of the war: how fighting anxiety makes it heavier
Quick answer: Trying to evict anxiety creates a second layer of suffering on top of the first — the shame of failing to evict it, the exhaustion of the effort, and the sense of being broken because the protocols have not delivered the promised silence.
When the central question of your life becomes “how do I get rid of this feeling,” something cruel happens. Every moment in which the feeling is present becomes a moment of failure. Every protocol becomes either a desperate hope or a quiet disappointment. The relationship to your own body becomes adversarial. You are not living your life; you are managing a hostage situation in your own nervous system.
And it costs energy. Enormous, daily, invisible energy. The eviction effort itself is exhausting — sometimes more exhausting than the anxiety would have been if it had simply been allowed to be present without being argued with.
Eviction vs Coexistence: a comparison
| The eviction approach (the wellness default) | The coexistence approach (somatic therapy) |
| Treats anxiety as a malfunction to be removed. | Treats anxiety as a feature of a particular nervous system’s baseline. |
| Goal: silence, calm, absence of feeling. | Goal: peaceful relationship with the feeling that is present. |
| Measures success by the disappearance of anxiety. | Measures success by living fully alongside anxiety. |
| Generates shame when anxiety persists. | Generates self-compassion when anxiety persists. |
| Requires constant protocol management. | Requires less daily effort once the relationship shifts. |
| Promises freedom from the feeling. | Offers freedom in the relationship to the feeling. |
| Tends to make anxiety feel like an enemy. | Tends to make anxiety feel like an old, occasionally useful housemate. |
What peaceful coexistence actually looks like
Coexistence is not resignation. It is not “giving up on getting better.” It is something much more interesting, and far more useful, than either of those: it is a relationship in which the anxious nervous system is allowed to be present without being constantly at war with the person it belongs to.
In practice, this looks like a day in which you were anxious and lived your life anyway. A day in which the hum was present and you went to the meeting, took the call, hugged the child, made the dinner — and were, in the middle of all of it, more or less yourself. That is a fully successful day. It only looks like a failure if the metric is the absence of anxiety, which was never the right metric in the first place.
It also looks, after a while, like quiet curiosity. Once you are not at war with the anxiety, you may begin to notice it sometimes has useful information — about an exhausted body, a relationship that needs honesty, a creeping over-commitment, a sadness underneath. Anxiety at war with you has nothing to teach. Anxiety sitting at the table with you sometimes turns out to be the most observant member of the household.
Signs you are stuck in the eviction war
If several of these feel familiar, you are probably in the war rather than in the relationship:
- You measure good days by how little anxiety was present.
- You feel like a wellness failure when protocols don’t deliver lasting calm.
- You collect new tools and protocols faster than you can integrate them.
- You feel guilty for being anxious despite “doing everything right.”
- You have a low-level adversarial relationship with your own body.
- You secretly suspect the goal of “no anxiety” is impossible — and feel ashamed of that suspicion.
- You scan content about new techniques compulsively, hoping the next one will be the one.
How somatic therapy supports coexistence (rather than eviction)
Somatic therapy works with the body bottom-up rather than top-down. Where the eviction model asks the mind to argue the body into a different state, somatic therapy goes the other way — it slowly grows the body’s capacity to be present with what it is feeling, without escalation. Over time, the nervous system learns that anxiety does not require an emergency response, and the secondary layer of suffering — the war on the anxiety — quietly drops away.
Importantly, somatic therapy is paced. We use what are called the window of tolerance, titration (small doses of charge) and pendulation (moving between activation and settling). The aim is not to push the system into the anxiety to “process it out.” The aim is to expand the range in which the system can be at home with itself. That is a slower, more durable kind of change than any quick technique.
When this works — and it does, reliably, with time — the person’s relationship to their own anxiety begins to look less like an exhausted manager of an unruly tenant, and more like the person of the house, with the lights on in every room. The anxiety is sometimes loud. It is sometimes quiet. It is not, anymore, the central event of every day.
Practical body-based steps to begin coexisting
- Name the war out loud.Notice when you are at war with the feeling. The naming itself softens the war.
- Stop measuring success by the absence of anxiety.Use a different metric: did I live my life today? Did I show up for what mattered? That is the right scoreboard.
- Get curious instead of combative.Ask the anxiety, gently, what it is alerting you to. Sometimes the answer is real. Sometimes it’s old static. Both are okay.
- Let the body sit with what is present.Long exhales, a hand on the chest, weight to the chair. Not as a technique to remove the feeling — as company for it.
- Lower the stakes of any single day.One anxious afternoon is not a failure. It is one afternoon. The relationship is built over months and years, not minutes.
- Treat your nervous system as a long-term roommate.You are not going to evict it. You can absolutely learn to live well with it, over time, in a way that brings real peace.
Frequently asked questions
Can chronic anxiety be cured? For some people, yes — particularly when the anxiety is driven by a specific, treatable cause. For many others, the more accurate and useful framing is not cure but a different relationship: significantly softened, much less daily impact, and a peaceful coexistence rather than a constant war.
Why won’t my anxiety go away despite therapy? Often because the underlying nervous system runs warmer or scans more vigilantly by baseline. Therapy that focuses on eviction can hit a ceiling. Therapy that focuses on relationship — body-based, paced, somatic — often opens up where talk-only work has stalled.
Is somatic therapy effective for chronic anxiety? Yes — particularly for the kind of anxiety that has persisted through other approaches. Somatic therapy works bottom-up with the nervous system, which is where the persistent activation actually lives. Several specific somatic modalities have peer-reviewed support for trauma and stress-related conditions; the wider field is evidence-informed.
Is my anxiety a sign something is wrong with me? No. It is far more often a sign of a nervous system that learned, at some point, that vigilance was useful. That is information about a system, not a verdict on a person.
Should I keep trying new protocols? If a protocol is genuinely helping, yes. If you are collecting protocols compulsively in the hope that one will finally end the anxiety, the collecting itself may be part of the problem. Coexistence often requires less protocol, not more.
What does a somatic therapist do with anxiety differently from a CBT therapist? CBT works primarily with thoughts and beliefs about anxiety. Somatic therapy works directly with the body’s patterns underneath those thoughts. They are not mutually exclusive — many people benefit from both at different stages — but somatic work often reaches what talk alone cannot.
Can I do somatic therapy for anxiety online? Yes. Online somatic sessions work well with a skilled, trauma-informed practitioner. Co-regulation happens through tone, presence and shared attention — which travel through a screen.
What if I do not want to “accept” my anxiety? Coexistence is not the same as acceptance in the resigned sense. It is not “learn to like it.” It is a working relationship in which the feeling is allowed to be present without becoming the central event of every day. Most people find that vastly preferable to either resignation or eviction.
Working with a somatic therapist for chronic anxiety in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge & Online
If you are looking for a somatic therapist for chronic anxiety in Dublin, Naas, Newbridge or anywhere in Kildare and Ireland — or you would like to work online from wherever you are in the world — I see clients in person and online. My approach is integrative: somatic practice rooted in Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, polyvagal-informed nervous system work, inner child work, and Family Constellations (the Hellinger method). I am IPHM-accredited and currently completing an MSc in Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy.
Chronic, high-functioning anxiety is one of the most common reasons people come to me. The work tends to be slow, paced, and durable — the opposite of another protocol. Over time, what changes is not just the volume of the anxiety, but the relationship to it: less war, more company, much more day-to-day life.
If you would like to find out whether we would be a good fit, the easiest next step is to book a short, no-pressure intro at somatictherapyireland.com. And if you would like a long audio companion to this article, the somatic talk — Anxiety That Doesn’t Go Away — is available on Insight Timer and wherever you listen.
About the author
Abi Beri is an Integrative Somatic Therapist, Family Constellation Facilitator and Nervous System Specialist based in Dublin, Ireland. He is IPHM-accredited and currently completing an MSc in Pluralistic Counselling and Psychotherapy. His practice integrates Somatic Experiencing, polyvagal-informed nervous system work, inner child work and Family Constellations (the Hellinger method). He sees clients in person from a practice base across Dublin and Kildare, and online globally. More at somatictherapyireland.com and blissfulevolution.com.
Further reading & references
- Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory. Norton.
- van der Kolk, B. (2014). The Body Keeps the Score. Viking.
- Levine, P. A. (2010). In an Unspoken Voice. North Atlantic Books.
- Maté, G. (2022). The Myth of Normal. Knopf.
- Dana, D. (2018). The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy. Norton.
- Companion somatic talk: Anxiety That Doesn’t Go Away (Insight Timer, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube).
