Therapy for POTS and Dysautonomia in Florida
By Kimberly Giunta, LMHC

If you are living with POTS or another form of dysautonomia, you already know how much it can affect your life.
It is not just about heart rate, blood pressure, dizziness, or fatigue. It can change the way you work, socialize, exercise, sleep, travel, and think about your future. It can also leave you feeling anxious, frustrated, isolated, or unsure of what your body is going to do from one day to the next.
And sometimes one of the hardest parts is feeling like other people do not really understand what you are dealing with.
Therapy can give you a place to talk about all of it.

When Your Physical Symptoms Feel Like Anxiety

If you have POTS or dysautonomia, some of your physical symptoms may feel very similar to anxiety or panic.
You might suddenly experience a racing heart, dizziness, trembling, nausea, weakness, shortness of breath, temperature changes, or a surge of adrenaline. Those symptoms can be frightening. And when they happen often enough, you may start worrying about when they are going to happen again.
You may find yourself wondering, “What if I pass out? What if my heart rate will not come down? What if something is seriously wrong? What if this happens when I am away from home? What if I cannot get back to where I feel safe?”
That does not mean your symptoms are “all in your head.” Your physical symptoms are real.
Therapy is not about trying to convince you otherwise. Instead, it can help you work with the fear, catastrophic thinking, anticipatory anxiety, and stress that can build on top of the physical symptoms you are already experiencing.
The goal is to help you feel more confident in how you respond when your body feels unpredictable.

Chronic Illness Can Change Your Life

Living with dysautonomia can affect parts of your life that other people may not see.
Maybe you have had to give up activities you used to enjoy. Maybe driving has become difficult. Maybe you avoid going places because you are afraid of becoming dizzy, weak, or symptomatic. Maybe you are constantly thinking about how much energy you have and whether doing one thing today will leave you exhausted tomorrow.
You may experience fear of fainting, dizziness, or losing control in public; anxiety about being far from home; difficulty driving or traveling; fatigue and limited energy; changes in your ability to exercise or work; financial stress related to medical care or reduced productivity; grief over the life you had before becoming ill; frustration when family or friends do not understand; isolation; fear of future flare-ups; or medical trauma from emergency-room visits, hospitalizations, or frightening symptoms.
If you were once very independent, active, or accustomed to taking care of everyone else, needing help can be especially difficult.
There can be real grief involved in adjusting to a body that no longer behaves the way it once did.

Medical Trauma and POTS

Many people with POTS spend months or even years trying to figure out what is wrong.
During that process, you may have been told that your symptoms were simply anxiety, stress, or panic. You may have had frightening emergency-room visits, hospitalizations, repeated medical tests, or experiences where you felt dismissed or not believed.
Those experiences can stay with you.
You might notice that you feel anxious before medical appointments or procedures. You may become nervous when someone takes your blood pressure or checks your heart rate. A hospital setting may bring back memories of times when you felt frightened, vulnerable, or out of control.
Therapy can help you process those experiences without dismissing the medical condition that brought you there in the first place.
You should not have to spend your therapy sessions convincing someone that your symptoms are real.

Anxiety With POTS is Complicated

Treating anxiety when you have dysautonomia can be different from treating anxiety in someone whose symptoms are primarily psychological.
You may genuinely experience tachycardia, dizziness, adrenaline surges, weakness, or other symptoms that begin before you feel anxious. The anxiety may come afterward.
For example, your heart rate suddenly rises. Then you think, “What if something is wrong?” Fear increases, your body reacts to that fear, and now the original physical symptom and the anxiety are feeding into each other.
Therapy can help you recognize that cycle and work on the part of it you can influence.
The goal is not to tell yourself that nothing is happening. The goal is to learn how to respond without adding another layer of fear to an already difficult physical experience.

How Therapy Can Help

Therapy can help you learn ways to cope with both the emotional and practical impact of chronic illness.
Depending on what you are dealing with, our work may include reducing catastrophic thinking, managing health-related anxiety, coping with unpredictable symptoms, working through medical trauma, adjusting to changes in your level of functioning, processing grief related to chronic illness, developing more realistic expectations for yourself, communicating your needs to family and friends, setting boundaries with people who minimize your illness, reducing fear of future flare-ups, rebuilding confidence and independence, and learning to separate a physical symptom from the frightening thoughts that may follow it.
Therapy is not about expecting you to be positive all the time. It is about helping you cope with what is actually happening in your life in a way that feels more manageable.

Your Symptoms Can Be Medical and Still Affect You Emotionally

You do not have to choose between believing your symptoms are medical and acknowledging that they affect your mental health. Both can be true.
You can have POTS and anxiety. You can experience a real adrenaline surge and become frightened by it. You can have genuine dizziness and also begin worrying about when the dizziness will return. You can have been through frightening medical experiences and develop symptoms of trauma afterward.
None of that makes the underlying medical problem less real.
Therapy can help you address the emotional consequences of chronic illness without minimizing what is happening physically.

Online Therapy for POTS and Dysautonomia in Florida

I provide telehealth therapy for adults throughout Florida and have more than 25 years of experience as a Licensed Mental Health Counselor.
I work with adults dealing with chronic illness, POTS and dysautonomia, anxiety, trauma and PTSD, grief, life transitions, and the emotional impact of changes in health and functioning.
Telehealth can also be especially helpful when driving, travel, heat, waiting rooms, fatigue, dizziness, or prolonged upright activity make getting to an office difficult.
If POTS or dysautonomia has changed the way you live your life, you do not have to minimize how hard that has been.
You can talk about the fear. You can talk about the frustration. You can talk about the grief, the anger, the uncertainty, and the parts of chronic illness that other people may not understand.
And you do not have to spend your therapy sessions proving that your physical symptoms are real.
You can focus instead on learning how to live as fully and confidently as possible alongside them.

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