Couples Therapy | Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT | Hermosa Beach, CA

Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT·Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist #148775·Hermosa Beach, California

The Practice

Anxiety is part of a protective system that directs our attention toward uncertainty and potential threat. The capacity to anticipate what could go wrong, remember prior danger, detect changes in our environment, and prepare for possible consequences has obvious survival value. In contemporary life, it helps us recognize risk, plan carefully, take consequences seriously, and respond before a problem becomes harder to manage.

This helps explain why anxiety can coexist so easily with competence. Anticipating problems may make you unusually prepared, sensitivity to consequences can improve judgment, and thinking several steps ahead can be enormously valuable when mistakes are expensive or other people depend on your decisions. The same vigilance can be useful in relationships, parenting, finances, and health.

Our capacity to anticipate problems can also continue working after it has given us all the useful information available. The mind generates another contingency, revisits a decision because a better one might still be available, or seeks reassurance that provides relief without resolving the uncertainty underneath it. An effort to anticipate and reduce risk can gradually become an effort to achieve a degree of certainty that life cannot provide.

This can be difficult to recognize in highly capable people because anxiety may organize behavior in productive and socially rewarded ways. Extensive preparation can look like conscientiousness, repeated checking like rigor, and difficulty delegating like exceptionally high standards. A person can function at a very high level while devoting considerable mental energy to preventing mistakes, criticism, disappointment, conflict, or outcomes that cannot be fully controlled.

The distinction lies partly in what all that vigilance is accomplishing. Careful preparation and analysis can materially improve an outcome. Continuing long after additional thought has stopped producing useful information may serve primarily to postpone the discomfort of uncertainty. High standards can produce excellent work while also consuming time and attention far beyond the value of what is being improved.

Anxiety becomes costly when efforts to remain safe, prepared, or in control begin limiting your choices. You can know intellectually that you have done enough and still find it difficult to stop, recognize that a relationship is secure while continuing to search for reassurance, or make a sound decision and spend the next several days reconsidering it. Therapy can help clarify which concerns deserve further thought or action and which require learning to tolerate what cannot be known or controlled.

Work With Me
Regina Abayev JD, LMFT

"Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced."

James Baldwin

How Anxiety & Internal Pressure Can Show Up

Anxiety is not limited to feeling nervous or afraid. It can influence how you work, make decisions, relate to other people, evaluate yourself, and respond when circumstances fall outside your control.

01 Perfectionism & the Moving Standard High standards can be chosen deliberately and pursued with considerable satisfaction. Perfectionism has a different quality when meeting the standard becomes closely connected to relief, security, approval, or how you evaluate yourself.This can make accomplishment surprisingly difficult to absorb. You may immediately notice what could have been better, discount praise because you know where the weaknesses were, or reach an objective only to establish a more demanding one. The standard that once represented success becomes ordinary once you meet it.Perfectionism can therefore produce excellent results while making those results unusually difficult to enjoy. Understanding what the standard represents to you is more useful than deciding whether it is objectively too high.
02 Overthinking, Decisions & Uncertainty Some decisions deserve extensive analysis. Others eventually reach a point at which additional thinking no longer improves the decision and instead postpones the discomfort of making it.There are questions for which certainty is unavailable. You cannot know in advance whether a relationship will last, whether a career change will prove worthwhile, whether another person will respond as you hope, or whether you will eventually regret a choice that seems sound today. Intelligence can identify more variables, more exceptions, and more possible outcomes without resolving the uncertainty inherent in the decision.This is where thinking can become circular. The issue is no longer a lack of information; it is difficulty accepting that the remaining information cannot be obtained before you choose.
03 Control, Responsibility & Other People’s Expectations Anxiety can increase the desire to control variables that appear controllable. You may remain closely involved in work that could be delegated, become uncomfortable when another person approaches a task differently, anticipate what people need before they ask, or try to prevent disappointment by managing expectations in advance.This can extend well beyond work. Partners have reactions you cannot determine for them. Children develop preferences and make choices you would not make. Other people can misunderstand you, disapprove of a decision, or remain upset after you have explained yourself carefully.Greater flexibility includes knowing what responsibility belongs to you and what belongs to someone else. It also requires tolerating the fact that making a thoughtful decision does not guarantee that everybody affected by it will be pleased.
04 Self-Criticism & Internal Pressure For people who have relied on self-criticism for a long time, being hard on yourself can feel responsible and productive. You identify weaknesses quickly, correct mistakes, and push yourself when effort begins to decline.Self-evaluation becomes less useful when every mistake acquires meaning beyond the mistake itself. A disappointing performance becomes evidence that you should have worked harder. Rest produces guilt. Success provides temporary relief before expectations increase again. The internal response can become harsher precisely when patience and clear judgment would be more useful.Therapy does not require replacing honest self-assessment with indiscriminate reassurance. We can examine whether the way you speak to yourself is accurate, whether it continues to improve performance, and what changes when accountability no longer depends on criticism.
05 Impostor Feelings & Difficulty Internalizing Success Impostor syndrome describes the experience of doubting your competence or legitimacy despite substantial evidence that you have earned your position. The term can be misleading if it suggests that the person simply has an inaccurate view of themselves. More often, the interesting question is how someone evaluates the evidence.Success may be attributed to preparation, effort, timing, luck, relationships, or having persuaded other people that you are more capable than you believe yourself to be. Mistakes receive a different interpretation: they are treated as more revealing, as though an error provides better evidence of your underlying ability than years of competent performance.This can create a demanding cycle. If you believe you succeeded because you prepared far more than everyone else, extensive preparation becomes necessary the next time. A promotion increases the stakes rather than settling the question of whether you belong. Greater responsibility exposes you to problems you have not solved before, which can feel like evidence of inadequacy rather than an ordinary consequence of moving into more difficult work.Impostor feelings can also appear during transitions that objectively represent progress. Becoming a partner, assuming a senior leadership role, entering a more competitive environment, building a successful business, or becoming responsible for people with expertise different from your own may temporarily exceed the internal picture you have of yourself. Your circumstances have changed faster than your sense of who you are within them.Therapy can help examine the standards by which you decide whether you are competent, the evidence you accept or dismiss, and the behaviors you use to protect against being exposed. The aim is not to convince yourself that you are exceptional. It is to develop a more accurate assessment of what you know, what you do well, where your limitations are, and what you are allowed to learn without treating uncertainty as evidence that you do not belong.
How I Work
Direct, Active & Engaged

I listen closely, ask challenging questions, offer interpretations, and share what I see. I pay attention to contradictions, avoidance, resistance, and the places where change becomes harder than expected. With anxiety and perfectionism, this may include noticing when careful thought has become repetitive, examining what feels at stake in making a mistake, or understanding why another person’s disappointment is so difficult to tolerate.

Depth Without Endless Analysis

Many of the people I work with are exceptionally good thinkers and have spent considerable time trying to understand themselves. You may know where a response came from, recognize it while it is happening, and explain accurately why it continues without being able to respond differently.

We use insight to understand the history and function of a response, then pay close attention to what happens when you try to change it. The ability to explain anxiety is different from the ability to tolerate uncertainty when you encounter it.

Trust & Discretion

My practice is private pay, and I do not submit claims directly to insurance companies. Treatment does not pass through an employer-sponsored health plan unless you choose to submit documentation for reimbursement yourself. I maintain a discreet private office in Hermosa Beach and provide secure telehealth throughout California.

Let’s Begin
Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT

My professional background includes nineteen years in law, finance, technology, leadership, and entrepreneurship before I became a therapist.

Education J.D., University of Michigan Law School
M.A., Marriage and Family Therapy, Pepperdine University
Ph.D. coursework in Clinical Sexology
License Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist #148775
Advanced Training Emotionally Focused Therapy · Gottman Method Couples Therapy · Relational Life Therapy · Accelerated Resolution Therapy · Advanced Mediation & Dispute Resolution
Full Biography →
The Office  ·  Hermosa Beach, California

A private practice space designed for serious work, with a view of the Pacific.

Further Reading

High Achievement and Shame: The Cost of Performance-Based Worth

How self-worth can become connected to achievement and why accomplishment may provide less relief than expected.

Intellectualization: The Defense of All Defenses

How thinking can provide understanding while also creating distance from emotional experience.

People-Pleasing as a Learned Relational Strategy

How accommodation can become a way of managing relationships and other people’s reactions.

Intelligence and Terminal Uniqueness

How intelligence can become exceptionally useful in explaining why principles we recognize in other people’s lives have limited application to our own.

Begin

Anxiety & Perfectionism Therapy in Hermosa Beach and Across California

I work with adults in person in Hermosa Beach, serving the South Bay and greater Los Angeles, and through telehealth throughout California.

Let’s Begin Regina Abayev, JD, LMFT  ·  Hermosa Beach, CA  ·  info@reginaabayev.com