Getting Started: How to Optimize the Early CBT Sessions
- Principles of CBT – Establish roles and goals
- How to socialize your client to the CBT Session structure
- Get your client to do homework
- What not to do (reassurance, rabbit hole)
- Tools for goal setting
- Begin with the end in mind: Termination considerations
Assessment and Treatment Planning: Set the Stage for Successful Treatment
- Diagnosis – why it’s important
- Key questions to ask at intake
- Assessment forms – where to find them
- Teach your clients to use a notebook
- Using a SUDS scale
Anxiety and the Brain: What Every Client Needs to Know
- Why this is a pivotal point of treatment
- Simple ways to teach clients about anxiety and the brain
- The role of avoidance and safety behaviors
- Medication-what is helpful and what is not
The Art of Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)
- The role of the clinician
- Teach clients to ride the wave of anxiety
- Create a fear hierarchy using SUD scales
- How to set up an exposure
- Working with resistance to exposure
- What NOT to do and why
Cognitive Therapy: Change the Way Clients Think about Thinking
- Empower clients to choose how to interpret their thoughts
- Utilize values clarification to motivate change
- Challenge distortions and core beliefs that get in the way of change
- The role of mindfulness in anxiety treatment
Family Involvement: Teach Loved Ones to be a Part of the Solution
- Help families learn healthier ways to talk back to anxiety
- Teach how to respond without reassuring
- Challenge loved ones to face their own fears
Phobias and OCD: Exposure and Response Prevention in Action
- Identify OCD’s tricks
- Strategies for the most common phobias (heights, spiders, small spaces and more!)
- How to get comfortable with extreme exposures
- Vomit phobia, fear of harm, contamination, obsessive thoughts, sexual obsession
- Identify your own obstacles to successful ERP
- Get out of the office!
- Using scripts
- Demonstrations and practice
Panic Disorder: Interoceptive Exposure Techniques That Work
- Why deep breaths aren’t enough
- Practice breathing to increase CO2
- Identify the fear in panic
- How to induce symptoms of panic to build tolerance of discomfort
- Strategies for choosing a panic behavior to replicate
Social Anxiety: Paradoxical Treatment Interventions that Get Results
- Going after embarrassment
- Tools to practice mindfulness during conversations
- Build clients’ “I can handle it” muscle
- Help clients improve insight about their fears
- How to remove safety behaviors in social situations
Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) and Worry: Helping Our Clients Live in the Present
- Overcoming the fear that “I won’t be able to handle it”
- Tools that teach clients how to handle distressing thoughts/feelings
- Utilize mindfulness/living in the present
- Write worry scripts, assign time for worry, chase after worry
Kids with Anxiety: Playing with Fear
- Special considerations when working with children
- School refusal, contamination, bad thoughts, PANS/PANDAS
- Add play to your treatment plan
- Strategies for age appropriate interventions
- Teach kids to talk back to their fears
- How to handle parent resistance/therapy interference
Termination and Relapse Prevention
- Develop a client wellness plan that sticks
- Help clients identify red flags
- Teach clients to do ongoing exposures
- Establish a plan for when to return to therapy
- Risks and limitations of the research
