Full Course Description

Social Anxiety Disorder Comprehensive Training Course: Evidence-based CBT strategies to overcome fear, stress, and avoidance

In this six-part intensive training, you will learn how to use the five most effective strategies for treating social anxiety disorder. You will also learn how to apply, combine, and adapt these strategies to fit the unique needs of your socially anxious client. Learn from clinical expert, Larry Cohen, as he teaches you exactly how to design and implement these critical skills in order to decrease social anxiety and build self-confidence. Watch as he demonstrates through role plays exactly how to use the strategies in a flexible, relational way. PLUS, in addition to this intensive training course, you get 70 pages of client worksheets, instructional handouts and questionnaires for you to use and adapt in your own practice. 

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Determine what social anxiety disorder is, its impact on those who suffer from it, and what treatments have been demonstrated to be most effective.
  2. Employ strategies to help clients understand the impact of self-focus and self-evaluation when experiencing social anxiety, and how to use external mindfulness when socially anxious.
  3. Utilize strategies to train clients in differing means of doing cognitive restructuring before and after social anxiety triggers.
  4. Construct behavioral experiments / exposures to test socially anxious thoughts and underlying core beliefs, and to increase client motivation to carry out such experiments.
  5. Demonstrate strategies to train clients in the use of assertive defense of the self to increase self-confidence in handling fears come true.
  6. Utilize strategies to help clients identify and change underlying core beliefs that exacerbate their social anxiety.

Outline

MODULE 1: UNDERSTANDING SOCIAL ANXIETY & ITS EVIDENCE-BASED TREATMENT

  • Resources for therapists and for consumers
  • Basic facts about social anxiety, and the role of shame
  • Diversity factors in social anxiety
  • The vicious cycle of socially anxious beliefs, automatic thoughts, feelings and behaviors; walking through an example
  • Brief overview of outcome studies on social anxiety treatment
  • Integrating the 3 waves: debates and syntheses
  • Debate on accepting anxiety vs. decreasing anxiety as therapy goal
  • The 5 core CBT treatment strategies: external mindfulness; cognitive restructuring; behavioral experiments; assertiveness training; core belief change work
MODULE 2: STRATEGIES FOR ACCEPTING AND DEFUSING FROM SOCIALLY ANXIOUS THOUGHTS
EXTERNAL MINDFULNESS (CURIOSITY TRAINING)  
  • Rationale 
  • Debate on external mindfulness vs. internal mindfulness (meditation)
  • Thought and feeling defusion
  • Introducing external mindfulness to clients with in-session experiments and video recording
  • Clinical demonstration of introducing clients to external mindfulness in session
  • Homework to help clients master external mindfulness while observing and participating
MODULE 3: STRATEGIES FOR CHANGING SOCIALLY ANXIOUS THOUGHTS
COGNITIVE RESTRUCTURING (REFRAMING)   
  • Rationale
  • Themes of socially anxious hot thoughts
  • Debate on defusing from negative thoughts vs. reframing them
  • Debate on how and when to do cognitive restructuring for social anxiety
  • Debate on targeting verbal vs. imaginal thoughts
  • How to introduce clients to cognitive restructuring
  • Clinical demonstration of role-played cognitive restructuring argument  
  • Clinical demonstration of use of confident imagery to reframe hot thoughts
  • Homework to help clients master cognitive restructuring
MODULE 4: EXPERIMENTS TO TEST ANXIOUS THOUGHTS AND REDUCE AVOIDANCE
BEHAVIORAL EXPERIMENTS (EXPOSURES)
  • Rationale
  • Debate on exposures for habituation vs. experiments for learning / cognitive restructuring  
  • How to choose experiments
  • Debate on what types of experiments to choose:  straightforward vs. paradoxical (social mishap, de-catastrophizing, shame-attacking); examples of both types
  • Debate on use of fear hierarchies
  • In-session and homework experiments
  • Use of video for in-session experiments
  • Clinical demonstration of use of video
  • Introducing clients to safety-seeking behaviors and how they are self-defeating
  • Common safety-seeking behaviors
  • Identifying, reducing and eliminating safety-seeking behaviors
  • Carrying out experiments: before, during and after
  • Debate on accepting anxiety vs. defying / combatting anxiety
  • Strategies to increase follow-through and decrease avoidance of experiments
  • Clinical demonstration of consensual role play to increase motivation to do experiments
  • Use of surveys as experiments
MODULE 5: ASSERTVENESS TO INCREASE SELF-CONFIDENCE
ASSERTIVE DEFENSE OF THE SELF (HEAD-HELD-HIGH ASSERTION)
  • Rationale
  • How to practice the strategy in session and in homework
  • Debate on the limitations of the strategy, and ways to address these limitations
  • Clinical demonstrations (2 or 3) of practicing this strategy in role plays
MODULE 6: CHANGING CORE BELIEFS TO INCREASE SELF-CONFIDENCE; MAKING PROGRESS BEYOND THERAPY
CORE BELIEF CHANGE WORK
  • Rationale
  • Debate on whether to target core beliefs at all when treating social anxiety
  • Themes of core beliefs in social anxiety
  • Helping clients identify their unhealthy core beliefs
  • Helping client write drafts of healthy new core beliefs
  • Core belief change strategies
  • Clinical demonstration of core belief argument
  • Clinical demonstration of Then vs. Now 
PROGRESS DURING AND BEYOND THERAPY
  • Review of using scales for assessment and monitoring progress
  • Termination strategies to maintain progress, make further progress beyond therapy, and to prevent relapse

Target Audience

  • Counselors
  • Therapists
  • Psychologists
  • Addiction counselors
  • Marriage and Family Therapists 
  • Social Workers

Copyright : 06/14/2022