What You’ll Learn During Your Two Days in Nashville
Take your practice to the next level! Here’s what you’ll learn at the amazing Omni Nashville hotel, where you can find onsite pools, massage and spa services, fine dining, and the Ryman Auditorium, Music City Center, Bridgestone Arena, and iconic Broadway all within walking distance!
Getting Started: How to Optimize the Early CBT Sessions
Assessment and Treatment Planning: Set the Stage for Successful Treatment
Anxiety and the Brain: What Every Client Needs to Know
The Art of Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP)
Cognitive Therapy: Change the Way Clients Think about Thinking
Family Involvement: Teach Loved Ones to be a Part of the Solution
Phobias and OCD: Exposure and Response Prevention in Action
- Principles of CBT – Establish roles and goals
- How to socialize your client to the CBT Session structure
- Getting your client to complete 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)
- Help clients ride the wave of anxiety
- Create a fear hierarchy using SUD scales
- How to set up an exposure
- Strategies to handle 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!
- When and how to use imaginary 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
- Challenge the belief that “I won’t be able to handle it”
- Understand worry as a compulsion
- Skills to help clients handle distressing thoughts/feelings
- Mindfulness to get out of the future and into 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 for future struggles
- Teach clients to do ongoing exposures
- Establish a plan for when to return to therapy
- Risks and limitations of the research
Objectives
- Demonstrate the CBT session structure with anxious clients in order to achieve positive clinical outcomes.
- Assess for and diagnose each DSM-5® anxiety disorder, including Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Separation Anxiety Disorder, PANS/PANDAS, and Panic Disorder.
- Integrate Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) techniques to increase your client’s success.
- Utilize strategies that help family members become anxiety “coaches” for the client.
- Formulate interventions for challenging automatic negative thoughts in clients who have been diagnosed with anxiety.
- Plan when it is clinically appropriate to use extreme exposure interventions with clients.
- Demonstrate the use of interoceptive therapy for treating panic in clients.
- Analyze the purpose of utilizing paradoxical exposures when treating social anxiety.
- Apply knowledge about Generalized Anxiety Disorder to learn how to prevent fears about the future from interfering with quality of life.
- Utilize play-based exposure interventions for the treatment of anxiety in children.
- Employ Exposure and Response Prevention techniques to reduce symptoms of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.
- Formulate treatment termination and relapse prevention plans with clients.
