Chronic Anxiety: Powerful Treatment Methods to Break the Anxiety Cycle

Credit

Handouts

Faculty

David Carbonell, PhD Related seminars and products

---

Effective treatment methods for anxiety disorders were just starting to enter the mainstream when David Carbonell, PhD, began his career as a psychologist over 25 years ago. He’s been helping people overcome fears and phobias, and developing new treatment strategies, ever since. Blending humor, compassion, and acceptance with cognitive behavioral methods, Dr. Carbonell, a sought-after presenter, has taught his unique treatment methods to more than 5,000 mental health professionals at workshops across the country.

Dr. Carbonell is the “Coach” at www.anxietycoach.com, a popular self-help site, as well as the author of The Worry Trick (New Harbinger Publications, 2016) and Panic Attacks Workbook (Ulysses Press, 2004). He’s the founding member of The Therapy Players, an improvisational comedy troupe of psychotherapists, and a frequent speaker at annual conferences of the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. He has a unique blend of CBT, ACT, Metacognitive Therapy to offer people with anxiety disorders, and the professionals who treat them, and it’s his goal for you to leave armed with an approach, and numerous specific tools, that you can use the next day.

Clinicians rave about David’s guiding formulation of the Anxiety Trick, the simple, humorous language with which he describes it, and the way he helps you translate it into practical, powerful interventions. Join him for a day and go home ready to use innovative new strategies for helping anxious clients, bypassing many of the usual obstacles to progress as you guide your clients to recovery.

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. David Carbonell maintains a private practice and is a founder member of The Therapy Players. He receives royalties as a published author. Dr. Carbonell receives a speaking honorarium, recording, and book royalties from PESI, Inc. He has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. David Carbonell has no relevant non-financial relationships.

Alternate Options

Additional Info

Access never expires for this product.

Target Audience

• Social Workers
• Psychologists
• Counselors
• Marriage and Family Therapists
• Case Managers
• Addiction Counselors
• Therapists
• Nurses
• Other Mental Health Professionals

Outline

Treatment Strategies Prepare Clients for Treatment

• Disarm the fear of treatment
• Discover the Anxiety Trick
• Experiment with exposure and acceptance
• Empathy requires a phobic viewpoint

• CBT methods to review outcomes and plan experiments
• ACT methods to promote acceptance of discomfort and action
• Metacognitive Therapy methods to disengage from arguing with anxious thoughts
• Paradoxical methods to encourage exposure

• Belly breathing the right way
• Don’t take it lying down
• What’s your job when you’re anxious?
• Replace destructive protection with valued actions
• The rules of opposites

• The problem with correcting thoughts
• Uncle Argument at the banquet
• Disengage from “what if?”
• Change your relationship with worry

• Work with your amygdala
• The real purpose of exposure
• Being AWARE

Treating Anxiety Disorders Panic Disorder

• What maintains it? How to end it
• Hope and help for demoralized clients
• Get unstuck from the “Why?” questions
• 3 powerful questions

• The self-centered phobia
• Whose thoughts bother you?
• Secrecy is a safety behavior
• Would you like to try an experiment?
• Compassion for self

• The two types of worry
• The Mad Libs of anxiety
• Paradoxical thought experiments
• Don’t even think of thought stopping
• Worry appointments and exposure methods for worry

• In vivo exposure for:
  • Fear of flying
  • Fear of public speaking

Research Limitations and Risks of Psychotherapeutic Approaches

Objectives

1. Communicate how anxiety can impede clients’ ability to engage in treatment and utilize clinical strategies to alleviate this issue.
2. Analyze the efficacy of various anxiety treatment approaches, including CBT, ACT, Metacognitive Therapy and paradoxical methods.
3. Implement clinical techniques to address clients’ thoughts, feelings and behavior that underlie anxiety, including shame, blame and excessive self-protection.
4. Teach a simple breathing technique that both decreases acute anxiety symptoms and serves as a metaphor for management of future anxiety.
5. Apply simple yet effective clinical interventions in sessions to help clients acquire a new perspective of chronic anxiety and a more adaptive approach to managing symptoms.
6. Utilize specific behavioral interventions to decrease symptoms of Panic Disorder, Social Anxiety Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and Specific Phobias.

Reviews