ACT with Anxiety: Help Clients Get Unstuck from Anxiety and Enrich Their Lives – Richard Sears

ACT with Anxiety: Help Clients Get Unstuck from Anxiety and Enrich Their Lives – Richard Sears

Description:

As a therapist, it’s likely you treat stress and anxiety successfully with techniques like relaxation almost every day. But have you noticed that some clients seem to just get worse, despite your best efforts? That the more you work to reduce the stress or the anxiety, the worse it gets?

Teaching relaxation, coping or distress tolerance skills may be fine for surviving a crisis, but in the long run, they often subtly reinforce avoidance of thoughts and feelings. Even talking about anxiety week after week in therapy can become a form of avoidance! Worse still, the struggle with anxiety can become ingrained in clients’ sense of identity, and their lives become very restricted and without purpose or meaning.

Watch ACT expert and author Dr. Richard Sears as he brings the principles of ACT to life with his wisdom, humor, and passion. He’ll help you transform your clients’ relationship with their anxieties to help them build a life worth living. You’ll learn how to skillfully use:

Acceptance and mindfulness processes to help clients relate differently to anxious thoughts and feelings
Commitment and behavioral change processes to help them flexibly move in the direction of a more meaningful life
From explaining the ins and outs of ACT with anxiety using everyday metaphors and samples, Dr. Sears’ provides dozens of techniques that can transform your clients’ suffering in the very first session!

And as an added bonus, you’ll receive an EXCLUSIVE 25% OFF discount on Dr. Sears’ ACT with Anxiety and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy & Mindfulness Toolbox books— when you purchase either or both with registration!

Outline:
The Anxiety Trap and How to ACT

From natural stress response to chronic reactivity
How anxiety about anxiety leads to a restricted life
Conceptualizing GAD, panic, OCD, health anxiety, and PTSD from an ACT frame
Toward process-focused treatment versus techniques
Help Clients Set Their Life’s Course
Don’t Let Anxiety “Drive the Bus”

Use “the voice” of anxiety to discern values
Define a life worth living alongside anxiety
Design exposures to coincide with values
Exercise: Bus metaphor
Anxiety as Control Attempt:
Let Go of What Is Not Working

Myths and truths of thought suppression
Dig deeper into the control pit
Increase psychological flexibility in the face of anxiety
Metaphor Exercise: Creative helplessness to get rid of anxiety
Clients Are Not Their Anxiety:
How to Expand the Sense of Self

Explain over-identification with anxiety
Shift from self-as-content to self-as-context with the anxious client
Metaphor Exercise: Expand the sense of self to put anxiety in context
Defusion:
Break Free from The Battle with Anxious Thinking

How internal representations develop in the human mind
How thoughts are conditioned with meaning and emotion
Reification of thoughts – why arguing with thoughts can make them worse
Brain programming – why clients cannot control or suppress thoughts long-term
Defusion – break the pattern of anxious spirals
Metaphor Exercise: Shift from being lost in the drama to aware of thoughts as they are
Acceptance:
Break Free from the Battle with Anxious Feelings

The nature, purpose, and psychophysiology of anxious feelings
Diving into feelings to uncouple them from thoughts and misinterpretations
Metaphor exercise for exposure therapy
Metaphor exercise for self-compassion
Metaphor exercise for shifting old feelings through memory reconsolidation
Just this Moment:
Break free from Future Worries and Past Regrets

Why our brains get lost in the past and the future
Help clients start from where they are
Eternity in this moment – the illusion of time
Mindfulness – experiencing reality through the senses versus mental representation
Explore anxiety with curiosity – math problem versus sunset
Exercise: Three minute mindfulness
Just Do It:
Take Committed Action

How to build momentum toward what really matters
Develop a realistic and workable action plan
Teach clients to act with anxiety
Why we cannot “try” – making the leap
NLP online course

So what is NLP?
Firstly, NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. Secondly neuro refers to your neurology;
Thirdly linguistic refers to language however, programming refers to how that neural language functions.
As a result,In other words, learning NLP is like learning the language of your own mind!

Moreover, NLP is the study of excellent communication–both with yourself, and with others.
It was developed by modeling excellent communicators and therapists who got results with their clients.
NLP is a set of tools and techniques, but it is so much more than that.
In conclusion, It is an attitude and a methodology of knowing how to achieve your goals and get results.