When: Friday, October 4th , 2024 | 9:00 am – 4:30 pm Pacific Time
Where: Live on Zoom. You will receive your Zoom link/invitation the week of the event.
Continuing Education Credit Hours: 6 CEs | $165.00
With anxiety at an all-time high across all demographics, all mental health professionals must become more adept at effectively understanding, identifying, assessing, and treating various anxiety disorders, phobias, and OCD.
This continuing education workshop promises to help mental health professionals better understand and treat anxiety more effectively using evidence-based treatments like Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) and Compassionate Exposure.
For decades, Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP) has been studied as one of the most efficient ways to treat anxiety disorders, OCD, and specific phobias. Exposure & Response Prevention, done well, can change lives and lead to incredible recovery. Many clinicians are unsure or even fearful of learning this treatment because of misunderstanding the treatment model, such as believing ERP is cruel or further traumatizing. Even Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can be a less than warm modality to many providers. Evidence-based practices can be applied with the warmth mental health providers have for clients. This workshop provides an in-depth view at the Exposure & Response Prevention model while centering self-compassion. People living with “doubt disorders” like Generalized Anxiety, Health Anxiety, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Panic, and Specific Phobias experience chronic invalidation, hold a distorted sense of self, feel a heightened idea of responsibility, question their reality (including memory and diagnosis itself), can engage in self-punishing behaviors, feel intense amounts of shame, and experience stigmatization.
It is vital that more clinicians in the community become better knowledgeable and skilled at identifying anxiety disorders and effective treatments, as regular talk therapy will not yield results in the lives of anxiety sufferers.
This course combines Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) principles with self-compassion tools and interventions. CBT positions thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as simultaneously occurring factors in the human experience. Practicing self-compassion can feel equally dangerous to allow, especially if a person is having deeply troubling worries, obsessions, fears, and self-beliefs. When an individual has a distorted sense of self, which often happens with anxiety, self-compassion can be a beautiful and challenging first step of healing. Self-compassion has been shown to increase therapy efficacies across modalities (Wetterneck et al., 2013). While it might seem logical that therapy outcomes are impacted by a person’s ability to be self-compassionate, applying and living these practices in real life can be challenging, especially during moments of hardship!
Self-compassion, like exposure and response prevention trials, creates new pathways for thoughts in the brain. However, for many people, especially those in the anxiety-based community, self-compassion does not come naturally and may even bring on discomfort. The practice of self-compassion is correlated with a reduction in symptoms like anxiety, rumination, and depression (Warren et al., 2016). There is much power and healing that compassion can provide. This workshop posits self-compassion work as a primary exposure for the treatment of anxiety-based diagnoses and views self-compassion as a distress tolerance device. In this course, you’ll gain a deeper understanding of the “doubt disorders”; how symptoms, core fears, self-beliefs, criticism, and compassion interact; the tenets of self-compassion; the basic tenets of ERP therapy; and have practical tools for applying self-compassion to the ERP model. Understanding the nuances of diagnoses and how to implement effective treatment through exposure and response prevention and compassion practices will be transformational in your clients’ lives.