Workshop Duration

1 day/6 hours

Workshop Level

intended for mental health professionals with intermediate to advanced CBT skills in treatment of anxiety

CBT practitioners can expect that approximately two-thirds of their anxious clients will experience clinically significant symptom improvement with treatment but only 25% - 40% will achieve symptom-free status.  This means that a significant number of anxious treatment-seekers (25%-33%) show a poor treatment response.  This workshop addresses the pervasive problem of tepid or failed treatment response in the anxiety disorders.  It begins with an analysis of treatment failure, the nature of treatment-resistant anxiety, and the limitations of standard CBT.  The remainder of the workshop focuses on innovations in theory, assessment, case conceptualization, cognitive restructuring, and behavioral experiments that target specific features of treatment resistant anxiety.

WORKSHOP OBJECTIVES:

• UNDERSTAND treatment resistant anxiety  
• ADOPT a transdiagnostic framework
• UTILIZE process-focused assessment and case formulation
• IMPLEMENT resistance-focused cognitive and behavioral interventions
• ENGAGE in real-time treatment evaluation

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN:

• to address poor treatment response to pre-empt discontinuation 
• to  incorporate resistance issues into case formulation and goal setting
• to tailor psychoeducation to increase “buy-in” of reluctant clients
• to modify cognitive and behavioral strategies so they target emotional reasoning, distress intolerance, and homework noncompliance  
• to counter automatic pathological mental control 
• to conduct real-time outcome evaluation