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

CPD

Handouts

Speaker

Richard Sears, PsyD, PhD, MBA, ABPP Related seminars and products

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Richard W. Sears, PsyD, PhD, MBA, ABPP, is a board-certified clinical psychologist in Cincinnati, Ohio, where he is in private practice for both therapy and consultation. Dr. Sears has served as a clinical supervisor for 15 years in addition to teaching doctoral level supervision and consultation courses. He holds several academic appointments, including the Department of Clinical Psychiatry & Behavioral Neurosciences with the UC College of Medicine. Dr. Sears is also a psychologist contractor with the Cincinnati VA Medical Center and with Alliance Integrative Medicine.

A sought-after professional speaker, Dr. Sears has provided hundreds of seminars on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and mindfulness around the world, and is the author of over a dozen books, including the forthcoming ACT with Anxiety (2020), The CBT & Mindfulness Toolbox (2017), Mindfulness: Living through Challenges and Enriching Your Life in this Moment (2014) and Consultation Skills for Mental Health Professionals (2006). He is also a fifth-degree black belt in Ninjutsu, once serving as a personal protection agent for the Dalai Lama of Tibet. He has a PhD in Buddhist Studies, and received ordination in three traditions, as well as recognition as a Zen master, experiences that have greatly enriched his understanding of and passion for teaching the principles of mindfulness and ACT.

 

Speaker Disclosures:

Financial: Dr. Richard Sears maintains a private practice and has an employment relationship with the University of Cincinnati, Alliance Integrative Medicine, and Wright State University School of Professional Psychology. Dr. Sears receives royalties as a published author. He receives a speaking honorarium, recording royalties, and book royalties from PESI, Inc. He has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.

Non-financial: Dr. Richard Sears is the director of the Center for Clinical Mindfulness and Meditation. He has professional affiliations with the American Board of Professional Psychology, the Academy of the American Board of Clinical Psychology, the Association for Contextual Behavioral Sciences, and the Cincinnati Academy of Professional Psychology.

Objectives

1. Determine the idiographic factors that maintain vicious cycles of anxious thoughts, feelings, and behaviours for each individual client.
2. Investigate what really matters to clients to enhance motivation and willingness to engage in the work of therapy.
3. Utilize metaphors to foster a more flexible sense of self in the service of creating a life worth living.
4. Apply new research on metacognition, defusion, and acceptance to change your client’s relationship to anxious thoughts and feelings.
5. Employ mindfulness exercises to undermine automatic reactions that maintain the anxiety response.
6. Formulate individualized behavioural activation plans to help clients take measurable steps toward a more fulfilling life.

Outline

• 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

• Use “the voice” of anxiety to discern values
• Define a life worth living alongside anxiety
• Design exposures to coincide with values
• Exercise: Bus metaphor

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

Target Audience

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