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

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Exploring the Essential Features of “Richard Sears – ACT with Anxiety: Help Clients Get Unstuck from Anxiety and Enrich Their Lives – PESI”

Speaker: Richard Sears, PsyD, PhD, MBA, ABPP
Format: Audio and Video
Media Type: Digital Seminar

Tags: Best Sellers Acceptance Commitment Therapy

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!

Speaker
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 behaviors 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 behavioral activation plans to help clients take measurable steps toward a more fulfilling life.

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

Target Audience

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

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