Tag: anxiety
Make Decisions Like a Ninja
Decision making can be difficult when we’re struggling with a strong emotion and can be problematic when we’re coping with depression and anxiety. Pros and Cons is a flexible, easy to use and effective CBT skill that can improve our decision-making skills and increase confidence when making decisions. Pros and Cons can be helpful in the following areas: 1. Distress Tolerance: Comparing the Maladaptive coping mechanism to the Adaptive Coping Mechanism 2. Life Skills (exercise, medication compliance, eating well): Comparing, for example, Working Out v. Netflix. 3. Social Anxiety: Comparing Avoiding a Social Event v. Attending 4. Depression: Getting out of …
Social Anxiety and How to Kick its Ass
One effective way of becoming more comfortable with Social Anxiety is to expose yourself to social situations over and over again. When I say this usually the response I get is “How can I practice when I’m too anxious to show up to the kinds of things that make practice possible?” Before I answer that question I encourage you to consider five points: (1) Social anxiety may mean having to do things differently than everyone else in the beginning. (2) Defeating social anxiety is a matter of skill (knowing what to do) over comfort (doing it). (3) Because social performance is …
Challenging Irrational Beliefs with the Continuum Technique
The Continuum Technique is a tool used in CBT to help people challenge irrational beliefs about themselves or the world around them. It’s a pretty simple tool that acts as a contrast to harmful beliefs that we simply accept as true or allow to remain unchallenged. We’re going to apply the technique to a hypothetical situation that some folks with OCD may be able to relate to. This example involves someone who believes that contamination is going to create a threat to their baby which can then lead to reduced affection, touch, and play. The belief we are going to challenge is: …
Does Shame Work?
Before we get into whether shame is effective, we should probably talk about the purpose of shame. Shame has less to do with the morality of a behavior and more to do with the social impact of others knowing about it. The arbitrator of morality is guilt. Not a very effective or accurate arbitrator, but that’s its job. Shame is more about conformity. It is less likely to cause a person to change their behavior and more likely to increase a person’s efficacy in hiding it. Not because the behavior is wrong, just socially or economically harmful and its disclosure …
Progressive Muscle Relaxation
A couple of years ago I did a video on PMR and I can’t find it so I did another one based on a few requests from clients who preferred to be guided through the exercise. I used the cam on my computer (which is about 5 years old) so the quality isn’t terrific – also I hate doing video- but it’s a good exercise and might be worth checking out. If you are experiencing any pain or have an injury just avoid tensing that part of the body when we get to it during the exercise.
Suicidality and Safety Plans
One area of critical importance in working with clients who struggle with depression, anxiety, and OCD is ensuring that a thorough assessment of suicide risk and a plan in coping with suicidal ideation is completed during the assessment and throughout treatment. Even if a client does not have a history of suicidality, a safety plan is a good thing to discuss and have in place. Safety Plans should include the following: Activites that clients have engaged in that have helped them avoid suicide and parasuicidal behaviors in the past or if there is no history, activities they imagine would help them cope. …
Drive the Feeling
Most of us tend to think about emotions as either good or bad, positive or negative but every emotion can be helpful and destructive. One goal of DBT and CBT is to help folks use emotions more effectively; to understand the purpose of each emotion and to decide how to use emotions (if at all) in achieving our objectives. One important step is to determine whether the context or situation reasonably connect to the feeling. If they do, then we work towards figuring out how to abide by the emotion effectively. If they don’t then we act opposite the emotion. …
Get your Greek on…
Did you know that much of CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) is based on the work of the Athenian philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle)? One common skill taught in CBT is Socratic questions which can be used as a means of stepping away from our initial (and provocative) interpretation of an event and coming to a more reasonable conclusion. Socratic reasoning takes a conclusion (or anything really) and begins with a process of asking open-ended questions. This can be helpful when we are struggling with depression or anxiety because we are more likely to come to the worst possible meaning of …
Self-Validation
DBT and CBT are both pretty big on changing how you think as a way of changing how you feel. Both recognize cognitive distortions which are faulty patterns of thinking that develop during periods of distress and/or can act as a catalyst for distress. One component of both therapies involves helping folks change their thinking habits so they are less vulnerable to high levels of distress and are less prone to engaging in ineffective behaviors. One way to challenge ineffective thinking is to engage in self-validation. There are six levels of validation, for this post we’re going to focus on …