Transform your practice with this intensive 2-day Anxiety Treatment Certification recording and get the skills, proven strategies, and interventions you need to take your treatment of anxiety to the next level!
You’ll learn how to more skillfully assess clients, differentiate between various anxiety presentations, fully engage clients in treatment, and effectively use tools from CBT, mindfulness, Motivational Interviewing, and contemplative practices to enhance clinical outcomes.
Expert guidance on combining brain-based principles, body-oriented techniques, and traditional psychotherapeutic approaches will change the way you work with challenging clients whose anxiety is exacerbated by shame, self-judgement, and attachment issues.
Best of all, this training meets the educational requirements when applying to become a Certified Clinical Anxiety Trauma Professional (CCATP) through Evergreen Certifications. Certification lets colleagues, employers, and clients know that you’ve invested the extra time and effort necessary to understand the complexities of treating anxiety in clients. Professional standards apply. Visit www.evergreencertifications.com/CCATP to get started!
Continuing Professional Development Certificates
- PESI Australia, in collaboration with PESI in the USA, offers quality online continuing professional development events from the leaders in the field at a standard recognized by professional associations including psychology, social work, occupational therapy, alcohol and drug professionals, counselling and psychotherapy. On completion of the training, a Professional Development Certificate is issued after the individual has answered and submitted a quiz and course evaluation. This online program is worth 12.0 hours CPD.
Handouts
Manual - Certified Clinical Anxiety Treatment Professional
(13.9 MB)
Debra Alvis, Ph.D., is a licensed psychologist and private practitioner with over twenty-five years of clinical experience. She specializes in an integrative approach bringing together polyvagal, neuroscientific, and somatic principles to treat trauma and co-morbid disorders.
Debra discovered that the polyvagal approach facilitates a mindful awareness of the biological reactions influencing the therapist/client relationship and the client's sense of safety in the world. Integrating physiological, brain-based, body-focused approaches with traditional psychotherapeutic orientations helped clients to recover more easefully and quickly from trauma. In addition, with an increased sense of safety and connectedness, clients more frequently practiced the strategies required through her work in private practice and as a clinical supervisor, educator, and consultant.
Dr. Alvis developed and led the Mind/Body Program at the University of Georgia where she now teaches health psychology graduate students to apply polyvagal, neuroscientific, and somatic approaches, serves as project director for federal grant focusing on integrative healthcare, and develops mindfulness-based research studies. A thirty-year personal contemplative practice and over a thousand hours training as a mindfulness and yoga teacher further enrich her presentations.
Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Debra Alvis is in private practice. Dr. Alvis receives a speaking honorarium from PESI, Inc.
Non-financial: Debra Alvis has no relevant non-financial relationship to disclose.
Additional Info
Program Information
Access for Self-Study (Non-Interactive)
Access never expires for this product.
Objectives
Establish how stories and metaphors can be used as psychoeducational tools to explain the physiology of anxiety, and how contemplative approaches impact the anxious brain and body.
Articulate distinctions in differentiating among anxiety disorders and assessing physical symptomatology.
Provide an explanation of how medication impacts neuroplasticity and determine when medication serves to enhance or derail anxiety treatment.
Specify how individualized, awareness-based interventions can be used by clinicians to enhance client efforts towards change and reduce avoidance.
Communicate how evidence-based contemplative approaches can address self-judgment, worry, and negative thinking that can exacerbate anxiety symptoms.
Characterize how visual meditations can increase clients’ ability to focus attention and reduce rumination.
Analyze the research on the impacts of meditative movement on anxiety symptomology.
Establish how breathing practices can interrupt obsessive thinking, ritualized behaviours, and reassurance seeking.
Specify how treatment plans that employ reframing techniques can interrupt anxiety-producing thoughts.
Assess whether attachment style impacts treatment outcomes amongst clients undergoing treatment for social anxiety disorder.
Communicate how script-based, brief deep relaxation exercises can be implemented to increase feelings of safety and enhance emotional regulation.
Explore how journaling can be used as a clinical tool to shift clients away from anxious thoughts and toward action-oriented change.
Outline
The Neurophysiology of Anxiety
Cognitive & amygdala pathways to anxiety
Autonomic nervous system responses
Polyvagal Theory
Serotonin, dopamine and neurotransmitters
The role of brain derived neurotropic factors
The impacts of sleep and nutrition on the anxious brain
Assessment and Differential Diagnosis
DSM-5 classification of anxiety Disorder
Assessment from the whole person perspective
Clinical approaches for ambiguous anxiety presentations
Phobia vs. OCD
Trauma, Axis II, or both?
Distinguish anxiety from agitated depression
Biological Treatment of Anxiety: Impacts of Psychopharmacology & Nutraceuticals
How medication impacts neuroplasticity
Frequently prescribed medications
Common side effects
Evidence-based supplements
From Avoidance to Proactivity: Strategies to Engage and Sustain Client Motivation
Illustrate neuroscience concepts with stories & metaphors
Link contemplative practices to brain change
Address impasses with awareness based interviewing
Reframes – replacing old neural patterns
Co-create meaningful, values based-goals
Motivational Interviewing for Anxiety Treatment: Mobilizing & Sustaining Change
Elicit change talk
Elaborate on change indicators
Coalesce motivation for exposure treatment
Renew motivation when fear arises
Techniques to Address the Cognitive Pathway to Anxiety
Strategies to dismantle automatic thoughts, core beliefs
How to unwind troublesome thinking patterns
When life feels overwhelming – stemming the tide techniques
Apply Chain Analysis – when and how
Relaxation Skills: Help Clients Develop an Anxiety Resistant Brain
Wire in relaxed, alert mood with deep relaxation
Letting go with moment to moment exercises
Breath and movement strategies to deactivate panic
Antidotes to Shame, Guilt and Self-Judgement
How shame and self-judgement exacerbate anxiety
Tools to identify anxiety fuel
Appropriate & inappropriate guilt
Anxiety interventions for the shame prone client
Ease shame intensity with body witnessing and observing skills
Self-compassion inquiry – inviting in parts of the self
Counteract anxiety with gratitude
Attachment Anxiety
Untangle developmental roots
Contemplative applications – the Polyvagal Theory
Techniques to prime secure attachment
Movement and Visual Meditations for Anxiety Relief
Visual meditations for specific clinical concerns
Prepare with movement, imagery and sound
Draw from inner resources
Instil a new perspective with movement and writing
Individualized follow-up assignments
Mindful Recovery Tools for GAD and Social Anxiety
Three steps for moving from reactivity to responsiveness
Interrupt the worry cycle: from the meditation cushion to daily life
Mindful exploration – predictions vs. what happened
Bring curiosity to perceptions
Prime secure attachment for social anxiety
Meditation for OCD Management
How clients can recognize excessiveness
Titrate exposure with breathing practices
Reduce repetition with mindful response prevention
Overcome obsession with mantra & breath
Research and Limitations
Target Audience
Social Workers
Psychologists
Counselors
Marriage and Family Therapists
Case Managers
Addiction Counselors
Therapists
Other Mental Health Professionals
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Additional Participant CE
Additional Participant CE must be purchased for each additional viewer. These viewers will watch the video with the main registrant, but will have individual access to course handouts and certification. The standard price of this program includes certification for main viewer.
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