Social Anxiety Disorder Comprehensive Training Course: Evidence-Based CBT Strategies to Overcome Fear, Stress, and Avoidance

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Program Information

All members of the PESI, Inc. planning committee have provided disclosures of financial relationships with ineligible organizations and any relevant non-financial relationships prior to planning content for this activity. None of the committee members had relevant financial relationships with ineligible companies or other potentially biasing relationships to disclose to learners.  For speaker disclosures, please see the faculty biography.

Handouts

Speaker

Larry Cohen, LICSW, A-CBT Related seminars and products

Social Anxiety Help

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Larry Cohen, LICSW, A-CBT, is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker specializing in the treatment of Social Anxiety Disorder. He has worked with over 1,000 persons with social anxiety and related disorders and has led more than 95 social anxiety therapy groups in Washington, DC. His social anxiety therapy group was the focus of a National Public Radio story on CBT.

Larry received his Masters in Social Work from the University of Michigan in 1987. He co-founded the National Social Anxiety Center (NSAC) in 2014 and has served as NSAC’s Co-Chair ever since. He is also a founding member of the National Registry of Certified Group Psychotherapists.

Larry has achieved a number of certifications including the rigorous certification of Diplomate in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy by the Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies, which has also conferred on him the status of Fellow for having “made sustained outstanding contributions to the field of cognitive therapy,” certification as a Diplomate in CBT by the National Association of Cognitive Behavioral Therapists and certification in Trial-Based Cognitive Therapy, helping people use role plays to change unhealthy attitudes. He is included as a “Top Therapist” in Washingtonian magazine’s listing in the category of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

 

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Larry Cohen maintains a private practice. He receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from Psychotherapy Networker and PESI, Inc. He has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Larry Cohen is the co-founder and co-chair of the National Social Anxiety Center and is a fellow of Academy of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies.

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Objectives

1. Determine what social anxiety disorder is, its impact on those who suffer from it, and what treatments have been demonstrated to be most effective. 
2. Employ strategies to help clients understand the impact of self-focus and self-evaluation when experiencing social anxiety, and how to use external mindfulness when socially anxious. 
3. Utilize strategies to train clients in differing means of doing cognitive restructuring before and after social anxiety triggers. 
4. Construct behavioural experiments / exposures to test socially anxious thoughts and underlying core beliefs, and to increase client motivation to carry out such experiments. 
5. Demonstrate strategies to train clients in the use of assertive defence of the self to increase self-confidence in handling fears come true. 
6. Utilize strategies to help clients identify and change underlying core beliefs that exacerbate their social anxiety.

Outline

Understanding Social Anxiety & Its Evidence-Based Treatment

• Resources for therapists and for consumers
• Basic facts about social anxiety, and the role of shame
• Diversity factors in social anxiety
• The vicious cycle of socially anxious beliefs, automatic thoughts, feelings and behaviours; walking through an example
• Brief overview of outcome studies on social anxiety treatment
• Integrating the 3 waves: debates and syntheses
• Debate on accepting anxiety vs. decreasing anxiety as therapy goal
• The 5 core CBT treatment strategies: external mindfulness; cognitive restructuring; behavioural experiments; assertiveness training; core belief change work

Accepting and Defusing from Socially Anxious Thoughts

• External Mindfulness (curiosity training)
  • Rationale
  • Debate on external mindfulness vs. internal mindfulness (meditation)
  • Thought and feeling defusion
  • Introducing external mindfulness to clients with in-session experiments and video recording
  • Clinical demonstration of introducing clients to external mindfulness in session
  • Homework to help clients master external mindfulness while observing and participating

Changing Socially Anxious Thoughts

• Cognitive Restructuring (reframing)
  • Rationale
  • Themes of socially anxious hot thoughts
  • Debate on defusing from negative thoughts vs. reframing them
  • Debate on how and when to do cognitive restructuring for social anxiety
  • Debate on targeting verbal vs. imaginal thoughts
  • How to introduce clients to cognitive restructuring
  • Clinical demonstration of role-played cognitive restructuring argument
  • Clinical demonstration of use of confident imagery to reframe hot thoughts
  • Homework to help clients master cognitive restructuring

Testing Anxious Thoughts And Reducing Avoidance

• Behavioural Experiments (exposures)
  • Rationale
  • Debate on exposures for habituation vs. experiments for learning /cognitive restructuring
  • How to choose experiments
  • Debate on what types of experiments to choose: straightforward vs. paradoxical (social mishap, de-catastrophizing, shameattacking); examples of both types
  • Debate on use of fear hierarchies
  • In-session and homework experiments
  • Use of video for in-session experiments
  • Clinical demonstration of use of video
  • Introducing clients to safety-seeking behaviours and how they are self-defeating
  • Common safety-seeking behaviours
  • Identifying, reducing and eliminating safetyseeking behaviours
  • Carrying out experiments: before, during and after
  • Debate on accepting anxiety vs. defying /combatting anxiety
  • Strategies to increase follow-through and decrease avoidance of experiments
  • Clinical demonstration of consensual role play to increase motivation to do experiments
  • Use of surveys as experiments

Assertiveness To Increase Self-Confidence

• Assertive Defense Of The Self (head-held-high assertion)
  • Rationale
  • How to practice the strategy in session and in homework
  • Debate on the limitations of the strategy, and ways to address these limitations
  • Clinical demonstrations (2 or 3) of practising this strategy in role plays

Changing Core Beliefs To Increase Self- Confidence; Making Progress Beyond Therapy

• Rationale
• Debate on whether to target core beliefs at all when treating social anxiety
• Themes of core beliefs in social anxiety
• Helping clients identify their unhealthy core beliefs
• Helping client write drafts of healthy new core beliefs
• Core belief change strategies
• Clinical demonstration of core belief argument
• Clinical demonstration of then vs. now

Progress During And Beyond Therapy

• Review of using scales for assessment and monitoring progress
• Termination strategies to maintain progress, make further progress beyond therapy, and to prevent relapse

Target Audience

• Counsellors
• Therapists
• Psychologists
• Addiction counsellors
• Marriage and Family Therapists
• Social Workers