Lynn Lyons – 3-Day Intensive Workshop Helping Anxious Kids: Powerful Approaches for Breaking the Worry Cycle

Outline

A Process-Based Approach to Anxiety

• Don’t fall into the Content Trap:
  • Process of anxiety matters more than the content of the child’s fears
• Patterns of Worried Families;
  • Avoidance
  • Accommodation
  • Reassurance
  • Overprotection
• ”Don’t Do the Disorder”:
  • How to avoid mirroring and supporting the anxiety disorder

Four Critical Concepts: The Foundation of a Skill-Based Approach

• Content versus Process:
  • Moving kids and parents out of the details of worry and into a process based approach that applies to all anxiety disorders
• We Are Eliminating Nothing:
  • Getting rid of symptoms doesn’t work with paradoxical anxiety
• How to Get on Offense:
  • Changing the relationship to worry
• Creating Playful Connection:
  • Offer solutions to Anxiety’s demands

Laying the Groundwork: What Families Need to Know Upfront

• Getting Out of the Anxiety Cult:
  • Breaking the Anxiety Culture – escaping the high demands of school, home, social life …
• Create a new framework for families to separate from generational anxiety
• The importance of psychoeducation:
  • Explanation activates treatment
• Cognitive Patterns:
  • Recognize anxiety and interrupt common thought patterns
    • Global
    • Catastrophic
    • Permanent

Putting It Together: Seven Puzzle Pieces

• Expect Worry
• Talk to Worry
• Get Uncomfortable and Unsure ON PURPOSE
• Breathe
• Know What You Want
• Bridge Back to Your Successes
• Take Action on Your Plan

Creating Interventions and Homework: Tasks that Teach

• Role Playing: The importance of experiential learning and practice
• Using Rewards and Consequences: The ins and outs of parent coaching
• Examples of My Favorite Assignments:
  • Wall of Flexibility
  • Spaghetti Challenge
  • Photo Album Investigation
  • Ten Good Things … and many more

Schools, Accommodations, and Parents

• Creating Effective Behavioral Plans
• Skill-Based Goals versus Avoidance-Based Plans
• Case Studies and Common Issues

When it’s not just Anxiety …
Untangling Complicated Presentations with Three Frames for Treatment and Prevention

• Experience is Variable: Creating Flexibility in a Rigid System
• The Value of Parts: Skills to Combat Global Thinking
• Action Counts: Counteracting the Passivity of Anxiety and Depression

The Challenge of Somatic Symptoms

• Taking Full Advantage of Relaxation: Are we missing opportunities? (Yes!)
• The Safety Behavior Trap: Common Ways We Exacerbate Physical Symptoms
• Common Diagnoses with Anxious Children (eg GI issues, insomnia, headaches)
• The Mind-Body Connection: What Kids (and Adults) Should Know

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder: The Importance of Process

• Myths and Current Research
• The Biggest mistakes therapists make with OCD
• Diagnosis and Misdiagnosis
• Creating a Family Plan
• The benefit of direct language and psychoeducation for families

Anxiety, ASD, OCD: A Tangled Web

• The Executive Overload Model
• Attention and Focus?
• Internal versus External Focus
• The importance of prioritizing interventions

When There’s a Trauma History

• What Modifications are Needed?
• A Cognitive Approach and Complex PTSD?
• The Concept of Differentiation