While each treatment program is individualized, your program is likely to consist of one or more of the following treatments: Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy; EMDR; and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. We have found that by integrating these three clinically proven psychotherapy procedures, we can maximize treatment effectiveness. Sometimes one approach is all a client needs to overcome anxiety, sometimes more than one approach is better. We believe the combination of these three types of therapy provides a particularly potent approach to reducing or eliminating anxiety in our clients.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) works by understanding how a person’s thinking patterns and behaviors contribute to their experience of anxiety. For example, a person may tend to think things like: “this is too hard, I won’t be able to handle this. I’m not good enough to do this. What if something goes wrong, that would be really bad and terrible.” These kinds of thoughts will tend to have most of us become increasingly anxious. It is very important to be able to become aware of what we are thinking, and to learn more balanced, accurate, and helpful ways of thinking. CBT also focusses on behaviors that tend to initiate or maintain anxiety. For example, if a person has had a panic attack in some public place, that person may want to avoid public places for fear that they might have another panic attack. Avoiding sort of helps people to avoid panic, but it also serves to keep some of the anxiety locked in place. These kinds of behaviors (things we do to manage our anxiety), are also a key target of CBT.
EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) is used to allow clients to work through traumatic or difficult experiences from the past and in the present that might be contributing to anxiety. For example, if a child is bitten by a dog, the child may remain fearful and anxious around dogs, even until much later in her or his life. The adult may not even have any recollection of the bad experience with this dog, but this experience may be stored in his or her brain and that fear might get activated every time certain situations are encountered. These activations of past scary or difficult experiences may lead directly to phobias, excessive worry, or panic. These kinds of experiences are very effectively treated with EMDR. EMDR facilitates the processing of these events, so that the original fear, pain, or anxiety are no longer triggered. Successful treatment with EMDR removes the origin of the anxiety, and so anxiety symptoms are often quickly eliminated or reduced.
Acceptance and Commitment therapy (ACT), provides an additional therapeutic benefit above and beyond what CBT and EMDR provide. ACT reduces or eliminates the power that anxious thoughts and feelings have over our lives. It is a sophisticated approach to psychotherapy that teaches clients how to fundamentally accept their thoughts and feelings so that these same thoughts and feelings no longer have the power to dictate how we experience our lives. ACT also places great importance on defining how we want to live, what is fundamentally important to us, and then to proceed to act in ways that support us in moving towards our most sought after life goals.
CBT, EMDR, and ACT have all been shown by controlled research studies to be effective in the treatment of Anxiety disorders.
