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

1. Demonstrate how to interrupt patterns of anxious parenting to decrease the modeling of family anxiety.
2. Implement active assignments for families that correct the common cognitive traps that bolster both anxiety and depression.
3. Articulate the difference between content-based and process-based interventions as it relates to treatment.
4. Develop a therapeutic toolbox to include playfulness, humor, games, collaboration, and active homework assignments to reduce anxiety symptoms.
5. Create interventions that focus on interrupting the process of OCD in families rather than the content of the OCD.
6. Incorporate role playing and active techniques in session with families to facilitate emotional expression and increase engagement in therapy.
7. Teach families strategies to decrease the impact of and connection between anxiety, GI symptoms, headaches, and sleep issues.
8. Implement the “7 puzzle pieces” of a skill-based treatment plan for decreasing symptoms of anxiety.
9. Minimize the use of avoidant and safety behaviors that strengthen anxiety in families.
10. Demonstrate to families how the worry and anxiety process works in the brain and body to maximize effectiveness of psychoeducation.
11. Provide psychoeducation to parents and children and the relationship to quality of sleep and symptoms of anxiety.
12. Incorporate relaxation skills and techniques to effectively treat somatic symptoms of anxiety.
13. Consider the differences in clinical presentation of OCD, ADHD and other anxiety diagnoses in order to best inform choice of treatment interventions.
14. Adapt a treatment intervention strategy to meet the clinical needs of children with trauma histories.
15. Assess the impact of anxiety disorders on attention and focus in order to more accurately diagnose and intervene with anxious children.
16. Adapt a process-based treatment approach to clients with ASD with the goal of increasing flexibility and social engagement.
17. Write effective behavioral plans and IEP goals for use in schools.
18. Create at least three homework assignments that experientially promote flexibility and an offensive approach to worry.

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