A therapist for anxiety plays a crucial role in helping individuals overcome panic attacks, phobias, and traumas. Their approach involves understanding the nature of anxiety, building a therapeutic alliance, and employing various techniques to address the underlying issues and promote healing.
Here’s how a therapist for anxiety can help:
- Understanding and Education:
- Providing clients with a general understanding of anxiety, its nature, and its function.
- Explaining the difference between normal anxiety and disordered anxiety.
- Dismantling myths about panic and anxiety to approach treatment from a place of knowledge rather than fear.
- Building a Therapeutic Alliance:
- Establishing rapport and a positive alliance, which is essential for change across all forms of psychotherapy.
- Acknowledging and validating clients’ experiences to ensure they feel heard.
- Normalising and reframing experiences to build hope and optimism, as many clients may feel hopeless about change.
- Displaying understanding with formulations and ensuring the client acknowledges the formulation is correct.
- Offering a helping relationship with unconditional positive regard and empathy [see previous turn].
- Assessment and Goal Setting:
- Assessing the client’s efforts to manage anxiety and how well these efforts have worked.
- Identifying patterns of experiential avoidance and control efforts.
- Helping clients clarify their values and how they want to live their lives.
- Collaboratively setting individualised goals, focusing on what the client wants instead of anxiety.
- Therapeutic Techniques:
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): Addressing thinking patterns and behaviours that worsen anxiety. CBT helps clients identify and challenge distorted thoughts, such as overestimation of probability and catastrophising.
- Exposure Therapy: Implementing behavioural experiments to gradually face feared symptoms or situations. Framing exposure in the context of a client’s values and goals, with the aim of moving towards a valued life.
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT):
- Using mindfulness and acceptance-based notions to understand and treat anxiety disorders.
- Helping clients accept what needs to be accepted and change what can be changed to make meaningful life improvements.
- Focusing on living a rich and meaningful life rather than solely on anxiety reduction.
- Using metaphor, paradox and experiential exercises to help clients make contact with thoughts, feelings and memories that have been feared and avoided.
- Solution-Focused Brief Therapy (SFBT):
- Focusing on what is working in the client’s life rather than what is wrong.
- Identifying strengths and resources, and finding exceptions to anxiety.
- Eliciting questions, asking about details and giving compliments to encourage clients to talk about solutions and change.
- Using techniques like scaling questions to assess hope, confidence and motivation.
- Psychosensory Therapy:
- Using sensory input to alter moods, sensations, thinking and behaviour [see previous turn].
- Employing techniques like Havening, which uses touch to create delta waves in the brain, depotentiate traumatic experiences and provide a safe haven for the amygdala.
- Promoting Self-Awareness and Coping Strategies:
- Encouraging clients to explore how anxiety has become a problem in their lives.
- Helping clients recognise and challenge the belief that they must control their thoughts and emotions.
- Developing coping strategies to manage stress and reduce emotional arousal.
- Addressing Trauma:
- Employing trauma-informed approaches to stabilise and calm patients.
- Using techniques like Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) to lay traumatic memories to rest.
- Ongoing Support and Flexibility:
- Framing therapy as an opportunity to learn new and more flexible ways of responding to anxiety.
- Monitoring progress and brainstorming solutions for overcoming barriers.
- Preparing clients for potential setbacks and equipping them with strategies to deal with them.
Summary
A therapist for anxiety adopts a multifaceted approach to assist individuals in overcoming panic attacks, phobias and traumas. They educate clients about anxiety, establish a strong therapeutic relationship, and utilise various therapeutic techniques such as CBT, ACT, SFBT and psychosensory therapies. By promoting self-awareness, developing coping strategies and providing ongoing support, the therapist for anxiety empowers clients to reclaim their lives and move towards a more fulfilling future.