2 Day Skills Practice Intensive to Treat Anxiety Disorders: Proven and Effective Techniques and Intervention Strategies with Children, Adolescents and Adults

Workshop Description

If you have treated people with anxiety disorders, you know how much of a problem it is to help clients and students navigate through their anxiety. Over time, too many have entered therapy for anxiety having been told over and over by exasperated friends and family to Just.Stop.Worrying.About.It. They have felt terrified by panic and ashamed to admit how keenly they fear being afraid. They know they are competent but entirely freeze when asked to speak in a group meeting, and they feel weak for being unable to force the words out. Many have been in psychotherapy and have made gains dealing with family of origin issues, addiction, personality concerns, self-esteem or other psychological complaints, but they still are debilitated by worry, panic or social anxiety. For people of all ages who suffer anxiety, good psychotherapy may take some time, but their suffering can immediately be relieved if treatment begins with symptom management. So many competent therapists can benefit from a clear, symptom management approach to anxiety disorders that will work seamlessly with other psychotherapeutic needs.

In this 2-Day Intensive Workshop, Dr. Margaret Wehrenberg, author of The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques will share her best-selling ideas for how to eliminate panic, worry and social anxiety for clients and students of every age. These techniques really work and can be immediately applied by seminar participants in their school, medical or office settings. Through discussion, demonstration, and participant interactive practice, not to mention fun, participants will gain a compendium of methods they can utilize with their specific clientele.

Dr. Wehrenberg will cover a range of anxiety issues, including:

• The purpose of worry and how to interrupt rumination
• Health anxiety, using “Worry Well and Only Once” among other methods
• Exploring the origins of panic to adjust treatment and apply 3 immediate ways to stop panic in its tracks
• The process of memory consolidation that sets cues for panic and social anxiety and how to set up successful exposures to accomplish memory reconsolidation that desensitizes those cues
• When and how to apply “energy tapping” to reduce phobic reactions that keep anxiety in place
• Reducing generalized anxiety through cognitive tools such as “Transfer Your Worry”, “Pay Attention Out Loud” and “Do the Worst First”
• Establishing the 3 C’s conditions – Calm, Competent and Confident – by addressing cognitions, behaviors and belief change to create successful exposures for social anxiety

Letter from Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D.

Dear Colleagues,

If I have heard it once, I have heard it hundreds of times about my 1-day workshop: “There was enough material here for 2 days!” The biggest limit of my 1-day format is time to help seminar participants feel confident they can apply all the knowledge to their specific clientele and students. Now you can have a chance to master the anxiety management techniques that have helped thousands of people.

I want to share with you my approach to getting the symptoms of anxiety under control. Sometimes anxiety management is all that is needed, and sometimes it sets the stage so that other psychological work can continue without distraction from these troubling symptoms. If you have ever attended a 1-day workshop with me, you know it is loaded with ideas for treating generalized anxiety, panic and social anxiety. In this 2-day session I delve deeper into the application of The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques, offering you opportunities to apply the techniques in practice sessions and to fine-tune your skills with cases studies and lots of discussion for how to use these methods in difficult cases.

This 2-day format session will be different because I will show you how I teach clients and students to do the basic techniques of breathing for panic or for generalized anxiety, muscle relaxation, and energy tapping, and you will be able to interact in and practice those. I will demonstrate varied techniques with participant volunteers (either role play or actual issues), I will do real-time case study, and you will have several rounds of applied practice.

I hope you will join me, bring your questions and cases and be prepared to have some fun with practice sessions. Regardless of your level of current expertise, you will come away with enhanced skills to help your clients/students manage their anxiety disorders.

Why Study with Dr. Wehrenberg?

Margaret is a psychologist in private practice and the author of 9 books on the treatment of anxiety and depression, notably the best-selling book, The 10 Best-Ever Anxiety Management Techniques. She blogs for Psychology Today and in 2021 was quoted in the New York Times, AARP Magazine, Woman’s World Magazine, and she contributed articles published in The Psychotherapy Networker online. She brings a wealth of practical knowledge from her long career in mental health.

Margaret Wehrenberg, Psy.D.

Workshop Topics:

• Anxiety
• social anxiety
• worry