APTC Blog

I covered the need to do exposure therapy for anxiety disorders in my last blog post, but I didn’t spend much time talking about another aspect of treatment. As you may already know, the preferred form of treatment for anxiety disorders is Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) and the exposure work is the “Behavior” part of that framework. The “Cognitive” part may be just as important as the behavioral part for many clients. Below you will find a list of what are called “cognitive distortions”. These are common mistakes in people’s thinking that can lead to anxiety and depression

I saw a new client recently and asked one of my usual opening questions for a new client “Tell me what it is you most want to accomplish by working with me”, and my new client responded (as most new clients do) with “I want to learn how to control my anxiety”. I think this reflects a fundamental mistake in how people are thinking about how to better manage their anxiety. If the goal is to” get rid of” or “control” anxiety I think we’re heading off in the wrong direction so I often will offer a different perspective to make sure that the new client and I are on the same page. That perspective is that it’s not helpful to try and “get rid of” or “control” anxiety. 

As a follow-up to my last blog post on using mindfulness to manage an anxious mind, I thought I would furnish some additional resources for how to learn more about mindfulness and if you’re interested in becoming more mindful, how you might begin to develop a mindfulness practice

Inevitably as you seek to manage your OCD and do the necessary exposure work, you will be bombarded with lots of anxious thoughts. Being aware that this is going to happen and having some strategies in place to deal with it, greatly increases your chances of a successful outcome. Most of us aren’t aware of our thoughts, but I guarantee they are there.

As I’ve written about in other places, uncertainty is at the heart of OCD. One of OCD’s many tricks (go here and here for previous posts on this topic) is to make you think you can’t move forward unless you feel sure that nothing bad will happen.