
Contributed by Lynn Lyons
25 Results
Unmasking Anxiety’s Everyday Patterns: How to Interrupt an Epidemic of Avoidance and Worry
Anxiety may be everywhere, but even within our field, we seem to know little about how it operates and is maintained. Without information and interventions that target the underlying patterns that fuel it, anxiety spirals, and the cycle not only continues within, but between people. This session offers concrete strategies to help clients recognize, interrupt, and prevent the cognitive, generational, and social habits of our everyday lives that create anxiety, keep it going, and often lead to depression. You’ll discover how to:
The most common—and often missed—patterns of anxiety in clients of all ages
Active interventions with clients that build skills to interrupt anxiety’s patterns
Normalize worry and anxiety and remove families from a crisis-based and pathologized approaches to uncertainty
Use a family/social support frame that defuses anxiety and depression’s demand for avoidance and disconnection
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Helping Anxious Families: Active Tips That Work and Common Traps to Avoid
Anxiety and OCD will show up, and after the past year, anxious cracks have become chasms for many anxious families.
It’s common for clinicians to get caught up in content (what kids worry about) instead of focusing on the how and why of anxiety --all the more detrimental with a missed OCD issue!
In this recording, Lynn will show you how (and why!) to sidestep this content trap and move away from all-too-common elimination strategies.
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Preventing Childhood Anxiety and Depression: How to Expand Our Paradigm
Given the increasing rates of child and adolescent anxiety and depression, it’s clear our current treatment paradigm isn’t working to proactively reach the young people who need help. It’s time we put an end to misinformed accommodations that only strengthen patterns of anxiety. Discover cutting-edge programs that get upstream of the problem, targeting parents and other important adults as key to mitigating and preventing childhood anxiety. Also, explore family systems approaches that teach both adults and children concrete skills to interrupt generational patterns of anxiety, depression, and emotional (mis)management. This recording will demonstrate how to:
Apply parental coaching and collaboration as an integral component of intervention
Identify family patterns that support generational anxiety and address them using skill-based interventions
Challenge the most common “elimination strategies,” such as distraction and reassurance, that actually increase anxiety and impair functioning
Use groups, psychoeducational classes, and school-based programs to reach more underserved families and youth
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Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents
With anxiety at epidemic levels among our children, Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents offers a contrarian yet effective approach to help children and teens push through their fears, worries, and phobias to ultimately become more resilient, independent, and happy.
How do you manage a child who gets stomachaches every school morning, who refuses after-school activities, or who is trapped in the bathroom with compulsive washing? Children like these put a palpable strain on frustrated, helpless parents and teachers. And there is no escaping the problem: One in every five kids suffers from a diagnosable anxiety disorder.
Unfortunately, when parents or professionals offer help in traditional ways, they unknowingly reinforce a child's worry and avoidance. From their success with hundreds of organizations, schools, and families, Reid Wilson, PhD, and Lynn Lyons, LICSW, share their unconventional approach of stepping into uncertainty in a way that is currently unfamiliar but infinitely successful. Using current research and contemporary examples, the book exposes the most common anxiety-enhancing patterns?including reassurance, accommodation, avoidance, and poor problem solving?and offers a concrete plan with 7 key principles that foster change. And, since new research reveals how anxious parents typically make for anxious children, the book offers exercises and techniques to change both the children's and the parental patterns of thinking and behaving.
This book challenges our basic instincts about how to help fearful kids and will serve as the antidote for an anxious nation of kids and their parents.
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3-Day Intensive Workshop Helping Anxious Kids: Powerful Approaches for Breaking the Worry Cycle
Anxiety is a very persistent master. When it moves into families, it takes over daily routines, schoolwork, and recreation. Depression is often close on its heels.
The most frequent comment I hear from anxious families is “no one told them what to DO.” After multi-session assessment or months of appointments, they still didn’t have a clear plan or understanding of HOW to respond when anxiety shows up.
Imagine being able to offer families immediate and effective tasks to weaken anxiety’s grip!
What if, during a first session, you could give your clients the information and a road map to change the powerful patterns of anxiety disorders?
Join Lynn Lyons, LICSW, internationally recognized psychotherapist, author and speaker, in an intensive training. She will teach you HOW to interrupt anxiety’s cognitive patterns with simple, process-based strategies. You’ll focus on concrete and often counter-intuitive strategies that normalize worry for families and provide an “umbrella approach” that applies to all anxiety disorders.
Leave this workshop with new techniques to break the anxiety cycle:
Untangle complicated presentations of anxiety
Combat the challenges of somatic symptoms
Avoid the big mistakes with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
The importance of prioritizing interventions
… and MORE!
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Helping Parents Through Crises: Avoiding Pitfalls & Amplifying Opportunities
Parents are being asked to navigate jobs, kids’ schooling, and financial concerns, all while handling their own emotions and those of their children.
Although these circumstances are unique, the skills worried parents need to interrupt catastrophic (and contagious) patterns remain the same.
A family approach packed with concrete information and coaching works with stressed families--and is more important than ever.
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Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents: Changing the Family Dance
Anxiety can be a very persistent master. When it moves into families, it takes over daily routines, schoolwork, and recreation. To make matters worse, the things adults (including many therapists and school staff) do to help anxious children can actually make the anxiety stronger. Fortunately, research shows that what we teach children about risk, danger, uncertainty, and problem-solving makes a huge difference in whether they go on to become anxious or depressed teens and adults. In this workshop, you’ll explore concrete counterintuitive strategies that normalize worry for families, including how to help children, teens, and their families.
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OCD and Children: It’s a Family Affair
When obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) shows up in a child, it’s likely that other family members have it, too. OCD is the ultimate cult leader, demanding acceptance of a skewed view of reality and often ruling families for generations. This workshop demonstrates how to recognize OCD, the common pitfalls of treating OCD in kids, and active strategies to get families unstuck.
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Lynn Lyons
Lynn Lyons, LICSW, is a speaker, trainer, and practicing clinician specializing in the treatment of anxious families. She’s the coauthor of Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents and is the co-host of the podcast Flusterclux. Her latest book for adults is The Anxiety Audit.