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

Description

Handouts

Outline

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

Faculty

Lynn Lyons, LICSWRelated seminars and products: 6

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Lynn Lyons, LICSW, is an internationally recognized psychotherapist, author, and speaker with a special interest in interrupting the generational patterns of anxiety in families. Her skill-based approach to anxiety focuses on the need to teach families about HOW anxiety works and what families can do to pull members out of the powerful “anxiety cult” that demands obedience to its need for certainty and comfort. Lynn’s approach uses humor, playful connection, and a constant focus on DOING, an umbrella strategy she has taught to thousands of professionals and families.

Lynn is the co-author with Reid Wilson of Anxious Kids, Anxious Parents and the companion book for kids Playing with Anxiety: Casey’s Guide for Teens and Kids. She is the author of Using Hypnosis with Children: Creating and Delivering Effective Interventions and has two DVD programs for parents and children.

She maintains a private practice in Concord, New Hampshire where she sees families whenever she’s not on the road teaching.
Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Lynn Lyons is in private practice. She receives royalties as an author for HCI; and Norton. Ms. Lyons receives a speaking honorarium from PESI, Inc.
Non-financial: Lynn Lyons has no non-financial relationship to disclose.