The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Anxiety: Breaking Free from Worry, Panic, PTSD and Other Anxiety Symptoms
Kim L. Gratz, Alexander Chapman, Matthew T. Tull
Language: English
Pages: 158
ISBN: 2:00235994
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Overview
If you have an anxiety disorder or experience anxiety symptoms that interfere with your day-to-day life, you can benefit from learning four simple skills that therapists use with their clients. These easy-to-learn skills are at the heart of dialectical behavior therapy (DBT), a cutting-edge therapeutic approach that can help you better manage the panic attacks, worries, and fears that limit your life and keep you feeling stuck.
This book will help you learn these four powerful skills:
•Mindfulness helps you connect with the present moment and notice passing thoughts and feelings without being ruled by them.
•Acceptance skills foster self-compassion and a nonjudgmental stance toward your emotions and worries.
•Interpersonal effectiveness skills help you assert your needs in order to build more fulfilling relationships with others.
•Emotion regulation skills help you manage anxiety and fear before they get out of control.
In The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Skills Workbook for Anxiety, you’ll learn how to use each of these skills to manage your anxiety, worry, and stress. By combining simple, straightforward instruction in the use of these skills with a variety of practical exercises, this workbook will help you overcome your anxiety and move forward in your life.
acceptance, you could work on accepting that your boss has this unfortunate interpersonal style and that it hurts you, and then figuring out what to do about it. For instance, you might use an emotion regulation skill (see the next chapter) to deal with your hurt feelings, use mindfulness to allow the comments to roll off your back, or start looking for a different job with a boss whose style is more compatible with your needs. Finally, when you practice acceptance, it often helps to make a
better able to handle stress when it comes up. Using Mindfulness Skills to Deal with Distraction and Poor Concentration Stress can be very distracting. Often, when people are under a lot of stress, they find that they have a difficult time focusing on anything else. Is this one way in which stress affects you? When you are stressed, do you find it difficult to think about anything else? Do you find that you spend a lot of time thinking about the sources of your stress and the impact this stress
your best not to escape or avoid your emotions; simply bring your attention to the physical sensations of whatever emotion you are experiencing. You’ll find this type of exercise again in chapter 7, when we discuss how to deal with overwhelming emotions related to post-traumatic stress. This exercise, however, is much more focused on worry, so do it whenever you catch yourself worrying. The first step is to catch yourself worrying. Identify that you are worrying and tell yourself, Okay, I’m
attacks, or the sudden experience of intense fear or terror, can be found to occur in most anxiety disorders and are the main symptom of panic disorder in particular. However, as you may remember from the first chapter, panic attacks are actually a very common experience, even for people who haven’t been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. Panic attacks can also be very frightening and may have a major impact on a person’s life. Fortunately, DBT skills can be incredibly useful in reducing the
disorder. Foreword writer Terence M. Keane, PhD, is associate chief of staff for research and development and director of the behavioral sciences division of the National Center for PTSD at the VA Boston Healthcare System. He is also currently president of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America.