Читать книгу Anxiety For Dummies - W. Doyle Gentry, Laura L. Smith - Страница 76

Mental health professionals offer a wide variety of treatments. We’ve thoroughly studied the research on what works for anxiety disorders so you don’t have to. The best treatments for anxiety have been based on scientific knowledge about what anxiety is and how it works. Studies consistently show that treatments with this scientific foundation are particularly effective. Four treatments have shown efficacy over time:

 Cognitive therapy (CT) focuses on teaching you new ways of thinking. People with anxiety often have distortions in the way they perceive events, and this approach helps you correct those distortions. For example, an anxious client may be overestimating the risks involved with flying. A cognitive approach would help her discover that the risks are small enough to warrant tackling her fear.

 Metacognitive therapy (MCT) goes beyond cognitive therapy and targets the way people think about their thinking. So, it isn’t just concerned with distortions in thinking; rather, it also focuses on how upset one gets over disturbing thoughts. For example, an anxious person may overestimate the risk of being rejected. Cognitive therapy would help that person reassess that risk. MCT would help the person realize that much of the upset is about viewing the distorted thought itself as horrible instead of just a random thought.

 Behavior therapy (BT) operates on the premise that changing the way you act or behave changes the way you feel about the things that happen in your life. Using the previous example of the woman with a fear of flying, a behavior therapist would likely help the woman go through a series of steps related to flying such as watching movies of flying, going to the airport, and eventually booking and taking a flight. Exposure therapy is a primary tool used by behavior therapists when treating anxiety related problems. (See Chapter 9 for more information.).

 Acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) guides clients to become more mindful of the present moment. Thoughts and emotions must be accepted rather than avoided. The very attempt to avoid thoughts and emotions makes them worse according to ACT. ACT also encourages people to identify their core values and live life accordingly.

One other therapy you may hear about is called cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), which essentially represents a combination of CT and BT. We write about these specific types of therapies to inform our readers about what research has found to be successful. In general, all these approaches seem to work. Many of the techniques in each therapy are similar and overlap. That fact may explain why outcome studies have not demonstrated clear superiority for one of these approaches over the others.

Treatments that work share similar strategies. Therefore, we select some of the best elements from each type of therapy for dealing with common symptoms of anxiety, as seen in Part 2.