CBT Skills For Distressing Physical Symptoms

This course is designed to be attended live during the specific dates and times listed. By attending live, you’ll be able to harness the benefits of live discussions, timely feedback, and a collaborative environment.

Course Description:

The landscape in physical rehabilitation settings is changing rapidly as the research continues to identify numerous benefits of integrating psychosocial strategies into treatment. An individual’s beliefs, thoughts, and emotions will influence their physiology, their experience of their symptoms and how they engage in their unique rehabilitation process. Your effectiveness as a practitioner is determined largely by your capacity to intentionally identify and address these factors. However, these are skills that are not taught in most traditional physical rehabilitation programs. This experiential course is designed to address this gap, teaching practical strategies from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy that can be integrated immediately into practice.

This course is designed to be attended live during the specific dates and times listed.

Learning Objectives:

After completing this course, participants will be able to:

• Appreciate the psychological processes influencing recovery in physical rehabilitation settings.
• Help patients to identify the various components of their experience with distressing symptoms (physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviours).
• Integrate traditional CBT skills into clinical practice in order to:
  • Identify unhelpful thinking patterns
  • Introduce thought records to evaluate and shift distressing thoughts
  • Develop behavioural experiments & exposure hierarchies to challenge avoidant behaviours rooted in anxiety and interfering with recovery
• Define psychological flexibility and how this relates to physical recovery
• Employ tools for measuring psychological flexibility in patients that are getting “hooked in” by their symptoms.
• Integrate tools rooted in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy into clinical practice. Strategies will include
  • Acceptance & self-compassion.
  • Defusion from painful experiences.
  • Dropping anchor/contacting the present moment.
  • Moving Forward with pain (values-based goal setting).
• Obtain a framework for conceptualizing the private experiences (thoughts, emotions, physical sensations) and behaviours of patients in order to help guide the selection of psychosocial strategies.