Anxiety Disorders: Integrated Christian Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy

hello everyone this is dr. Campbell I want to talk to you a little bit about treatment of anxiety disorders from an integrated Christian cognitive behavioral therapy strategy and I've been dealing with anxiety disorders for a long time in fact it's one of the area that I specialize in and you will also have to learn a lot about anxieties sort of because you're going to have a lot of people coming into counseling with anxiety disorders so it's going to be something you're going to gain some expertise over over time so you need to study and learn and and start to conceptualize anxiety disorders one way I think about this is that anxiety disorders are triggers from the world which turn on the autonomic nervous system the autonomic response in the nervous system particular it turns on what's called the sympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system God wired us this way and it's important that we are wired that way that we have a nervous system it responds to stress and response to events in our life because it can help us a lot by avoiding things that are going to hurt us so that's sort of why it was wired there has adaptive purposes that God built it in there but that something that was meant for good of course can start to be bad in terms of our lives if it takes over and the autonomic nervous system is working to some extent overworking and it's causing us to fear a lot of different things in our world I talked to you a little bit already about how some of those fears are trained by parents who teach us to fear and that the world is a scary place so we do need to go back in the history and look at the origins of they fear and to figure out what happened there but once again some people are just very sensitive and they're prone to anxiety in fact I think most people with psychological disorders have very sensitive reactive nervous systems so that's just my little observation on that but let's talk about the these the different types of anxiety disorders they're usually can be discriminated by the specificity or the of the stimulus that's triggering the anxiety for example in a simple phobia the stimulus that's triggering the anxiety is very specific it's like my mom's afraid of cats and so she sees a cat or no system reacts by the way her father had taught her that fear and there was like an old wives tale that cats could cause certain problems when she was growing up and someone threw a cat on her anyway she learned that fear and very often fears and anxiety are learned through experience in the environment and so we need we need to look at those origins mmm excuse me then the stimulus that triggers anxiety can be more generalized for example in the social phobia where an individual is fine except when they have to speak in front of people and those that triggers anxiety then we have what's called generalized anxiety which is a broad spectrum anxiety which is where we have any type of stimulus just about triggering anxiety so it's generalized anxiety tends to spread out can start specific and then it sort of spreads out and involves other stimuli in it and generalized anxiety is very tough to treat and very tough for people to get over and because it's obviously been something that they're responding to in many different aspects of their life so it's important to look at how specific the stimulus is that's triggering the anxiety now we talked about how the nervous system reacts and how it's you know God sort of wired it in there to react to run and then think it's a very primitive response it's like a knee-jerk and our anxieties often like a knee-jerk it can be adaptive but it also be maladaptive we can start to become afraid far too many things in our world especially if we're being taught that and we're very sensitive people so I want you to know also that anxiety disorder symptoms of anxiety can be caused by medical conditions for example hyperthyroidism or certain heart disorders etc can have side effects certain medications can have side effects of anxiety so it's important to if you have a client coming in with anxiety might the first session sort of do an analysis of what's going on but you might also refer that client for a complete like physical so that we can figure out whether any of the conditions that they're experiencing were from physical problems now in disorders such as panic disorder by the time the person gets to me they've usually gone through a lot of doctors they've gone through a lot of tests because they they they're dying or going crazy now panic disorders are one of the exceptions to the stimulus being out there that's triggering the reaction the stimuli and anxiety disorders seem to be in turn or proprioceptive by definition you can't really tell what is causing you the anxiety to sort it's hard to put your aunt a panic attack it's hard to put your finger on it but what a panic attack is it's described as a false alarm in your brain basically your your brain goes oh god we're dying we're dying unbelievably bad feeling you feel like you're going crazy losing your mind going to die depersonalization derealization it's really unpleasant it's sort of my analogy there is it's like walking down a hallway and then getting into a seat and being electrocuted but not dying it's that traumatic so you might imagine that when people have these they have other what happens is they get secondary conditioning of lots of that response for example if they start to think about walking down the hallway they'd start to experience anxiety if they start thinking even thinking about going in the building they start to experience anxiety because it's so much associated and they'll try to avoid those situations so you can get panic attacks with agoraphobia for example where an individual is thought through this so much that they're afraid to go out at all because they might have a panic attack and they have a panic attack then who will help them and so they they tend to stay inside so that's an extreme example of that of the consequences of the panic attack in the secondary conditioning now of course as Christians God doesn't want us to be anxious it says do not be anxious about anything but everything with prayer and Thanksgiving percent to requests the God and the peace that transcends all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus there are a lot of scriptures that that are sort of anti-anxiety scriptures and sometimes I with the Christians all hand on the Bible and I'll say here show me in here where it says to be anxious and of course there right isn't anywhere where it shows you tells you to be anxious in fact there's a lot of scriptures cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you et cetera and I memorized a lot of those because I tend towards anxiety so the Scriptures do help you and they are powerful but it's not the only thing my emphasis with the with anxiety disorder this is often the flesh and the truth of the flesh and I try to help people reduce their overall level of anxiety and I use a device called a motivator and and the technique is called cue controlled relaxation basically every seven minutes this motivator I used and I where goes off and it buzzes and then when it buzzes I'll take a slow deep breath in through the nose out through the mouth and as I'm doing that I'll say something such as let go I'm like God there I'm using the flesh part the cognitive part is the thinking part and the flesh part is the slow deep breathing and slow deep breathing is totally incompatible with anxiety so I use that to try to turn off the nervous system and to desensitize people to the world out there so that their threshold is how it takes more of a stimulus to trigger an anxiety response because usually people are very sensitive and and it doesn't take much to trigger the anxiety response so that's my main tool that I used in terms of dealing with the flesh and I use scriptures in combination with that and I use prayer etcetera even meditation teaches people to meditate but the slow deep breathing is very powerful and it's one of the basic tools I use to reduce anxiety now there are other things that I help people do I get them plugged into exercise usually that's very important to reduce anxiety drinking liquids is important there's lots of a lot of water that's good to do for anxiety so there are other flesh things that are important as well as tying people into something bigger than themselves getting them back to church getting them looking at things in a different way helping them change their perspective now the actual additional treatments to bring about a relaxation response from a psychology point of view can include for example progressive muscle relaxation which is a technique where you tense and then relax you know so you tense your muscles and then relax there's mental imagery where you think of pleasant things and pleasant situations and your anxiety can go down there's a bio feedback which is wiring yourself up and then as you relax you say a sound will go lower or higher based on whether you're relaxed and that's the feedback you get so you learn to relax through that technique and meditation so there are lots of different tools that you can use I tend to use that cue controlled relaxation to bring about that response and I'm very successful with that at the same time I'm teaching the scriptures and I'm teaching truths about the world that it's not really a scary place when you have God and you have the big picture there so I try to bring people back to a knowledge of the truth and the truth will also help set them free as I work on their flesh to also learn how to relax I have an interesting video that I made on my daughter who learned in the womb and learned the word relaxation in the womb actually the word and I'll give you a link to look at that so that you can have a have a look at the power of relaxation and slow deep breathing basically so those are that's a way that I integrate and look and treat anxiety disorders from a flesh sort of perspective using cognitive behavioral therapy changing thinking changing behavior and and using the behavior modification techniques and by the way you should learn a lot about behavior modification reward and Punishment because I conceptualize anxiety disorders especially in terms of negative reinforcement I've already given you a handout on that on negative reinforcement so I suggest you go back and look at that because it's a really an important way to understand for example obsessive compulsive disorders etc so I can conceptualize those using a combination of my behavioral treatments and understanding of behavior modification and my understanding of the flesh understanding of relaxation concepts and also the spiritual realm where we help people to look at things deeper and bigger and from the perspective from God's perspective and you know that we're all going to be going home and you know this world is troubled and we must keep looking up and keep looking for God to God for our strength and nestling under his wings for our peace and our and our relaxation from there and it comes from him so there all these things can be combined in the treatment of anxiety disorders and I hope you're going to be very successful in that god bless

Channel: Brian Campbell

Views: 17,955

Rating: 4.90099 out of 5

Keywords: Anxiety (Disease Or Medical Condition), Christian Therapy

Id: sxl1HMbLBtg

Length: 11min 0sec (660 seconds)

Published: Tue May 06 2014