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Full Course Description

Affective Neuroscience for Clinicians

When it comes to working with emotions in therapy, few interventions deal with the emotion itself and how to respond to it.

Instead, we teach our patients to manage and regulate them…and, in the process, we hope they go away.

But, often, the emotions don’t go away.

Why? Because the modalities you know and practice treat the symptoms and not the cause!

We need a new way to think about psychopathology and this is it!

I’ve devoted my career to affective neuroscience research and emotion-based therapies. And, along the way, helped thousands of patients with their emotional struggles.

YOU CAN easily and effectively help your clients create deep, lasting change by giving them the power to access and accept difficult emotions that come at unexpected times.

Spend this day with me and I guarantee that you will walk away with research proven strategies and tactics that help your patients overcome their emotional challenges and move through trauma, anxiety, and depression.

If you see patients with PTSD, trauma, anger, fear, guilt, shame, abandonment and compulsion issues – this is a must see seminar!

Purchase today and I will see you in the webcast!

Lee Stevens, Ph.D.

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Determine which patients would benefit from affect reconsolidation and how to maximize successful outcomes.
  2. Utilize emotion in psychotherapy through techniques involving emotion-based mindfulness, self-validation, self-compassion, and emotional regulation skills
  3. Develop patient’s skills to recognize when their feelings are germane to the current situation and when they may be a result of past experience(s).
  4. Employ principles of affective neuroscience to inform treatment strategies for working with emotion in psychotherapy.
  5. Demonstrate strategies to increase and decrease emotion and recognize when to apply each strategy.
  6. Distinguish between the wanting and liking neural systems as they relate to treatment for a patient with compulsive behaviors.

Outline

Using Affect and Emotion in Therapy

  • Affect reconsolidation as a universal mechanism
  • When to implement affect reconsolidation
  • Creating the optimal conditions in therapy
  • Risks and Limitations

Affective Neuroscience Principles

  • Key brain regions for emotions
  • Impact of specific emotions on brain cortex
  • Emotion as a central problem in psychopathology
  • Strategic use of emotion in therapy

The goals of emotion-based psychotherapy

  • Building safety and trust with your patients
  • Addressing internal and external relationships to emotion
  • Achieving the optimal level of arousal
  • Changing the relationship with memory and emotion
  • Seeing emotions as a useful tool in therapy

Affective Neuroscience 4-Step Therapeutic Model

  • Emotional Awareness/Mindfulness
  • Validation of emotions
  • Self-Compassion & Empathy
  • Utilizing emotion

The Affect Reconsolidation Toolbox

  • Mindfulness for recognizing emotions and where they come from
  • Emotional validation techniques
  • Techniques for optimal arousal of emotions
  • Gestalt techniques for increasing emotion
  • Somatic techniques for up and down regulation
  • Cognitive based techniques to stop reinforcement of negative feelings

Therapeutic Goals When Targeting Specific Emotions

  • Anger – boundaries and consequences, forgiveness
  • Sadness – unresolved grief, primary/ secondary emotions
  • Fear – managing fear responses, controlling behavior
  • Desire – regulating reward systems, increasing self-control
  • Disgust – self-acceptance
  • Jealousy/Envy – comparisons to others, self-judgement

Affect Reconsolidation in the Treatment of Trauma

  • Creating curiosity about our emotional responses
  • Differentiating between past and present emotions
  • Work with secondary emotions first
  • Affect Reconsolidation for primary traumatic feelings

Target Audience

  • Counselors
  • Psychotherapists
  • Psychologists
  • Social Workers
  • Addiction Counselors
  • Occupational Therapists
  • Occupational Therapy Assistants
  • Marriage & Family Therapists
  • Case Managers
  • Therapists
  • Nurses
  • Other Mental Health Professionals

Copyright : 04/16/2021

Neuroscience-Informed Strategies for Therapists

Neuroscience really does contain the power to transform your practice, by developing who you are as a clinician, what you do as a clinician, and how to get clients more invested.

That’s why becoming “neuroscience-informed” isn’t just a buzzword – it’s the key to simplifying your therapy and making it more targeted than ever before.

And by working with an understanding of the brain’s natural mechanisms, you can navigate treatment pathways with confidence, yielding faster and more sustainable results.

Now in this all new training you’ll watch Chad Luke, PhD, whose shown thousands of therapists how neuroscience can dramatically change not only how clinicians treat common issues but truly show and explain to their clients why there brain works the way it does. He’ll share dozens of practical applications and give you the step-by-step instruction you need to successfully integrate it into your clinical practice.

Whether you’re a seasoned therapist or just starting out, this training will equip you with the tools and techniques you need to address mental health disorders through a neuroscience lens.

So watch author, researcher and neuroscience expert Chad Luke, PhD as he lays out the latest steps and functions to not only integrate neuroscience into your practice but how to effectively use it with your clients. You’ll also learn:

  1. The benefits of adding neuroscience interventions into your practice
  2. Ways to talk with your client about what’s going on in their brain
  3. Insight and support for a variety of theoretical approaches
  4. The why behind the what around healing and wellness
  5. How to refine your treatment of anxiety, trauma, and more through neuroscience
  6. And so much more!

Finish this training with the tools you can use to ignite, reignite, and reimagine your clinical work through brain science!

Purchase now!

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Identify the function and clinical value of integrating neuroscience into clinical practice.
  2. Determine how neuroscience integration improves social and emotional health.
  3. Identify functions of the brain and nervous system as they apply to mental health.
  4. Utilize five neuroscience integration strategies to improve activities of daily living.
  5. Determine how the neurobiology of empathy builds authentic connections to improve relationships.
  6. Identify brain-based strategies to manage depression symptoms.

Outline

Laying the Foundation for Neuroscience in Psychotherapy

  • Key reasons to integrate neuroscience into your psychotherapy practice
  • The 5 E’s:
    • Empathy: Reduce stigmas and bias
    • Engagement: Capture clients attention
    • Expectations: Power of expectations in the healing process
    • Education: Illuminate limiting factors
    • Experimentations: Basis for new strategies
  • Valuing the human above the technology
  • Responsibility of the field not just the individual practitioner
  • Standards for early career and advanced practitioners
  • Key benchmarks for ethical practice
  • Uses of neuroscience: Theory enhancement, direct brain interventions, metaphor-based applications, and psychoeducation

Integrate Neuroscience into your Clinical Practice

  • 10 Axioms of integration
  • Brain and nervous system basics
  • Neuroscience and factors common across all theories of treatment
  • Limitations of the research and potential risks

Practical Applications of Neuroscience:

Validate and extend popular theories in practice

Third-Wave Cognitive Behavioral Theory

  • Neuroscience-informed-CBT
  • Expand the understanding of neuroplasticity and homeostasis
  • Left- and right-mode processing
  • Nervous system retraining

Psychodynamic Theory

  • Address trauma and relational wounds
  • Neuroscience informed ways to reduce harmful vs. healing recall
  • Grow through the impact of early relationships
  • Importance of the unconscious: Attention and implicit awareness

Humanistic-existential Theory

  • Neurobiology of therapeutic relationship – therapist or technician
  • Neurobiology of empathy in building authentic connections
  • Interpersonal physiology and co-regulation

Constructivist/Postmodern Theory

  • Phenomenological practices supported by neuroscience
  • Hawthorne effect: Manage awareness of strengths and challenges
  • Pygmalion effect: Unlock the power of expectation
  • Neurobiology of developing personal narratives
  • Solution-focused relationships and problem-management strategies

Inheritance Model of Wellbeing

  • A novel neuroscience-integrated model
  • 8 dimension-specific techniques and interventions

Address Mental Health Disorders Through a Neuroscience Lens:

Advanced integration and applications

  • Case vignette: Adult with anxiety, mood, and trauma
  • Anxiety disorders
    • Teach the prefrontal cortex to respect the messages from the anterior cingulate-cortex and amygdala
  • Mood disorders
    • Neuroscience-based models of depression
    • Monoamine, glutamate, and neuroplasticity theories
  • Stress trauma
    • Trauma as a continuum and working on specific brain regions
    • Treat the HPA, SAM, and DMN
    • Train systems to work in concert rather than opposition
  • Substance abuse disorders
    • Heal the mesolimcocortical dopamine system, reward and stress circuits
    • Listen to what serves and releasing what doesn’t

Target Audience

  • Counselors
  • Psychotherapists
  • Psychologists
  • Social Workers
  • Addiction Counselors
  • Occupational Therapists
  • Occupational Therapy Assistants
  • Physicians
  • Art Therapists
  • Marriage & Family Therapists
  • Case Managers
  • Therapists
  • Nurses
  • Other Mental Health Professionals

Copyright : 07/26/2024

Rewire the Anxious Brain: Neuroscience-Informed Treatment of Anxiety, Panic and Worry

Watch neuroscience and anxiety expert, Marwa Azab, Ph.D., and learn her keys for successful anxiety treatment. Dr. Azab integrates brain-based strategies for calming the anxious mind with client communication techniques that motivate change in your clients. Marwa’s approach promotes adherence to treatment and strengthens the therapeutic alliance – which is essential when working with anxious, worried, traumatized, or obsessive clients.

Dr. Azab will give you proven tools and techniques to:

  • Identify and treat the roots of anxiety in both the amygdala and the cortex
  • Explain “the language of the amygdala” in an accessible, straight forward way
  • Identify how the cortex contributes to anxiety, and empower clients with strategies to resist anxiety-igniting cognitions

Purchase today for this transformational training and put the power of neuroplasticity to work for you and your anxious clients!

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Ascertain the underlying neurological processes that impact anxious symptoms for clients.
  2. Develop client engagement in treatment using personalized goals and attending to the therapeutic relationship.
  3. Evaluate the differences between amygdala-based and cortex-based anxiety symptoms and identify how these symptoms inform treatment interventions.
  4. Communicate strategies for calming and training the amygdala in order to alleviate symptoms of anxiety.
  5. Implement methods for teaching clients to retrain the cortex so that anxiety is resisted rather than exacerbated.
  6. Analyze how psychotropic medication impacts neuroplasticity in the brain; identify related treatment implications.

Outline

Use Neuroscience in the Treatment of Anxiety

  • Positives: We know more about anxiety-based disorders than any other disorders
  • Science gives explanations, evidence, authority, destigmatizes difficulties
  • Concerns: It can be difficult to explain, answer questions
  • Clients may feel a lack of responsibility
  • Oversimplification is inevitable
Enhancing Engagement in Treatment
  • Don’t neglect the therapeutic relationship!
  • Address the challenges of anxious clients
  • Remember that strategies are effortful
  • Guide the process using client’s goals
  • Maintain motivation
Neuroplasticity
  • Define Neuroplasticity in everyday language
  • Therapy is about creating a new self
  • ”Rewiring” as an accessible concept for change
  • Re-consolidation: the modification of emotional memories
Identify Two Neural Pathways to Anxiety
  • Amygdala – bottom-up triggering of emotion, physicality of anxiety
  • Cortex – top-down emotion generation based in cognition
  • Explain the two pathways to clients
  • How anxiety is initiated in each pathway and how pathways influence each other
Client Friendly Explanations
  • Use illustrations to create concrete understanding
  • Fight/flight/freeze responses
  • The “language of the amygdala”
  • Anxiety and the cortex
  • Help clients recognize the two pathways to anxiety
Neuroplasticity in the Amygdala (Essential for all Anxiety Disorders, PTSD, OCD, Depression)
  • Sleep and the amygdala
  • The influence of exercise
  • Breathing techniques to reduce activation
  • Relaxation, meditation, and yoga to modify responses
  • Exposure as opportunities for the amygdala to learn
  • Combatting avoidance
  • When anxiety indicates that the amygdala can learn new responses
  • Push through anxiety to change the amygdala
Neuroplasticity in the Cortex (Essential for GAD, SAD, OCD, PTSD, Depression)
  • ”Survival of the busiest” principle – strengthen or weaken specific circuitry
  • The healthy (adaptive) use of worry in the cortex
  • ”You can’t erase: You must replace.”
  • Recognize and modify the impact of uncertainty
  • Training correct uses of distraction
  • Left hemisphere techniques – cognitive defusion, coping thoughts, fighting anticipation
  • Right hemisphere techniques – imagery, music
  • Mindfulness and anxiety resistances
Neuroplasticity and Medications for Anxiety Disorders, OCD, PTSD, Depression
  • Medication’s effects in the rewiring process
  • The myth of the chemical imbalance
  • The danger of sedating the brain with benzodiazepines
  • Promoting neuroplasticity with SSRIs, SNRIs
  • The effectiveness of CBT and meds
Move Beyond Diagnostic Categories to Focus on Anxiety Pathways
  • Anxiety is a component of many diagnoses (depression, substance abuse, etc.)
  • Amygdala- and cortex-based techniques help in other disorders
  • Targeting brain-based symptoms rather than disorders
  • Worry, obsessions, rumination respond to similar cortex-based techniques
  • Panic, phobic responses, and compulsions respond to amygdala-based techniques
Research, Risks and Limitations
  • Empirical versus clinical and anecdotal evidence
  • Clinical considerations for specific clients and settings
  • Efficacy of particular interventions may vary

Target Audience

  • Social Workers
  • Psychologists
  • Psychiatrists
  • Counselors
  • Case Managers
  • Marriage and Family Therapists
  • Occupational Therapists
  • Occupational Therapy Assistants
  • Speech Language Pathologists
  • Addiction Counselors
  • Therapists
  • Nurses
  • Physicians
  • Other Mental Health Professionals

Copyright : 05/22/2024

The Upward Spiral: Evidence-Based Neuroscience Approaches for Treating Anxiety, Depression and Related-Disorders

Early in my career, I recognized a disconnect between neuroscience research and popular treatment strategies. While depression and anxiety are clearly rooted in altered brain function, most clinicians were not taught about specific neural circuits and neurotransmitters that contribute to these disorders. As a result, treating mood and anxiety disorders were often incomplete – many solutions uncovered by research were overlooked and strategies relied heavily on medication without any changes in a client’s action, activity and environment. There had to be a better way to treat these clients and improve outcomes!

Today, I know that using proven cognitive-behavioral interventions like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT), and Behavioral Activation Therapy (BAT) in conjunction with exercise, social support and positive habits yields powerful therapeutic effects. Expanding your tool kit of brain-based interventions allows you to accommodate your clients’ different challenges. And, when your clients understand that what feels “wrong” is actually the activity and chemistry of particular brain circuits, it improves treatment buy in and compliance.

Watch this training and I will show you how:

  • The biology of stress, anxiety and depression informs cognitive therapies like ACT, MBCT, and BAT
  • Information provided by neuroscientific research can improve treatment outcomes
  • Simple interventions modulate the activity and chemistry of key brain regions
  • You can effectively teach clients about complicated brain structures and functions

Let me help you take your practice to the next level by connecting complicated research and neurobiological information to the work you do with clients each day.

Your satisfaction is guaranteed. Puchase today!

See you there,
Dr. Alex Korb

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Analyze findings from neuroscientific research exploring the connection between key brain regions, neurotransmitters, and mental health.
  2. Analyze how understanding neurobiological processes can help clinicians establish realistic goals with clients and engage them in therapy.
  3. Analyze the role of the amygdala in stress and anxiety and communicate how labeling feelings and mindful awareness of emotions can be used to manage symptoms.
  4. Determine how habits relate to stress and connect this information to cognitive behavioral approaches that intervene in habit loops and reduce stress related symptoms.
  5. Use neuroscience informed explanations of mental health disorders in discussions with clients to shift how they feel about their pathology.
  6. Assess the latest scientific research on gratitude and characterize the potential benefits and research limitations found in these studies.

Outline

Understand the Key Brain Regions and Chemicals Involved

  • Prefrontal cortex, limbic system, striatum
  • Neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, oxytocin, etc.
  • How it all fits together

Key Principles From Proven Cognitive-Behavioral Interventions

  • Behavioral Activation Therapy (BAT)
  • Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
  • Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT)

Utilize the Benefits of Exercise

  • Benefits on serotonin and dopamine systems, as well as stress reductions
  • Intensity and frequency of exercise required
  • How simply being outdoors can help

Minding the Amygdala: Mindful Awareness of Emotions

  • Labeling feelings to reduce amygdala activity
  • Making the most of ACT to reduce stress

Set Goals, Make Decisions, and Top-Down Regulation of Brain Activity

  • The impact of goal-setting on lower-level processing
  • Choice, decisions and happiness
  • The importance of intention and voluntary choices
  • Simple strategies for applying BAT

Low-Tech Biofeedback

  • The mind-body connection, meditation and MBCT
  • Understanding heart-rate variability
  • The power of breathing
  • How postural changes, muscle tension and facial expressions can affect mood

How the Brain Encodes Habits and How to Change Them

  • The distinction between impulses and routines
  • Cognitive and emotional habits
  • The relationship between habits and stress
  • Cognitive-behavioral approaches to changing habits

Social Solutions

  • The impact of social support on the brain’s stress response
  • The power of physical touch
  • Why social interactions are rewarding
  • How social support can improve the efficacy of medication

The Power of Gratitude

  • The impact of gratitude on key neural circuits
  • Operationalize gratitude to implement it in daily life

Make the Most of Sleep

  • How sleep affects mood
  • Key changes in sleep hygiene that improve sleep quality

The Limitations of Neuroscientific Research

  • fMRI imaging
  • Things to consider regarding animal studies
  • Simple explanations for complicated processes

 

Target Audience

  • Psychologists
  • Social Workers
  • Licensed Counselors
  • Marriage and Family Therapists
  • Nurses
  • Nurse Practitioners
  • Psychotherapists
  • Addiction Counselors
  • Occupational Therapists

Copyright : 05/03/2024

The Neuroscience of Grief

Why does grief hurt so much? Why does death, the permanent absence of a person with whom you are bonded, result in such devastating feelings and lead to behavior and beliefs that are inexplicable, even to the grieving person? Neuroscience and cognitive psychology can provide some answers beyond what grief feels like—tackling the questions of why. Some of the answers to our questions about grief can be found in the brain, the seat of our thoughts and feelings, motivations, and behaviors. By looking at grief from the perspective of the brain, we will discuss the contemporary neuroscience of how bonded relationships are encoded in order to better understand the why of grief. Considering grieving to be a form of learning is helpful to understanding the trajectory of adaptation during bereavement. 

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Describe how the neurobiological attachment system encodes close relationships and the separation response to loss. 
  2. Compare separation in pair-bonded animals to the neurobiological effects of acute grief in humans. 
  3. Explain how rumination and avoidance can interfere with the grieving process, preventing learning how to restore a meaningful life. 

Outline

Neurobiology of grief and grieving 

  • Neurobiology of attachment in humans and pair-bonded animals 
  • The difference between grief and grieving 
  • The Gone But Also Everlasting theory 
  • Risks and Limitations 

Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) 

  • Debunking the myth of the 5 stages of grief 
  • Empirical data on the grieving trajectories 

Grieving as a form of learning 

  • Complications for learning are also complications for grieving 

Toolkit of coping strategies and psychotherapeutic intervention 

  • Emotion regulation flexibility, the right strategy for the right moment 
  • Avoidance 
  • Rumination 

Target Audience

  • Psychiatrists   
  • Psychologists  
  • Counselors   
  • Social Workers  
  • Marriage and Family Therapists    
  • Nurses   
  • Physicians  
  • Other Mental Health Professionals 

Copyright : 04/25/2024

100 Brain-Changing Mindfulness Techniques to Integrate Into Your Clinical Practice

Enhance your treatment plans for anxiety, depression, ADHD, OCD, bipolar disorder, sleep, pain, and stress with brain-changing mindfulness skills tailored to the problems your clients face each day.

Watch this recording and get detailed guidance on the hows, whys, and whens of incorporating core and advanced mindfulness skills into your clinical practice.

Build your client education skills and improve therapeutic engagement with clear explanations regarding the neurobiology behind mindfulness. Interactive demonstrations and step-by-step instruction on specific interventions and exercises will give you the tools you need to treat a variety of disorders and populations, and will boost your confidence in using your new skills. Better still, you’ll walk away with a four-step process that ties it all together, making what you’ve learned immediately relevant to your own work with clients.

Program Information

Objectives

  1. Motivate clients to engage in treatment with understandable psychoeducational explanations regarding the research and practices associated with mindfulness.
  2. Formulate treatment plans for anxiety that include mindfulness techniques that can be used to regulate the client’s arousal state.
  3. Integrate mindfulness interventions into therapy that can help depressed clients manage negative thoughts and reduce the risk of relapse.
  4. Articulate how mindfulness training can be used as an adjunctive therapy with evidence-based treatment to enhance attention in clients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
  5. Communicate how mindfulness-based approaches can help clients observe internal reactions and establish how this information can be used in the treatment of posttraumatic stress symptoms.
  6. Instruct clients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) on the utilization of mindfulness skills that can facilitate disengagement from repetitive thoughts.

Outline

Mindfulness – the Neurobiology of Brain Changes

  • Neuroplasticity and the brain
  • Evidence for Mindfulness as a treatment
  • Brain changes for specific disorders
4 Steps to Integrate Mindfulness into Clinical Practice
  • How to teach Mindfulness in session
  • Techniques to increase client use of Mindfulness at home
  • Strategies for processing what happens with your client
  • Strategies to identify and overcome obstacles & resistance
Mindfulness Strategies for Specific Disorders
  • Mindfulness of breath
  • Present moment awareness
  • Core practice
  • Mindfulness of thoughts
  • Mindfulness of tasks
  • Mindfulness of intention
  • Mindfulness of intuition
  • Plus many more
Anxiety & Depression
  • Calm the arousal state and relax mind and body
  • Reduce anxious thoughts
  • Focus on the present
  • Decrease negative thoughts
  • Shift and improve mood state & increase pleasure
PTSD
  • Calm the arousal state
  • Improve ability to stay grounded in the present
  • Reduce traumatic thoughts
Panic & OCD
  • Reduce frequency and intensity of panic attacks
  • Increase awareness of obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviors
  • Decrease obsessive thinking and compulsions
Bipolar Disorder
  • Increase awareness of mood state
  • Stabilize mood over time
ADHD
  • Improve concentration
  • Increase task completion
  • Reduce hyperactivity
Pain & Sleep
  • Accept and embrace the pain
  • Calm busy thoughts
  • Relax the mind and body
  • Fall asleep and stay asleep

Target Audience

  • Counselors
  • Social Workers
  • Psychologists
  • Case Managers
  • Addiction Counselors
  • Occupational Therapists
  • Marriage & Family Therapists
  • Psychotherapists
  • Nurses
  • Other Mental Health Professionals

Copyright : 02/20/2020