Becoming the Calm in the Storm– A Half-Day Workshop

with

Julie Brams, LMFT and David Mellinger, LCSW

Coming on a Saturday Early This Fall

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The Peaceful Worrier Workshops

with

Julie Brams, LMFT and David Mellinger, LCSW

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Two half-day trainings for overcoming disturbing anxiety & worry

The Peaceful Worrier Workshops are two half-day trainings that can enable you to change your relationship to anxiety, fear, and worry.  Our therapeutic workshops blend cutting-edge psychological science with real-time meditation training proven to expand emotional awareness, relieve worry, and reduce problematic reactions to anxious thinking.

Join us in two half-day explorations of the healthy, strong ways that mindfulness meditation and traditional & new-wave psychotherapies can enable you to respond differently to your fear, anxiety and worry. We’ll help you learn ways to use mindfulness and psychological techniques to face your fears with heart and address vulnerability and trepidation – to go forward with less inhibiting fear so you may accomplish what you care about and what’s dearest to your heart. We’ll enable you to continue to overcome your disturbing anxiety and worry through exercising your strength while being good to yourself.

BECOMING THE CALM IN THE STORM

Our emotions profoundly affect what we care about the most; yet fear, irrational anxiety, and excessive worry can interfere with achieving what really matters to us.  Our “Becoming the Calm in the Storm” workshop, the first half-day workshop of the Peaceful Worrier series, blends cutting-edge psychological science with real-time meditation training proven to expand emotional awareness, relieve worry, master disturbing negative arousal and over-stimulation, and reduce problems with anxiety.

You’ll be introduced to mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation, as well as techniques of “psychological mindfulness” to help you steady yourself, begin clearing up confusing thinking and feelings, and start functioning with greater clarity when anxiety or worry hit and get too intense or disheartening. You’ll learn to tune in to the sense of vulnerability that so readily arises during times when doing the difficult things necessary to face your fears, and discover the means of unsticking and disentangling yourself from the “sticky thinking” of unhealthy worry and obsessing.  You’ll start to master the disturbing, “nervous arousal energy” that powers panickiness, “psychological avoidance” of disturbing emotions, sticky thinking, and anxiety-driven behavior (like acting over-controlling, timid, or frantic).  By the workshop’s end, you may be on the way to becoming more accepting of yourself and developing a more comfortable, stronger engagement with all of your emotional feelings.  You may discover you can act differently in important ways to overcome disturbing anxiety and worry:

– With greater clarity, yet more compassionately

– By moving through and past disturbing sticky thinking

– Easing off harshness and self-criticism

– Connecting to the real possibility of greater feelings of wellbeing and

kindness as you achieve what’s important and close to your heart.

 Emotional Awareness-Based Cognitive-Behavioral Training

• Learn to think more clearly by clearing up unhealthy worry and sticky thinking.
• Feel less discomfort by learning to overcome trepidation and become more accepting of vulnerability.
• Cope better with anxiety and worry while achieving increasingly more that you truly care about.
• Increase your confidence, sense of safety, and trust that things will be okay at anxiety-provoking times.

Mindfulness Meditation Practice

o   Breathing Meditation

             o   Loving-kindness Meditation

ON A PATH WITH HEART

The “Path with Heart” Workshop is the second of two trainings to enable you to change your relationship to anxiety, fear, and worry.  We’ll help you learn ways to use mindfulness and psychological techniques to face your fears with heart and address vulnerability and trepidation – to go forward with less inhibiting fear so you may accomplish what you care about and what’s dearest to your heart. We’ll enable you to continue to overcome your disturbing anxiety and worry through exercising your strength while being good to yourself.

Emotional Awareness-Based Cognitive-Behavioral Training

Expand your awareness of your values, the things you hold dear to your heart, and what you care enough about to change.

Learn how to overcome emotional avoidance by expanding your awareness of the thinking traps and physical tension that sustain anxiety and worry.

Learn to face your fears using psychological and mindfulness-based techniques of emotional exposure

Learn to gain the upper hand over unhealthy worry and other types of anxious, sticky thinking

Learn to be kinder to yourself as you face your fears.  Augment your trust that you will be okay at anxiety-provoking times. Enhance your acceptance of vulnerability and uncertainty while overcoming your anxiety and worry.

Mindfulness Meditation Practice

                                                                                                                        o   Body awareness meditation

o   Breathing meditation

            o   Loving-kindness meditation

The Intensive Anxiety and Worry Workshop (IAWW) – DATES TO BE ANNOUNCED

The Intensive Workshop for Anxiety Disorders (IAWW) was created to help people overcome anxiety disorders. Developed by anxiety expert David Mellinger, the IAWW is an evidence-based treatment that has been offered for over five years in community settings. This anxiety workshop program has benefited hundreds of men and women with one or more of a wide variety of anxiety disorders and conditions who worry themselves sick (worry often and catastrophically) and those with fear of fear – people who suffer from anxiety or panic attacks, agoraphobia and other phobias, and social anxiety disorder. Individuals with mild obsessive-compulsive disorder may also improve by doing the workshop. Utilizing a unique formulation of new psychological scientific findings dubbed Transdiagnostic Therapy, IAWW is a unique integration of traditional and new-wave cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), mindfulness, and acceptance-based CBT into a 6-week course of group therapy.

Workshop structure: Participants must be willing to devote six weeks to participating in an intensive workshop program that is designed to help overcome anxiety disorders.  Each weekly session is between 90 and 120 minutes in length, and there will be 30 to 90 minutes a week of home practice.

Most people who complete the IAWW:

Learn to cope with panic symptoms and come to see them as harmless, manageable passing events.
Gain perspective and psychological distance from their anxiety disorder symptoms.
Gain the upper hand over avoidance, engage in exposure therapy, and develop worry-busting skills that weaken anxiety’s grip by turning aside “sticky thinking”, which may include:

active worry
rumination
barrages of self-criticism
OCD-type obsessions

RESULTS:   Participants who recently completed the workshop in a community setting typically suffered from a variety of anxiety disorders, typically involving proneness to fear of fear and panic or anxiety attacks, a tendency to worry often and catastrophically, or both. Psychological measures of change over the course of the workshop indicated that program completers’ fear of fear dropped significantly – to within normal limits – and their catastrophic worry tendencies dropped as well. In addition, at least half of those who completed the workshop rated themselves as so much improved that they no longer considered further treatment necessary.