Behavioral Therapy as a Treatment for Anxiety Disorder
An Anxiety Disorder is a psycho-emotional disorder wherein the patient cannot prevent the spiraling of normal tension-based reaction – easily ignored or handled by non-sufferers – to events or thoughts, leading to an Anxiety Attack, rendering them non-functional in everyday activities. Most patients are treated for their symptoms rather than addressing causal effects. They include tranquilizers and antidepressant drugs for physical effects and lifestyle changes to minimize the triggering of anxiety episodes and, hence, a panic attack.
However, these are therapeutic and not causal curative treatments. By themselves they cannot prevent or cure the condition, only minimize its effect. What most sufferers really need is a way to get at the real or root cause of both their anxiety and their way of handling it and therapy is often the choice of professionals.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT, is a formalized psychotherapy which has, as its primary goal, the objective of altering how the patient feels about the issue, event, place, or thing. Corollary objectives include altering in turn their reaction to it, bringing that reaction into normative regions and preventing anxiety triggers from reappearing. This form of psychotherapy can only be performed by a therapist. In most states this form of deep behavioral modification can only be performed by licensed psychiatrists.
The typical structure that the CBT process takes is a formalized program lasting months. It is usually administered along with tranquilizers and antidepressants for physical and related effects of the disorder. The way that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy works is to help the patient regain control of their reactions to the stress-producing visualization – substituting normal reactions for abnormal ones. It does this by helping the patient to recognize the thoughts that produce the anxiety and altering them to normative levels by changing the patient’s response to them. CBT is often administered in group therapy delivery modes as well as one-on-one with a therapist.
It is very often proven effective if the patient is also challenged to maintain a detailed diary of the frequency of panic events, actually writing down how they feel as the event progresses. They are then asked to write out a reality-based judgment of the validity or invalidity of their fear.
Once the patient is comfortable with anxiety-thought recognition – which itself can take some time – they are then equipped to begin challenging the validity of those thoughts with replacement visualization.
Other specific techniques typically include ‘exposure’ techniques either by gradually or overwhelmingly exposing the patient to simulated role playing scenarios which are documented or recorded and subsequently discussed with the patient.
The combination of these techniques – along with medication – can often produce dramatic results in alleviating their anxiety attacks.
