ABSTRACT
Therapists with limited experience treating highly anxious patients can easily fall prey to a number of understandable pitfalls which are unproductive and even harmful. These fall into several categories. First, misdiagnoses can lead to unhelpful (although often quite interesting) exploration of “issues,” when the therapy work that needs to be done is at a meta-level involving the patient’s relationship to his own thoughts, sensations, memories, and imagination. Second, traditional concepts such as insight and catharsis can lead to causal explanations and interventions that are less than helpful with this group of patients. We provide a number of examples. Third, there are typical mistakes in the application of exposure-based practice that we illustrate.
Traditional concepts such as insight and catharsis can lead to causal explanations and interventions that are less than helpful with this group of patients.
