ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the fading of regular treatment sessions and the application, if needed, of booster sessions. It discusses therapeutic techniques to consolidate improvements, and reviews general relapse prevention strategies. The goal is to help patients generalize their knowledge of treatment strategies so that they can act as their own therapists once regular treatment sessions end. The chapter shows that the task of ensuring longer-term maintenance of treatment gains is a function of an adequate breadth and depth of the initial treatment such that core maintaining factors for social anxiety disorder are altered, and teaching the patient how to reapply treatment principles as needed around future symptoms. In treatment, objective goal setting was emphasized, as were practical examples of the influence of attentional sets on emotion. Phobic disorders, by their nature, provide patients with chronic training in avoidance and vigilance to negative outcomes.
