Therapy and Professional Services

Anxiety Disorder Treatment, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Services, and Therapeutic Techniques

Accepting Referrals and Self-referrals

I am accepting referrals and self-referral of adults and teens 16 and over for therapy to help overcome anxiety disorders, including panic and phobic disorders (including driving phobia and social phobia), OCD, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder. I not only provide therapy for anxiety disorders but also for relationship problems, everyday depression, and mood disorders. I also provide Meditation-Based Therapy (see the post on this site). The treatment I provide is primarily cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), with elements of mindfulness- and acceptance-based therapy. te titled Meditation-Based Therapy).

I see a limited number of clients in person in my Covid safe office, as well as virtually via Zoom or Facetime

Please call 818-716-1695 or E-mail Panicbuster@socal.rr.com for further information.

Fees and Insurance

Can I Afford Therapy?

My full fee is $175 for a 45- 50 minute therapy hour. I accept private payment – payable at each session – via cash, check, credit card, or Zelle. As a licensed California mental health professional, I can provide treatment for you as an “out-of network provider” if you’re covered by PPO insurance. I am sometimes able to apply a sliding fee scale to help with affordability.

Concerned about the cost? Consider the benefits of shorter-term treatment with a skilled professional who has the expertise to help you overcome your unique emotional distress. All you actually know about the abilities of therapists on your insurance’s provider panel is that they’ve contracted to work at reduced rates.

You may be able to use your PPO insurance to help pay for your care. If so, you can pay the agreed-upon fee in full at each session, and my office can bill your insurance, or else I can regularly send you with a “Super Bill” every 3 or4 weeks to submit to your insurance carrier.

Reasons to Choose Therapy with Me

I am skillful at helping and empowering clients to accomplish a great deal over a relatively short time through effective therapy. Some mental health problems can be treated swiftly by a skilled therapist, while others require extensive treatment, which I can provide, as well. I bring exceptionally extensive, sophisticated, active knowledge of the latest psychological science to the practice of psychotherapy. I’m grateful that I can often help clients overcome anxiety problems that other therapists – including even anxiety specialists – can’t.

I am now accepting referrals and clients for general psychotherapy and anxiety therapy at my Agoura Hills office. Call 818-716-1695 or email me at PanicBuster@socal.rr.com.

Therapy with David Mellinger

Our thoughts influence our feelings and actions.

CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is the term for a group of psychological treatments based on scientific evidence that have proven effective in treating many psychological disorders, including most anxiety disorders. CBT is vital, strong therapy driven by science and research, shaped by people’s emotional needs and wishes for a life of wellbeing. Treatment is goal-oriented and often short-term to resolve present-day problems; through this process, clients can overcome long-standing problems and disorders, as well.

CBT differs from many other therapy approaches by its focus on the ways that a person’s cognitions (thoughts), emotions, and behaviors are connected and affect one another. Because emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are all linked, CBT approaches allow for therapists to intervene at different points in the cycle of emotional disturbance.

Clients actively participate in treatment in and out of session. The CBT therapist and the client work together with a mutual understanding that the therapist has theoretical and technical expertise, but the client is the expert on him- or herself. The therapist seeks to help the client discover that he/she is powerful and capable of choosing positive thoughts and behaviors. Together, the therapist and client develop goals for therapy, work collaboratively to achieve goals, and track progress throughout the course of treatment. Because the skills taught in these therapies require practice, homework assignments often are included in therapy.

[The information in the above section is liberally excerpted, with permission, from the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy website. Learn more about CBT and emotional disorders, visit the Association of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapy on the Internet – www.abct.org]

Emotional Awareness-based CBT (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy)

Emotional awareness-based CBT (EACBT) is a core part of my psychotherapy practice. Emotions can be perplexing, painful, eye-opening, or joyous. Though they come and go, they need to be addressed for you to be the complete person you can be.

Our emotional feelings get drawn out of us sometimes,

Or we may offer them

Or they get stirred – or stirred up

Or they fill us, captivate us

Or we work with them

Or they confuse us or inform us,

Or we tame them, or they sweep us up

Or we focus them (or they focus us),

Or they grip us,

Or we play with them. or they play with us . . .

Or they uplift us and invigorate us.

Everyone brings their issues with emotional life to therapy. In the 1990s, psychologists and neuroscientists became keenly aware that CBT (cognitive-behavioral therapy) – then the rising star of evidence-based psychotherapy – seemed curiously lacking in focus on people’s real, substantial, palpable emotions. This deficiency was very serious:  We can only start to feel better once we realize that we’re feeling bad and actively endeavor to gain a clearer sense of the ways our feelings are affecting us.

By 1994, the focus of psychology and psychotherapy expanded to encompass richer awareness of emotions. In his work, Descartes’ Error, neuroscientist Antonio Dimasio posited that the essence of our humanness is best captured in the statement, “I feel, therefore I am”, rather than Descartes’s classic “I think, therefore I am.” In 1996, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux wrote an excellent, groundbreaking guidebook, The Emotional Brain. Psychologists Paul Ekman and Richard Davidson published The Nature of Emotion (1994), a grand exploration into theory and research on the relationship between emotional feelings and emotional disorders and the role enhanced emotional awareness can play in human functioning.

Concurrently, psychological scientists and psychotherapists began researching and bringing mindfulness and Buddhist psychology into psychotherapy practice. Meditation training and the Buddhist psychological perspective proved to enable people to become more aware of their emotions, disturbing thoughts, and bewildering thought patterns and learn to function better by working with them in strong, effective ways.  Psychoanalyst and Buddhist teacher Mark Epstein (2021) observed, “Emotions move on nerve pathways that are faster than thought. They can take us by surprise and overwhelm our carefully constructed mental defenses. Emotions, by their very nature, are out of our control. (The Zen of Therapy, 2021).”

A wealth of new therapies have developed that focus on understanding and working directly with emotions – their richness, the vital role they play in being human, mind, body, and feeling, and relief of emotional pain. These therapies integrate the neuroscience of emotion, traditional CBT, mindfulness and acceptance, Buddhist psychology, and techniques from different schools of therapy. They all formulate and articulate very effective emotion-focused treatment of emotional disorders. You may be familiar with some of these interventions that include Marsha Linehan’s Dialectic Behavior Therapy (DBT -Marsha Linehan), Steven Hayes’s Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) – and David Barlow’s Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders.

In my emotional awareness-based CBT, I integrate the best and most scientifically supported aspects of these and evidence-based other approaches.  We will work as a team to focus on your becoming familiar with the immediate sense of emotions – the disturbing feelings and the ebb and flow of emotions, moods, and emotional experience, as they come to play in your emotional life.

You will learn to open up space in yourself to become clearer and more aware of emotional feelings within you. You will develop skills to guide your emotions and become your best self, the person you strive to be. In our working together, your emotions will come to assume their essential role in enabling you to understand, heal, revitalize yourself, and achieve your unique and most valued goals.

New-wave CBT strategies  can help with sticky thinking and Anxiety-Depression

It isn’t uncommon for someone with an anxiety disorder to also suffer from depression, or vice versa. There’s good news, though:  Both disorders are very treatable, separately and together. According to the latest psychological research, to be optimal, therapy for anxiety and depression would likely need to focus explicitly on excessive worry and/or depressive rumination, when present – that is, on “sticky thinking”.

Sticky thinking is the repetitive, negative thinking of anxiety and depression.  Interwoven with strong negative feelings like sadness, guilt , fear, or self-blame, sticky thinking can enmire us too intensely in long, complicated thinking about disturbing matters and amplify the disruptiveness of disturbed sensitive feelings.

A new wave of CBT is uniquely suited for relief of many people’s problems with anxiety and depression:

Cognitive Reappraisal and emotional exposure  might be for you if you’re anxious or depressed, or if you simply worry too much – if you’ve realized your thinking at emotional times is sticky and unworkable and want to take action – to learn effective, scientifically proven techniques to counteract it. ACT is a new-wave CBT that helps clients remain focused on their values and achieving what matters to them the most thru practicing acceptance and learning mindfulness while working on overcoming emotional disturbance.  Cognitive Reappraisal is a time-honored, effective CBT technique for modifying the errors in thinking which often occur when we’re feeling disturbed. Click here to learn about four of the most frequent thinking errors that arise automatically during acute anxiety, panic, and disturbing worry, each with perspectives and remedies for modifying them and relieving your anxiety.

Utilizing Attention Training Techniques, you can develop the capability to shift away from negative trains of thought and toward the immediate environment or incompatible mental processes that counteract the brain mechanisms that sustain your sticky thinking.  Mindfulness techniques like concentration on the breath and abiding with peaceful awareness provide training for shifting to states of mind where you can have negative feelings without getting stuck on a train of thought or caught up in a grim story.  Mindfulness techniques can be honed to effectively counteract sticky thinking. For more about mindfulness and meditation strategies in therapy, see Meditation-Based Therapy.

A Brief CBT Self-Help Protocol for Anxiety

You might wish to try out CBT as self-help if you don’t feel able or ready yet to engage in therapy but are determined to do what you can to overcome disturbing anxiety and worry. CBT is most effective and precise when executed through dialogue with a skilled therapist with expertise in CBT, but people often find they can benefit from self-help cognitive therapy and behavioral interventions (like focus on the breath) implemented as self-help. If you would like a taste of CBT perhaps you’d like to begin HERE.

For more information on CBT, or to make an appointment, call David Mellinger, MSW at 818-716-1695.

Let’s Discuss Entering Therapy with Me
Phone: (818) 716-1695
Email PanicBuster@socal.rr.com

Problems & Disorders I Work with the Most

Anxiety Disorders

Anxiety disorders occur when too much anxiety (fear, edginess, panic, restiveness, worry, or obsession) comes too often and conflicts with our vital interests, threatening to derail us. Anxiety disorders are very treatable.

Anxiety can disturb us deeply through introducing a sense of threat and uncertainty into everything from enjoyable activities to taking care of the most vital matters. Anxiety disorders interfere with our confidence and sense of wellbeing and the quality of our engagement with things we care a great deal about and truly value.

Anxiety Disorders and Depression

Most people feel anxious or depressed at times. Going through difficult situations or profound losses can cause sadness, loneliness, fright, nervousness, or anxiety – all normal reactions to life’s stressors.

But when people experience these feelings daily or nearly daily for no apparent reason, normal, everyday functioning becomes difficult. If feelings of deficiency or inadequacy arise along with sadness and nervousness, an anxiety disorder, depression, or both may be the problem.

“It is not uncommon for someone with an anxiety disorder to also suffer from depression or vice versa. Nearly one-half of those diagnosed with depression are also diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. The good news is that these disorders are both treatable, separately and together.” (This section borrows from the Anxiety and Depression Disorder of America homepage, www.adaa.org)

> A Sidebar about “Sticky Thinking“ – It’s the label I’ve given to the repetitive negative thinking of anxiety or depression – often comes up in therapy with me. Interwoven with strong negative feelings like anxiety, sadness, guilt, or self-blame, sticky thinking can enmire us with too intense, long, complicated thinking about disturbing matters and intensify the distressing power of disturbed sensitive feelings to disrupt our functioning.

GAD and OCD

Men and women with GAD or OCD may find that themselves worrying intensely and incessantly. Overthinking may create doubts and put the squeeze on their richest emotions. Treatment for GAD and OCD – Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) – with me is likely to be exceptionally effective. When I do therapy for these disorders – as well as depression and mood disorders – I help my clients overcome sticky thinking – active worry, rumination, obsessiveness, dwelling on the negative, and intense self-blame and self-doubt – whenever it’s present.

To be highly effective, according to psychologist David Fresco (2014), an authority on the psychological science of optimizing therapy for anxiety and depression, treatment of Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Major Depressive Disorder likely needs to focus explicitly on sticky thinking, when present. The role of sticky thinking in anxiety has been known since the early 1980s thru psychologist Thomas Borkovec’s research on the role of active worry. In the early 1990s, the late Susan Nolen-Hoeksma and her colleagues demonstrated the seminal role of rumination (brooding, dwelling on the negative) in generating and sustaining depression. Focusing therapy on contending with rumination, active worry, and obsession is important in overcoming depression and anxiety.

High Octane Phobia Treatment and Enhanced Exposure Therapy:

Newer, More Effective Therapy to Overcome Anxiety and Phobias

About 56 million U.S. adults have had anxiety disorders over the past year (1), and 31.9% of adolescents between ages 13 and 19 have suffered from anxiety disorders as well (2).  Anxiety, fear, and panic attacks inhibit and incapacitate those with anxiety disorders from accomplishing valued goals, taking actions that they care about, and feeling free and vibrantly alive.

So much is at stake, and for so many of us!  Disturbing anxiety can engender self-doubt and tangle our thinking. A sense of threat can build up that jangles our nerves and sickens us with worry. Our capacity to cope can be compromised if it persists.  Our confidence can erode, and our happiness may be jeopardized.

For over four decades, psychologists, neuroscientists, and psychotherapists have devoted immense effort to develop and implement effective treatment for anxiety and phobias. The result is a remarkable achievement: Exposure Therapy (ET), a psychological treatment that enables people to see through the illusions of irrational fear and find the determination and courage to stride forward and do what’s needed to get the upper hand over anxiety.

Exposure therapy is a cognitive-behavioral therapy in which therapists create a safe environment in which to “expose individuals to the things they fear and avoid.” (3) Clients doing ET “repeatedly face situations, activities, or events that are feared, avoided, or endured with dread in order to learn new, more adaptive ways of responding and to reduce their anxious, fearful reactions.” (4) Using ET, a great many anxiety disorders sufferers have overcome panic disorder, fears of riding in elevators, driving on busy streets or freeways and situations like marketing, shopping in malls, going to concerts, social and sporting events, and movies, to name a few. In fact, ET has helped millions of people confront their fears and is now recognized as highly effective for phobic disorders, including panic, agoraphobia, social anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

These great accomplishments have been borne on the shoulders of giants of clinical psychology – most notably Joseph Wolpe, Jack Rachman, Edna Foa, David Barlow, and Michele Craske. I had the great fortune and privilege to learn to use exposure therapy from some of these greats starting in the mid-1980s, when ET became refined and proven effective.  Because I’ve been continually learning about scientific developments in the understanding of anxiety and its treatment, as psychological science and therapeutic strategies have evolved, I’ve been able to treat my clients using the latest, best practices.

A fable that has been going around for far too long is that anxiety can actually block courageous action and prevent individuals with anxiety disorders from being brave at crucial times.  That myth is untrue: Anxiety disorders are not courage disorders.  They’re built around false fear when no danger is present.

Through learning, progressing toward valued goals, and taking action that requires confidence and assurance, exposure practice shapes and molds clients into becoming aware of their courage in facing their fears. Traditional ET, which continues to be the principal treatment, has been enhanced by newer strategies that empower people to face their fears more actively and directly, and treatment is often swifter.

In recent years, the main emphasis in treating anxiety has shifted from eliminating anxiety to learning to face fears and progress in valued directions while, at the same time, coping with anxious and fearful feelings. Doing so accomplishes lasting changes in the underlying mechanisms of the disorder while regaining the ability to do what matters.

“ET 2023” has become stronger and more laser-focused on underlying causes, tailored to individuals’ needs, capabilities, and values, and in many cases swifter.

A Brief, Highly Informative History of Exposure

• Introducing Exposure

Anxiety disorders were widely considered chronic, and effective treatment was scarce until the first exposure therapy was developed during the 1950s by behavior therapy pioneer Joseph Wolpe. Dubbed “systematic desensitization,” Wolpe systematically and repeatedly exposed individuals with phobias to the stimuli they feared – situations, activities, and events – until their fears diminished. (5)

• A Recipe for Success

In the early1980s, the tides of change swept in: Leading psychologist Jack Rachman introduced a recipe for successful exposure therapy for fear, suggesting that effective treatment should entail “the transformation or neutralization of emotion-provoking stimuli [through repeated presentations in a carefully structured fashion] and by inducing a low level of arousal” (6).

• The Integral Concepts

In their pivotal article published in 1986, distinguished psychologists Edna Foa and Michael Kozak (7) helped lay critical groundwork for ET. They underscored the fact that for a person to learn to be less afraid, he or she must be exposed to a situation, activity, or event that evokes anxiety. They presented a model of the psychological mechanisms of anxiety disorders known as “fear structures” that create and maintain anxiety, irrational thinking, avoidance, and disturbing emotions and behavior and  impair our ability to cope and function optimally.

• The Launching of Exposure Therapy Treatment

By this time, psychological researchers and expert clinicians created and were testing out cognitive-behavioral protocols for treating anxiety disorders and began widely training therapists [like me!] in exposure therapy for panic disorder and agoraphobia. In 1989 and 1990, psychologists David Barlow and Michele Craske broke new ground when they published Mastery of Your Anxiety and Panic, a treatment workbook for clients and a scientific treatment manual for therapists (8, 9). Clients learned what to expect when they approached and engaged in feared, avoided activities during practices.  Psychotherapists learned to do skillful exposure therapy, optimizing the duration and quality of the exposures.

The principal mechanism through which traditional exposure therapy achieves emotional change and gives clients the upper hand over anxiety is habituation learning – a fancy term for learning that decreases the anxious response.  Early ET was dubbed graduated exposure in which clients are generally advised to proceed gradually – by “baby steps,” in order to learn most effectively that they need no longer fear.  Gauging and limiting the discomfort level during exposure seemed important somehow – although in retrospect it’s not clear that it ever truly or demonstrably was.

Why So Cautious?

Through repeated practices facing fear in anxiety-provoking situations, fear of fear (aka “panic anxiety”) impacted clients less and less. When they succeeded, they became much less apprehensive that crippling fear would overwhelm them and more confident in situations where they had been phobic. But the baby-stepping engrained in the gradualness of graduated exposure creates a false impression that fear itself is way too hot to handle. Consider this: Acute and disturbing anxiety is formidable, but there’s actually no real threat. What we avoided was never a danger to us in the first place.

     Skillful use of exposure therapy to face irrational fear is not dangerous, either:  It can never cause tissue damage. And it’s not an all-or-nothing affair: Psychologists no longer believe that treatment success depends on eliminating anxiety and panic. Importantly, we now know that intensive, more rapid exposure is equal or in some cases quite superior to graduated exposure (10). Anxiety treatment experts recommend that “exposure begins with a moderately difficult task and that steps be taken to increase the difficulty of the exposure as quickly as the patient is willing” (11).

As I have treated clients with exposure therapy to enable them to face their fears and overcome anxieties and phobias over the years, I find myself moved by their bravery or courage. When I remark on their courage, they often seem rather surprised to realize that this part of their character is helping them through.

The Face of Anxiety Therapy is Changing Lately

The most advanced anxiety therapies increasingly entail facing fear at a deeper, more elemental level and acting with bravery. In the last couple of years, innovative clinicians have proposed that individuals can learn to contend with anxiety more effectively if their minds are molded through therapy to recognize the healing potential of acting brave and to experience the adventure of leaning into their fears – “Let’s do it and find out what happens!” (12) More robust and resolute approaches to exposure are now coming into use.

Cutting edge research on inhibitory learning during anxiety and exposure has led to the identification of a set of strategies that can improve and enhance exposure therapy (13).  Traditional ET reduces phobic fear by decreasing the power of the sense of imminent danger in phobic situations. Yet many willing clients, with the strong encouragement and support of a therapist, can go much further when exposure is enhanced by Inhibitory Learning and their recovery is more lasting and durable.  More precisely, clients can learn to overcome fear inhibition – the need to hold back and avoid that discourages them from fully engaging in and benefiting from exposure and regaining their freedom of action.

Knowledge can be the remedy for fear.

Bravery can be the negation of anxiety.

Bravery and Acceptance

Clients’ courage and their capacity for radical acceptance–learning to recognize what is true in the present moment and embracing whatever is seen with an open heart (14) — are recruited and instilled during exposure enhanced by inhibitory learning. Michelle Craske and Amy Sewart (15) call for bravery and fear acceptance in the following coaching instructions they offer for engaging in exposure through Inhibition Learning:

• Removing safety behaviors – “Throw [it] out”– the self-protective actions people take when they don’t need to
• “Facing your fear” – The therapist may occasionally arrange for one of the original anxiety provoking events – to “pay a surprise visit” during practices, or welcome it when it happens to show up. Contrary to expectations, these seemingly unwelcome surprises can open clients’ eyes to their tenacity and bravery and bring about significant emotional change.
• Focusing your attention – “Stay with it” – Intentionally focus and maintain your attention on what you are afraid of during practices. We can counteract in adaptive ways the disruption of our ability to focus attention that strong emotional distress creates.
• “Varying it up” – At times, the therapist may pile on additional anxiety triggers during practices. For example, she may request that a client with freeway phobia who’s driving at 60 mph with trepidation on the freeway speed up and safely pass a semi-truck (another “inhibited behavior” for which she is phobic), or turn the heater up too high – although it’s a very hot day – to intensify the discomfort of the situation.

Both provoking of greater anxiety and increasing a client’s physical discomfort during practice are actually therapeutic – they’re likely to result in emotional change and improvement of self-efficacy and self-confidence – and they have no significant downside. In fact, confronting fears in this way—the feeling of “I can do it” (and you can!) is greatly empowering.

Overcoming the Power of Inhibition

Through exposure through inhibitory learning, clients can get the upper hand over or overcome:

• Instinctual, fight-flight-freeze reactions that automatically hold us back from engaging with phobic situations, activities, and events
• Excessive avoidance of the sense of vulnerability during exposure
• Experiential avoidance – Inhibited or overly intensely focused attention that prevents us from seeing what really is
• Intolerance of uncertainty linked to feeling frightened during exposure. Yet given the benefits people reap, isn’t it worth it?.

Practicing exposure through inhibitory learning, with the dedicated support of the therapist, enables individuals to learn that they’re safe–even while undermining their inhibitions and letting them step through the avoidance that sustains their fearfulness.  Their strengths emerge, mobilizing and enabling them to achieve what matters to them deeply. They can earn their liberty, the sense of self-efficacy, and perhaps pleasure and pride.

Traditional exposure can enable clients to gain the conviction that their phobic fears are very unlikely to actually occur. Exposure enhanced by inhibition learning enables clients to believe that their phobic fears could never have become real in the first place.

Anxiety Therapy 2023 can enable clients to focus on accomplishing what matters the most to them and enhancing their ability to function in essential situations while building self-confidence and satisfaction in their substantial achievements.

References

1. Harvard Medical School, 2007. National Comorbidity Survey (NCS – 2017, August 21).
2. Kessler RC, Chiu WT, Demler O, Merikangas KR, Walters EE., 2005. Prevalence, severity, and comorbidity of 12-month DSM-IV disorders in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2005 Jun;62(6):617-27.
3. American Psychological Association (2019). “What Is Exposure Therapy?” Viewed online at https://www.apa.org/ptsd-guideline/patients-and-families/exposure-therapy on Feb. 24, 2023.
4. Davies, C.D. & Craske, M.G. (2018). Exposure Strategies. In Hayes, S.C. & Hofmann, S.G. (Eds.), Processed-Based CBT: The Science and Core Clinical Competencies of Cognitive Behaviooral Therapy (285-297). Oakland, CA: Context Press.
5. Wolpe, J. (1964). The Systematic Desensitization treatment of Neuroses. In Experiments in Behaviour Therapy. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press Ltd.
6. Rachman, S. (1980). Emotional processing. In Behaviour Research and Therapy, Volume 18, Issue 1, 51-60.
7. Foa, E. B., & Kozak, M. J. (1986). Emotional processing of fear: Exposure to corrective information. Psychological Bulletin, 99(1), 20–35.
8. Barlow, D. H. & Craske, M. G. (1989). Mastery of Your Anxiety and Panic. Albany, NY: Graywind Publications.
9. Ibid, (1990). Mastery of Your Anxiety and Panic – Therapist Guide. Albany, NY: Graywind Publications.
10. Hayes, S. C.; Strosahl, K. D.; Wilson, K. G. (1999). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: An Experiential Approach to Behavior Change. New York: Guilford Press.
11. Antony, M. M. & Swinson, R. P. (2000). Phobic Disorders and Panic in Adults: A Guide to Assessment and Treatment. Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association.
12. Ehrenreich-May, J. & Coyne, L.W. (November 2022), Shaping       Bravery: A Clinical Demonstration of Shared Processes Across ACT and CBT That Target Youth Anxiety and Avoidance. Master Clinician Seminar, Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy.
13. Craske, M. G., Treanor, M., Conway, C., Zbozinek, T., & Vervliet, B. (July 2014). Maximizing Exposure Therapy: An Inhibitory Learning Approach. Behav Res Ther. 2014, 58: 10–23.
14. Brach, T. (2003). Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha. New York: Bantam Books.
15. Sewart, A. R., & Craske, M. G. (2020). Inhibitory learning. In S. Abramowitz & S. M. Blakey (Eds.), Clinical handbook of fear and anxiety: Maintenance processes and treatment mechanisms (pp. 265–285). American Psychological Association.

If you’re interested in entering therapy with me, call me at 818-716-1695 or email me at PanicBuster@socal.rr.com