Understanding and Treating Anxiety Disorders

Understanding and Treating Anxiety Disorders: An Integrative Approach to Healing the Wounded Self provides in an effective new way to treat anxiety disorders that shows how, by evaluating the specific needs of a client and selecting appropriate approaches from several different therapeutic methods, one can identify and treat the specific emotional basis for a particular anxiety. This book includes an integrative theory of the etiology of various anxiety disorders and an integrative psychotherapy that incorporates psychodynamic, behavioral, cognitive-behavioral, humanistic-experiential, and biomedical perspectives on anxiety. The approach is based in the premise that no single psychotherapeutic orientation is sufficient for the comprehensive and durable treatment of anxiety disorders. The integrated theories are first presented for anxiety disorders in general and then are applied to specific anxiety disorders, including specific phobias, social phobias, panic disorder with and without agoraphobia, generalized anxiety disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The author proposes that, in all of these variations of anxiety disorders, wounds to the client's sense of self are always central, and only by taking a tailored approach to a client's specific wounds can healing begin. This research-informed and clinically tested approach to helping clients resolve anxiety disorders will be of great interest to mental health practitioners of all orientations.