Presenter: Jamie Schumpf, PsyD

The NYC-CBT Board is proud to offer this four-part series teaching the fundamentals of CBT, taught by our very board members. This is a wonderful opportunity for clinicians wanting to gain a better understanding of CBT or brush up on skills and techniques they might not regularly use.

This session will cover cognitive interventions

REGISTER HERE

Please join us for a conversation about navigating life during and after graduate school

Topics will include:

• Experiences to acquire during training

• Licensure, including how social workers can earn their clinical license

• Career paths in academic medical settings

• Starting, building and maintaining a private practice

• Treating various patient populations

• Forensic evaluations and court testimony

• Supervision and consultation

• Professional community

• Self-care and burnout

• Your questions

with Cory Newman, Ph.D.

Patient safety is the utmost priority across populations, and this clinically-oriented workshop will offer practical tools for conceptualizing and intervening with individuals who have expressed suicidal thoughts. Special emphasis will be placed on cognitive-behavioral interventions such as increasing attachments to people and activities, and modifying “suicidogenic beliefs.” These procedures will be linked to research on the cognitive characteristics of suicidal patients, including hopelessness, morbid perfectionism, dichotomous thinking, and poor autobiographical recall.

with Bruce Hillowe, J.D., PhD

The New York State Board of Regents recently mandated that effective April 1, 2023, psychologists, social workers and mental health practitioners (LMHC’s, LMFT’s, LPsa’s and LCAT’s) take as part of their required continuing education a three credit course on the maintenance of professional boundaries with patients. The reason for the new requirement is concern about the number of professional disciplinary proceedings by the State’s licensing boards against mental health professionals where boundaries have allegedly been violated. This course has been designed to meet the State’s mandatory CE requirement for both boundaries and ethics: courses on boundaries that cover New York laws, rules and regulations related to unprofessional conduct may also be counted toward the ethics requirement.

Topics to be discussed will include the ethical, professional, legal and clinical backgrounds for boundaries; discriminating between boundary crossings and violations; the establishment and maintenance of boundaries at the outset of and during psychotherapy including issues of multiple relationships, at- risk patients and social media; the challenge of vulnerable patients and therapists; and maintaining clinical creativity and flexibility within the therapeutic frame. The potential harm and legal consequences of boundary violations will also be reviewed.

The presenter is Bruce V. Hillowe JD PhD, a psychologist-psychoanalyst and mental health care attorney who has defended hundreds of mental health practitioners in professional disciplinary proceedings in New York State, many of them for alleged boundary violations.

with Donald Baucom, Ph.D.

This clinically-oriented workshop will present the fundamentals of conducting cognitive-behavioral couple therapy (CBCT) for distressed couples in real world settings using a principle-based approach. The workshop will begin with how to conceptualize the concerns of a given couple, including cognitive, behavioral, and emotional factors within an ecological framework incorporating individual, relationship, and environmental factors. The majority of the workshop will focus on how to employ various cognitive, behavioral, and emotional interventions to alleviate relationship distress. The workshop will include brief didactic presentations and videos of various intervention strategies to achieve these goals. Adapting interventions to marginalized couples and other complicating factors will be discussed.

This practical workshop will review current information about the indications for pharmacotherapy in major mood, psychotic and anxiety disorders, and explore the strengths and limitations of currently available psychotropic medications. Predictors of placebo responsivity, as well as clinical (e.g., symptom cluster) and biological (e.g., pharmacogenetic) predictors of drug responsivity will also be reviewed. Decision-making regarding pharmacotherapy versus psychotherapy versus their combination in major depression will be discussed, as will the role of patient preference on treatment outcome. Finally, strategies for managing ultra-treatment resistant mood disorders in the setting of pharmacological futility will be explored.

In this presentation we will examine how regret is linked to hindsight bias, maximization rather than satisfaction strategies, intolerance of uncertainty, rejection of ambivalence, refusal to accept trade-offs, excessive information demands, and ruminative processes. Specific techniques will be elaborated to balance regret with acceptance, future utility, and flexibility to enhance more pragmatic decision processes, reverse ruminative focus on the past, and replace self-criticism with adaptive self-correction.

Medical treatments for chronic pain are often ineffective, and psychological treatments typically view pain as a lifelong, chronic condition that can only be managed but not effectively treated. Here, we introduce a novel therapeutic framework, pain reprocessing therapy (PRT), integrating advances from neuroscience, psychology, and medicine to more effectively treat chronic pain. PRT rests on the premise that many cases of chronic pain are driven primarily by fear-avoidance learning and maladaptive functional changes in predictive processing and pain construction—termed “primary” or “neuroplastic” pain. Critically, this suggests that cases of primary chronic pain can be “unlearned”, with symptoms mostly or completely eliminated. In a recently completed clinical trial (N = 151), 66% of patients randomized to PRT were pain-free or nearly so at post-treatment, as compared to less than 20% of controls, with gains largely maintained for one year post-treatment (Ashar et al., 2022). This workshop will provide clinicians an introduction to the PRT framework.

The NYC-CBT Board is proud to offer this four-part series teaching the fundamentals of CBT, taught by our very board members. This is a wonderful opportunity for clinicians wanting to gain a better understanding of CBT or brush up on skills and techniques they might not regularly use. This series is completely free. You can attend as many or as few as you would like. In addition, it’s a great chance to become better acquainted with our board members and colleagues. Space is limited. If you sign up, we kindly ask that you make your best effort to attend, that way a seat is not taken from others who would like to join. 

This session will cover cognitive interventions

Schema Therapy is a type of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) which was developed specifically for the treatment of personality disorders, chronic mood problems, and interpersonal difficulties. Schema therapy is evidence-based and transdiagnostic in its approach. This workshop will introduce the Schema Therapy model, including its contemporary modifications. Dr. Roediger will also demonstrate use of the therapeutic relationship for limited reparenting. Another key feature of Schema therapy is the intensive use of experiential techniques. After outlining the need for emotion-focused approaches to induce deep and corrective emotional experiences, participants will engage in an Imagery Rescripting exercise together. Finally, there will be a role play demonstration of a chair dialogue with an externalizing (e.g. narcissistic) client. Participants will receive an intensive introduction into the Schema Therapy approach, along with vivid clinical examples, and will learn how Schema Therapy broadens and deepens our CBT therapeutic options.

Please join your friends and colleagues from the NYC Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Association for our first in-person networking event since 2019! All are welcome, from students to early career professions to seasoned NYC-CBT veterans. Enjoy the Outdoor Garden Balcony & Indoor Bar.

Fear and anxiety are among the most common problems for which individuals seek psychological treatment. Although exposure therapy is highly effective for these conditions, many clients fail to benefit or experience relapse at some point after treatment. Cutting-edge models of exposure focus on an inhibitory learning theory of fear extinction, which points to specific techniques to optimize short- and long-term treatment gains. Collectively, inhibitory learning strategies emphasize distress tolerance, as opposed to habituation of distress; and introduce “desirable difficulties” into exposure by challenging clients to learn that their feared situations are not dangerous. This workshop aims to help clinicians apply this model to optimize exposure therapy. The inhibitory learning model will be described, and then numerous practical strategies for optimizing inhibitory learning during exposure will be introduced and illustrated in detail using case descriptions and videos.

Process-Based Therapy is not a new form of therapy, but a new way of thinking about what practitioners and the public should expect of evidence-based interventions. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is a good test case for a PBT approach because its underlying model has been examined, not just in over 850 randomized trials, but in thousands of basic and applied studies of processes of change and intervention kernels that move them. In this workshop, I will show how a focus on processes of change in PBT can vitalize your clinical work when applied in an idiographic way and how ACT and its psychological flexibility model can be used to accomplish that end.

Please join us for a conversation about navigating life during and after graduate school

Topics will include:

• Experiences to acquire during training

• Licensure, including how social workers can earn their clinical license

• Career paths in academic medical settings

• Starting, building and maintaining a private practice

• Treating various patient populations

• Forensic evaluations and court testimony

• Supervision and consultation

• Professional community

• Self-care and burnout

• Your questions

The bulk of therapist training is devoted to the initiation of therapy and reduction of acute symptoms, while less attention is paid to the later phases of treatment. Although modification of core beliefs or schemas is not inherently different from working with other cognitions, it can be a longer process. Effectively targeting core beliefs and schemas can be conceptualized as a multi-intervention process that involves cognitive, behavioral, experiential, and emotion-focused strategies to bring about change. Participants will be taught interventions to bring about lasting change in core beliefs and schemas. A number of specific strategies will be taught and demonstrated.

Recent conceptualizations of anxiety, depressive, trauma-related and other “emotional” disorders emphasize their similarities rather than their differences. In response, there has been a movement away from traditional disorder-specific interventions toward treatment approaches focused on addressing core psychological processes that cut across these disorders. These “transdiagnostic” treatments also address co-occurring emotional disorders, which is the norm rather than the exception, and have the potential to increase the availability of evidence-based treatments to meet a significant public health need. The Unified Protocol for Transdiagnostic Treatment of Emotional Disorders (Barlow et al., 2018; UP), has accumulated substantial empirical support for its use. The UP is an emotion-focused cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) that targets core temperamental characteristics , particularly, but not limited to, neuroticism occurring across what used to be called the “neurotic spectrum” (e.g., anxiety, depressive, dissociative, and related disorders).

This introductory workshop will first briefly discuss the rationale for a transdiagnostic approach to treatment and review evidence supporting the UP. This will be followed by a description and demonstration of how to apply core UP treatment modules, along with the similarities and differences between the UP and traditional CBT. Audio and videotaped illustrations of core treatment interventions (e.g., mindful awareness, emotion exposures) will be presented and attendees will be invited to participate in exercises as part of these demonstrations.

The purpose of this half-day workshop is to introduce participants to cognitive processing therapy (CPT) protocols for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The workshop begins with a functional description of why some people do not recover from trauma and why comorbid symptoms develop along with their PTSD. Cognitive and biological theories will be introduced to describe why cognitive therapy reduces PTSD symptoms. Participants will learn first about the standard 12-session therapy, session by session along with a variable-length version of the protocol. CPT is a very systematic approach to treating PTSD in which participants learn to think about their traumatic events differently and learn the skill of more balanced thinking generally. This workshop includes videotaped examples of the therapy.

How do we apply evidence-based treatment to the BIPOC patient and their individual context? What is the work we can each do to promote anti-racist attitudes and behaviors? We are thrilled to bring you Dr. Karinn Glover and Dr. Dinelia Rosa who will delve deeper into the medical and mental health disparities, discuss new approaches clinicians can apply, and lead us in a conversation about what we can each do to promote social justice as a mental health practitioner.

An evolutionary understanding of human nature and the adaptational function of emotions will be used to explain why mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and suicide were increasing well-before the pandemic. The pandemic has greatly accelerated this mental health crisis by further disrupting the ability of individuals to satisfy core human needs in the modern environment. An adaptation of CBT to deal with pandemic-related fear and sadness will be presented, with a focus on facilitating resilience and posttraumatic growth.

Needless to say, for the first time in our lifetimes we are experiencing a world wide pandemic that has disrupted the world. We don’t know exactly how or when it will end, but we do know there will be economic and mental consequences for almost everyone. In this environment, where we get conflicting advice of what we are to do to protect ourselves and loved ones, what kind of modifications can be made for the treatment of OCD? In this presentation, Dr. Grayson will discuss ERP in the age of pandemic. He will cover doing exposure via teletherapy, how to continue safely with contamination exposures, fear of harming others, health concerns about the coronavirus and other topics. There will be time for questions and answers on individual case issues and other pandemic related issues.

Many clients have been told that there are certain emotions that they should not have-envy, jealousy, ambivalence, boredom, resentment, regret, sadness, anger, and anxiety. They have been told, "You shouldn't feel that way"; "Get over it"; or "Stop crying." But a life worth living often involves experiencing unpleasant emotions that are often complex and apparently "conflicting." Just as people with OCD struggle with unwanted intrusive thoughts or people who ruminate look for "The Answer," we often struggle to rid ourselves of unwanted feelings. A new form of CBT-Emotional Schema Therapy, which draws on ACT, DBT, cognitive therapy and metacognitive therapy-emphasizes that all emotions evolved because they were adaptive-including emotions that we are often told we should not have. We will review beliefs in emotional perfectionism and existential perfectionism-that is, the belief that we should feel good and that our lives should follow certain expectations that we have. But real life is filled with disappointments, loss, unfairness, and even betrayal. I describe a model of emotional inclusiveness, containment of unpleasant emotions, normalization of "the abnormal," expansion and differentiation of emotions, and the use of these emotions to differentiate the values and meanings that we have. We will review how clients have learned problematic views of emotions, emotion regulation, and emotion expression and how these beliefs currently impede acceptance and tolerance of feelings. We will review these problematic beliefs about fear of emotions, such as the belief in Pure Mind, the need for "clarity" as opposed to openness and fluidity of emotion, beliefs in the durability and need for control of "negative" emotions, shame and guilt about emotions, and intolerance of "conflicting" emotions. We will examine how clients can overcome their fear of crying and in sharing painful feelings, while helping clients also pursue a range of other emotions. A wide range of techniques will be described and experiential participation will be encouraged to assist in deepening meaning without avoiding the unpleasant emotions often associated with finding meaning.

Recent treatment approaches for anxiety and depressive disorders stress the importance of addressing transdiagnostic factors such as rumination, worry, and impulsivity as part of comprehensive intervention. Both CBT and training in mindfulness meditation have shown the ability to disengage neural networks supporting rumination and worry, along with enhancing clinical outcomes through increased tolerance of negative affective states. This workshop will explore, from both a data and personal practice perspective, which elements of mindfulness training are best suited to be incorporated into clinical practice, how their utilization can be compatible with a pre-existing CBT therapeutic frame, and how doing so has the potential to yield benefits for both patients and therapists alike.

Please join your friends and colleagues from the NYC Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Association in collaboration with the Academy of Cognitive Therapy for an evening of networking, socializing and discussion of all things CBT and beyond! All are welcome from students to early career professionals to seasoned NYC-CBT veterans.

Cognitive-behavioral therapy for depression is one of the most well studied talk therapies with strong empirical support.  The model has included behavioral strategies such as pleasure and mastery ratings and activity scheduling. More recently, interest has emerged in traditional behavioral treatments for depression and behavioral activation (BA) resurfaced as a specific treatment for depression.  BA has added an emphasis on identifying and modifying depressed clients’ avoidance patterns and ruminative thought processes. These processes often function as disengagement strategies for clients struggling with depressed mood and difficulties regulating affect. The functional and behavioral aspects of treatment can be enhanced in traditional CBT for depression, and incorporated into an overall treatment plan and case conceptualization to assist clients in fully engaging in life and moving beyond the pull of depression.