This is the fifth in a series of posts about David Barlow & colleagues' new unified protocol for treatment of anxiety, depression & related emotional disorders.  The fourth post was on "Emotional awareness training & cognitive reappraisal" and this one is on the fifth & sixth modules in the eight module training - "Emotional avoidance & emotion driven behaviours (EDB's)" (typically taking one to three treatment sessions) and "Awareness & tolerance of physical sensations" (typically taking just one treatment session).

What we've seen in our work is that most people don't give themselves permission to live until they've been given a terminal diagnosis.                 
Stephen Levine

Well I didn't sleep too well last night.  Catero, my wife, and I went to the cinema yesterday evening and watched "500 Days of Summer" . I enjoyed it and it got me thinking about relationships.  The "Summer" of the title is a woman who doesn't believe in romantic love.  She's kind of charming and maddening and, as I biked away from the cinema, I wondered how I would have approached treating her if she had come to me for therapy!  Interestingly a newspaper reviewer commented that the film is "weirdly incurious about the inner life of its female lead".

Here are a collection of information sheets, handouts and questionnaires about social anxiety disorder.  As I write in the "Diagnosis & background facts" sheet below - "About 7% of the population qualify for a full formal diagnosis of social anxiety disorder in any one year, but even those who suffer from what qualifies as only a partial syndrome can have their lives significantly affected.  Social anxiety disorder makes sufferers more vulnerable to subsequent depression and, when comorbid, the depression tends to be more severe and more resistant to treatment.  There may well also be comorbidity with other anxiety disorders.  Social anxiety disorder is frequently not diagnosed even though it is disabling and well worth treating."

Diagnosis & background facts - this handout gives the criteria for a DSM-IV diagnosis of social phobia/ social anxiety disorder.  It also gives the abstracts of four research studies illustrating how common and troublesome social anxiety can be.  

Ten days ago, on this blog, I wrote about "Reducing negative states" as one aspect of a simple model entitled "Four aspects of helpful inner focus" (see below).  The model is a method I've evolved to help me organize and think about the many facets of deliberately induced altered states of consciousness.  I'm using terms loosely here.  I remember a hypnotist I came across many years ago, calling himself a "de-hypnotist".  He claimed that we walk around "hypnotised" most of the time and that he saw his job as trying to help us "wake up" from this hypnosis.  I mention this to illustrate how terms in this field - for example "inner focus" and "altered state of consciousness" - tend to creak rather a lot if one pushes at them for precise meanings. 

Hodge, D. R. (2008).