Hello, I'm Denise Winn and I teach the course 'How to handle chronic anxiety'. Now
if you're a therapist, you probably have a lot of clients
come to see you because of anxiety. Because it's an increasing problem,
it's growing enormously. Or you may be somebody who suffers from anxiety a lot
yourself. Now when I say 'chronic anxiety', it's not
any different from anxiety, but it tends to be around a lot for an individual. They
may even have incorporated it into their personality, and they describe
themselves as 'an anxious person'. They think they will always be anxious. But,
and it's true to a degree that we do have the trait of anxiety, some people
have higher levels than others. There is a genetic component. But this doesn't mean
that we can't learn to handle it. And in fact people who do have a higher genetic
tendency towards anxiety, are those who most need to learn the kind of skills
that we're teaching on this day. And therapists need to know them so they can
help those clients. Because people don't want to be prey to anxiety all the time -
it's a very miserable condition. It keeps people very upset, and obviously on
constant alert, and hyper vigilant, and that means lots of physical effects as
well that are really unpleasant to live with. So it's good to know that there's a
lot of things we can do about it, and the human givens approach has a very
successful track record for working with people with anxiety. So on the day, which
is of interest to human givens therapists, other therapists, and also people
who've got anxiety themselves, (although it is not a substitute for therapy) what
we will be doing is looking at anxiety from all angles. We start with explaining
it, because giving people an understanding for why they feel as they
do so much of the time can be enormously freeing. It normalizes something which has
felt very odd and unusual, it makes them feel set apart. So we'll be looking at that
aspect of anxiety. And then we'll be spending a lot of time
on practical skills. And these include how to lower physiological levels of
arousal. So there's very unpleasant feelings, bodily feelings of anxiety, once
they get a hold, how can we actually quickly reduce them. And there's going to
be a good number of options that I'm going to show you for doing this very
quickly. Then we'll be moving on to look at how people with anxiety can handle
thinking patterns that are not helpful to them - that they may not realize but
are actually exacerbating their anxiety, making it harder to deal with. So I'll be
giving you lots and lots of suggestions of ways of dealing with
negative thinking in a more positive productive way. And this can shift things
very quickly. I've had clients myself just say 'it is so freeing to learn these
techniques'. We'll also be spending time looking at
social anxiety, because this can be really excruciating for a lot of people
going into social situations, whether that is literally social situations like
parties or gatherings, or whether it is doing public speaking or eating in
public, anything like that can really mess up people's lives. So we'll be
looking at that. We will also be looking at complicating factors such as other
conditions where anxiety is a big feature - and this will include the
autistic spectrum disorder, ADHD, bipolar disorder, and also what we term 'right
brained caetextia' (which will be explained on the day) where people tend to
have difficulty regulating emotions amongst other things. So anxiety is very
pronounced in all these cases and we need to take a specific look at those so
that we have extra skills to help people who have those conditions. We'll also be
looking at the role of stories in helping people with anxiety. In the human
givens approach we set a lot of store by helping people create new
empowering patterns for themselves. And there's almost no
better way of doing this than by telling people stories in which patterns are
good ones that they can learn from and adapt. Because we're pattern matching
creatures. We look for patterns to follow. Sometimes we do that unproductively but
we can be helped to find good positive patterns as well. So all these things
we'll be doing on this day, and I do hope that you will want to come and join us.