A Compassionate Approach to Working with Anxiety – with Briony Martin

A Compassionate Approach to Working with Anxiety

Would you like to build your resilience for working with anxiety in the therapy room? Would you welcome a chance to work compassionately with your own anxiety as a way into working more effectively with clients? If so this experiential workshop might help.

Anxiety can be one of the hardest presenting issues to work with in therapy. It is often entrenched and accompanied by problematic physical symptoms and behaviours. It can be deeply distressing for the person experiencing it, and have a hugely negative impact on their life and their ability to function in the world. Clients can often be desperate for relief and help but, despite this, anxious thoughts and feelings persist and both client and therapist can be left feeling frustrated and stuck.

In this workshop we will be re-setting our approach to anxiety, moving away from trying to cure or fix it and towards coming alongside and listening to it. We will explore and experience this ‘compassion-focused’ approach which seeks to befriend the anxious voice rather than disputing or replacing it. We will learn some strategies for compassionate self-talk which can be used to attend to our own anxiety as well as offer to clients. And we will reflect on the impact of the pandemic, the climate crisis and other international issues on our collective experience of anxiety.

You can expect to learn:

• How anxiety shows up in clients… and in therapists
• How to relate compassionately to anxiety in clients, and how to help them to do the same for themselves
• Some creative techniques for working with anxiety in the therapy room or online
• How individual experiences of anxiety relate to bigger social issues
• Some strategies for soothing your own anxiety

About Briony Martin

Briony Martin MA(Cantab) MBACP Accred. Dip. Sup., is an experienced BACP accredited integrative psychotherapist, supervisor and educator. She has a private practice in Marlborough and offers training events across the south west. A former counselling trainer, she now teaches psychology undergraduates at The Open University and is currently studying for a Professional Doctorate in Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Chester. She has lived experience of anxiety, as well as extensive expertise working alongside clients with this issue. She also likes dogs, yoga and chocolate!

Feedback about Briony from our previous events

Open to psychological therapists (including trainees) from all modalities and health professionals.

CPD certificates supplied. Refreshments are included, but not lunch or parking.

The vast majority of our professional CPD events are led by psychotherapists. Each delegate is responsible for self-care should material during the event trigger difficult personal feelings.