I like to be helpful. It’s one of the reasons I became a psychologist. You could say it’s my mission. Sometimes I get a phone call or an email from a distant relation, a friend, an acquaintance, or even a resourceful stranger who found my name on a website or blog. These people often have questions about psychotherapy.
We here at the Center for Deployment Psychology are excited to unveil the new Evidence-Based Psychotherapies video section on our website. As part of our multi-day EBP training events, we use many videos to demonstrate a variety of techniques. One of the most common request we receive is participants wanting the opportunity to watch these videos again afterwards to help reinforce the concepts. Now those interested can watch (and re-watch) all these video demonstrations whenever they want.
I have been training providers in Prolonged Exposure therapy (PE) and collecting outcome data for the past seven years. Since I arrived at the Philadelphia VA Medical Center, I have been involved in the training of approximately 45 clinicians in PE and collected outcomes for over 300 cases. And while what follows is certainly not an exhaustive list of factors to consider in providing PE to a Veteran population, it does represent a convergence of my clinical observations and our empirical findings. With that stated, my findings and observations in providing PE to veterans are: 1) therapist experience matters; 2) service-connection is an important issue; and 3) not enough attention is paid to safety behaviors.
I read this book because I thought I might like to recommend it to new therapists who are just learning exposure techniques. I actually found that it has a much broader range than that. As it turns out, this is a solid and comprehensive review of the behavioral principles of exposure therapy and a pretty fantastic guide to implementation of exposure with a wide variety of anxious patients.
For most of us, summer conjures up the idea of vacation. Rather than thinking of vacation as only a time for leaving behind something stressful or routine, I have come to see it as an opportunity for proactively adding to my treasure chest through real life exposures. Yes, the kind we refer to in Prolonged Exposure (PE) Therapy.