Don’t Go Down the Rabbit Hole! A Clinical Approach to Unanswerable Questions and the Quest for Certainty
This recorded webinar was featured at the 2021 ADAA Virtual Conference Resilience and Recovery: From Research to Practice.
Webinar Description:
This workshop, based in empirically-grounded cognitive-behavioral and exposure-based principles, tackles a complex symptom presentation using a seemingly counter-intuitive approach. It begins with cultivating treatment readiness. Clinicians, children and parents learn to distinguish between the face-value content of the symptoms and the underlying distress and intolerance of uncertainty, recognize direct, subtle and indirect neutralizing, parenting traps and OCD “pinch points” that send them down the rabbit hole, and the cycle of escape that is strengthened by negative reinforcement. The importance of defining the right and wrong goals of treatment proactively is emphasized. “Don’t go down the rabbit hole” functions as a quick prompt for parents and children to pause, recognize and break out of intuitive and repetitive anxiety/OCD scripts, and switch to proactively-developed scripts that promote exposure and tolerance of uncertainty. Using well-established in vivo and imaginal exposure techniques, the treatment focus treatment shifts away from the face-value content to addressing the underlying feeling, to “bring down the feeling temperature” and not go down the rabbit hole.
Learning Objectives:
- Recognize neutralizing behaviors, parenting traps and “pinch points” that occur with confessing, apologizing and reassurance-seeking.
- Differentiate right and wrong goals of treatment and face-value content of symptoms versus underlying distress.
- Apply a systematic approach to focus on addressing the underlying process, instead of the content.
