AMP's Knowledge Project: CBT for Distressing Physical Symptoms with Lara Desrosiers (Virtual)
Education is not enough to shift Beliefs. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is the gold standard approach for working with pain related beliefs in rehabilitation settings.
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The goal of this course is for you to successfully learn and transfer evidence into your clinical practice. This sounds easy, but it takes intention and strategy to do it successfully. Most weekend courses do not achieve a material change in practice. The short time frame and the lack of opportunity to practice new skills and knowledge in a clinical setting do not facilitate consolidation. That’s why we’ve revisioned a weekend course to take place over the course of a month with structured reflection, regular prompting, high frequency touch points, and a chance to, again and again, engage with the material and transfer it to your clinical practice while being supported by course facilitators.
We guarantee that this course will enhance your practice.
This 4 week virtual learning experience will focus on improving your ability to identify & work with pain related beliefs and distress in your rehabilitation practice. An individual’s beliefs, thoughts, and emotions will influence their physiology, their experience of their symptoms and how they engage in their unique rehabilitation process. Your effectiveness as a practitioner is determined largely by your capacity to intentionally identify and address these factors. However, these are skills that are not taught in most traditional physical rehabilitation programs. Throughout this course you will have the opportunity to learn and practice techniques from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy that will improve your therapeutic relationship with your clients, improve your capacity to help them navigate the distress related to their symptoms, and enhance your impact.
This course is open to all healthcare and wellness professionals interested in enhancing their psychologically-informed practice.
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After completing this course, participants will be able to:
Appreciate the psychological processes influencing recovery in physical rehabilitation settings.
Help patients to identify the various components of their experience with distressing symptoms (physical sensations, emotions, thoughts, and behaviours).
Use motivational interviewing techniques to engage clients in pain self-management strategies.
Integrate CBT skills into clinical practice in order to:
Help clients build skills to calm their bodies & nervous systems.
Identify unhelpful thinking patterns.
Introduce countering strategies to evaluate and shift distressing thoughts.
Develop behavioural experiments & exposure hierarchies to challenge avoidant behaviours rooted in anxiety and interfering with recovery.
Obtain a foundational understanding of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy principles & integrate skills to support psychological flexibility into clinical practice.
Obtain a framework for conceptualizing the private experiences (thoughts, emotions, physical sensations) and behaviours of patients in order to help guide the selection of CBT/ACT strategies
Pivot & partner with clients when things don’t go to plan!
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Meet Lara Desrosiers
This Knowledge Project will be Facilitated by AMP’s Director, Lara Desrosiers. Lara is an Occupational Therapist who has worked in community mental health settings since graduating from McMaster University in 2009.
She has a passion for mental health and several years of experience addressing mental illness, trauma, and addiction using occupational therapy frameworks & psychotherapeutic technique. Lara now operates a private practice, Pelvic Resilience in Ontario where she supports individuals struggling with persistent pain and pelvic health challenges to get back to living life. Lara enjoys teaching multidisciplinary audiences how to build impactful psychologically-informed and trauma-informed practices.
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~10 hours of Self Paced Content to introduce you to theory, key concepts and skills rooted in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy
2 X 5 hour Integration Workshops focused on Clarifying/Refining Learning, Application, Practice, and Clinical Reasoning.
2 Optional 90 minute support calls. Students are encouraged to bring questions and case studies to the Integration Workshops and these optional support calls in order to unpack obstacles and gain clarity. No new material will be introduced in these Optional Support Calls.
Morning coffee emails with prompts to explore, reflect, and focus on the strategies introduced.
Discussion boards to consolidate new ideas, explore nuance and application, and learn from peers and facilitators.
A wealth of reference materials to dive into and explore during and after the course.
