Setting Up Patients for Success: Providing Patients with Psychoeducation Increases Their Resilience and Helps Maintain Progress in Treatment

When working with people struggling with anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorders, therapists guide the treatment process in order to help patients manage their symptoms, increase their willingness to experience distress, and raise their fear tolerance. However, guiding treatment is not enough: it is helpful for clients to understand why their efforts to reduce or get rid of their anxiety have not produced long-term relief, and also why and how the treatment we are proposing is effective. This understanding assists patients in trusting their therapists, increasing their willingness to engage in treatment, and instilling hope. Framing the treatment within clients’ values can help create and maintain change especially when progress seems stalled, scary, or too hard. In addition, because learning about exposure therapy can be overwhelming, patients must understand that their current coping strategies might offer some reduced distress in the short term but provide no long-term results, and reinforce the power anxiety and avoidance have over their lives. For patients to get the most out of treatment and maintain their gains post-treatment, it is our responsibility as clinicians to ensure that we have provided them with adequate psychoeducation and the power of choosing change.

This presentation addresses how to provide patients with psychoeducation on a number of topics, including the anxiety/OCD cycle, the cognitive behavioral triangle, exposure and response prevention, habituation, inhibitory learning, psychological flexibility, values, the power of choice, and treatment progress expectations. In addition, this session offers ways for clinicians to build rapport and establish trust with patients through the psychoeducation process by using relatable metaphors, humor, and providing helpful reassurance. This session also assists clinicians in working with patients on collaboratively setting treatment goals while simultaneously managing expectations and helping patients to understand that obstacles in treatment are normal and can be overcome. Finally, this presentation examines when in treatment clinicians might consider returning to psychoeducation in order to aid patients in reenergizing their efforts, examining motivation for treatment, and acknowledging their treatment successes to date.

Learning Objectives

1. At the conclusion of this presentation, attendees will be able to outline a plan for psychoeducation and be able to explain and present key concepts in treatment in lay terms to aid patients’ understanding of the purpose of therapy.
2. At the conclusion of this presentation, attendees will be able to develop their own examples to help patients relate to the material while also building rapport and connecting with their therapists.
3. At the conclusion of this presentation, attendees will be able to identify specific areas of the psychoeducational process where they can instill hope, motivation, and resilience in patients, using compassion, humor, and empathy.

If you have registered, and cannot view or missed the live webinar, please contact [email protected].