Disqualifying others is a common thinking style whereby individuals discount information that comes from other people. Unfortunately, these disqualifications can maintain negative beliefs in the face of overwhelming counter-evidence, and stop people learning from their interpersonal experiences.

Disqualifying the positive is a well-known thinking style in which individuals ignore, dismiss, or discount their positive attributes and experiences. While disqualifying the positive has been emphasized in cognitive models of depression, it also plays a role in anxiety disorders and other mental health conditions such as psychosis.

This guide helps your clients understand more about their condition by explaining what anorexia is, why it may not get better by itself, and the different evidence-based treatment options. It includes case examples, descriptions of symptoms and how they might affect a client’s thoughts, feelings and actions, and a screening assessment questionnaire.

A comprehensive source of information for your clients to understand more about their BDD. In approachable, straightforward language it explains what BDD is, what keeps it going, and why it might not get better by itself. It also includes symptom descriptions, and evidence-based treatment options.

This is a paper that we missed in 2020, but which takes a classic cognitive therapy (CT) approach to GAD. Participants used a Worry Outcome Journal (WOJ) to record in-the-moment worries, rate in-the-moment costs of each worry, and then track the actual outcome. They found that:

“… worries did not come true for WOJ users with GAD (91.4%). In fact, the most common incidence of false worries among participants was 100% with a median of 93.5%.”

The authors argue that the CT approach for GAD should aim for correcting maladaptive cognitions:

“Primarily, therapists should use techniques to draw client attention to evidence that their worries are unrealistic, unlikely, and unhelpful. If clients can track the actual results of their expectations, they may learn to form more adaptive, evidence-based beliefs and predictions.”

The contrast avoidance model (CAM) proposes that individuals with GAD use worry as a coping strategy because they prefer to feel chronically distressed in order to prepare for the worst outcome, rather than experience a shift from a positive or euthymic state to a negative emotion (negative contrast: Newman & Llera, 2011). Savoring — purposefully engaging and extending positive emotions — is a theoretically-derived approach to reducing avoidance of negative contrasts. This study in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders indicates that a relatively brief intervention,  which trains clients in savoring, can lead to significant reductions in contrast avoidance.