Deconstructing Anxiety: A Deeper Dive Into Understanding and Treating Anxiety Disorders

This workshop will provide a deep dive into treatment-resistant anxiety, helping to uncover the root causes of anxiety in even your most challenging clients. You will learn techniques for releasing the resistances that keep the anxiety alive, getting at their source and transforming them into a sense of high purpose and meaning, yielding powerful change and lasting results. With the understanding that anxiety (fear) is at the root of all suffering, you will gain insight into the five core fears – “universal themes of loss” – we all share, including:

• abandonment (loss of love), 
• loss of identity, 
• loss of meaning, 
• loss of purpose (the chance to express oneself) and 
• fear of death (including fear of sickness and pain) 

We develop our primary defenses, usually early in childhood or at times of trauma, as our best attempt to protect ourselves from these fears, but always at a great cost. This leaves us constantly holding vigil, on the lookout for the resurfacing of the fear. We build our entire personality upon this fear-defense dynamic. When our fear-defense dynamic spins out of control, an anxiety disorder can develop. The theory and techniques offered in this workshop will teach you how to uncover the core fear and chief defense quickly and reliably.

Armed with this knowledge, new strategies for “doing the opposite” of the chief defense and its secondary defenses have proven extremely successful in even the most anxious clients. Incorporating psychodynamics, mindfulness, Gestalt, CBT and transpersonal psychology, participants will undergo the actual techniques being presented, making for a rich and highly experiential presentation. Come prepared for an exciting adventure into the deepest regions of the unconscious, where the hidden fears at the source of our difficulties live, to bring them out into consciousness, available for rapid and lasting transformation.

This course is based on the recorded webinar, Deconstructing Anxiety: A Deeper Dive Into Understanding and Treating Anxiety Disorders created by Todd Pressman, PhD in 2026.