I can’t stop worrying. I worry all the time. It seems so pointless, but there must be a reason,” a client tells his or her therapist. Draw on (1) research comparing worry among people with generalized anxiety disorders with worry among normal controls and (2) the cognitive avoidance model of generalized anxiety disorder to suggest what the therapist might tell the client with respect to worry.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Ans: The therapist might begin by reassuring the client that almost everyone worries and that not all worry is bad. One of the functions of worrying, in fact, is to prepare an individual for negative events or to enable her or him to prevent negative events from happening. Worry becomes a problem, however, when a person cannot control it or cannot move from worrying about events to actively coping with them. Psychologists suggest that worry sometimes functions to reduce one’s negative feelings about bad events. In a sense, people use the worrying itself as a way to cope, rather than adopting more effective coping strategies.
Learning Objective: 8.3 Distinguish among the major anxiety disorders, their causes, and treatment.
Cognitive Domain: Application
Answer Location: Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Difficulty Level: Hard