Book Review: The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety

3.0 out of 5 stars Good REBT + Exposure, but not DBT, ACT, SIQR or MBCT

Rodger Garrett "SighKoBlahGrr" (Loma Linda, CA USA) - See all my reviews

(REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Cognitive Behavioral Workbook for Anxiety: A Step-by-Step Program (Paperback), by William Knaus, Oakland: New Harbinger, 2008.

Professionals:

Coming as it does from the New Harbinger stable, one might expect Knaus's book to include an in-depth review of mindfulness-based, experiential techniques along with CBT. One would be wrong.

Knaus is solidly rooted in Albert Ellis's rational emotive behavioral therapy, as well as the old-school exposure therapies of the '70s and '80s (think "Edna Foa"). But in this book (published well into the MBCT era in 2008), the "radical acceptance" and progressive self-awareness techniques that mark the MBCT's like acceptance and commitment therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and self-talk identification, questioning and revision, are not discussed.

Those whose anxiety and panic are fundamentally the products of left hemisphere dominance and irrationality may derive a lot of useful information and method here. But those whose anxiety and panic are essentially the products of right hemispheric hyper-emotionality (e.g.: hysteric borderlinism) should not expect much help... or, at least, not the "complete package."

Put in terms of personality theory, this might be a good book for people with DSM Axis II Cluster A traits, but probably not for those with traits from Cluster B. And in terms of neuropsychology: Those with over-myelinated downlinks from an over-thinky neocortex seem likely to do better with this than those with little neurological governance of their limbic systems.

Moreover, if the patient's anxiety is a function of dissociated terrorizing and complex PTSD, New Harbinger offers other workbooks more likely to help the patient acquire the skills base he or she will need to get some affective comfort. Among them: the Blocks' Mind Body Workbook for PTSD, Marra's Depressed & Anxious, Follette & Pistorello's Finding Life Beyond Trauma, and Hayes & Smith's Get Out of Your Mind & Into Your Life.

That said, the two pages on "A Case of Managing Panic" distills some of the most useful and artful translation of Selye and Wolpe I have thus far run into in a mass market volume. I wish I had understood overrunning the General Adaptation Syndrome and shipwrecking the autonomic nervous system as well as those notions are portrayed in those two pages a decade and a half ago.

(c) 2012 by Rodger Garrett; all rights reserved. Links are okay. Please inquire or comment to not_moses@fastmail.fm. Thank you.