Nice workbook for working through avoidance to be used in addition to therapy. Would recommend to clients and therapists alike.

Great book for helping my clients stop avoiding uncomfortable situations. As a therapist I have found myself turning to the book to help me in my work with my clients and I feel like they have benefited from it as well.

I received an Advance Review Copy of Overcoming Avoidance Workbook from via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. I have barely scratched the surface of this book because there is a lot to learn. Walks you through making necessary changes, using weekly formats related to each other, with questions to help on making positive steps forward. Gives you advice and treatment, ratings of your symptoms, and starting points to monitor progress. In my experience, avoidance and isolation can sometimes be mild patterns we don't always recognize or acknowledge within ourselves. I found this book insightful.

This book was really great to have during the past few weeks as I have worked with a number of students who have been affected by anxiety and work avoidance. I would absolutely love to have this book on hand as I continue to work with young people and look forward to purchasing my own copy (my ARC was digital).
I am not a therapist, but as anyone who has worked with youth knows, it is often hard for students to access services in a timely way and a workbook like this is helpful in giving kids a few helpful solutions rooted in CBT without having to cross the line from educator to armature therapist (a role I am reluctantly pushed in to at times).

This workbook is very helpful for people who struggle with a number of symptoms related to mental health and cope by avoiding, avoiding, avoiding. (That's me.) It's definitely a good guide to reducing these harmful behaviours and includes a number of exercises for introspection and improvement.

The Overcoming Avoidance Workbook by psychologist Daniel F. Gros aims to help you stop avoiding and start living. It takes a transdiagnostic approach, meaning it focuses on specific behaviours rather than the diagnoses in which they occur. The cover says that it’s for anxiety, depression, or PTSD, but the focus is on anxiety and depression.

The approach used is transdiagnostic behaviour therapy (TBT), which is a variation of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). The book is laid out much as TBT would be done in person with a therapist, with eight chapters that are each intended to be covered in a week, including worksheets and practice.

The author’s style is fairly blunt, although not excessively so. This is apparent when he tells readers at the beginning of the book that panic attacks won’t physically hurt you, no matter how much you might think they will. I think that for some readers, that bluntness will be really effective, but for others, it could be off-putting.

The model underlying the book’s approach is that a difficult event causes anxiety/depression, which leads to isolation, withdrawal, and avoidance, which worsens the anxiety/depression, and around and around it goes.

The author explains that the key intervention to end this cycle is using exposures. This approach varies from your standard prolonged exposure, where you would typically construct a hierarchy of feared situations to do exposure work. Instead, the author encourages you to dive right in and do a lot of exposure in a lot of different situations.

Avoidance is broken down into four different types: situation, physical sensations, thoughts, and positive emotion-promoting situations. The author explains when these are likely to occur and how to come up with exposures to fit them. The book also covers barriers that might get in the way of exposures being effective.

One thing that struck me as a bit odd was that the author equated not learning from an exposure to leaving too early. In prolonged exposure, the idea is that after about 45 minutes in a situation, the intense negative stuff will naturally decrease, and if you leave the situation before that, it just reinforces that being in that situation will make you anxious. The learning that the author was referring to was learning about the outcome that you were anticipating, because presumably you thought the outcome would be worse than it was. I would think that not learning could just mean that needing exposure to whatever it was wasn’t the issue.

There was also the standard CBT stance that pushing yourself to do things will eventually result in increased positive emotions. I think it certainly can, no question, but the reality is, it’s not always that neat and tidy.

Of course, a book about avoidance is going to be all about dealing with avoidance. Still, it felt like the author was being simplistic in making avoidance the defining feature in anxiety in depression. Perhaps that’s where the transdiagnostic bit runs into problems. I suspect avoidance is more universally a key feature in anxiety, but perhaps less so in depression. Granted, if you’re picking up a book about avoidance, it’s probably a moot point anyway.

For potential readers who are wanting to tackle avoidance, I think the main deciding factor in whether this book will be good for you is whether you want a direct approach or a softer approach. If you want direct, this is your book, but if you want softer, this may not be your best option.



I received a reviewer copy from the publisher through Netgalley.

Overcoming Avoidance Workbook by Daniel F. Gros is a workbook that ties the authors clinical, research, teaching, and administrative experiences, resulting in a book that helps the reader recognize and overcome avoidant behaviors. The workbook is developed around the method transdiagnostic behavior therapy (TBT) that focuses on using interventions successful across a wide variety of conditions like anxiety, depression, and PTSD.

The book is organized into 8 chapters with each chapter corresponding to your activities for the week. This structure simplifies the process of using this workbook while providing a reasonable amount of work in a week. Each section within the chapters provides background information and then provides one or more exercises to do related to that information. For many of the exercises there are also short anecdotes that are used for examples on how to use the exercises which is helpful for people who get stuck. Many of the exercises are very helpful to make copies of it for you to revisit at later dates! Each section builds on the previous and provide helpful reminders or summaries on what you learned previously. Overall I highly recommend this book for those looking for ways to reflect on the how, why, when of their avoidant behaviors and need some tangible ways to overcome it!

Many thanks to the publisher New Harbinger and Netgalley for the ARC in return for an honest review.

This is an extremely useful workbook for helping people overcome avoidance. It's structured on a week-by-week basis. First, the reader identifies their avoidance behaviors. Then, they gradually expose themselves to the things they're avoiding, to help overcome the associated negative emotions. One example used is a little boy who's afraid of cats. By gradually exposing himself to his best friend's new cat, the boy learns that the outcomes he fears are unlikely to occur.

The workbook focuses on symptoms rather than diagnoses. Whether the avoidance is due to anxiety, depression, PTSD, or another disorder, the techniques should work. Also, the focus is on behavior rather than the root cause. It's a program for improving your life in the present, getting back to activities you enjoy and reconnecting with people you love.

This isn't a book that you just read and magically get better. It's not about changing your mindset. It's about changing your behavior. You have to do the work.

A couple of caveats: First, this book doesn't address the fact that sometimes, the things people are avoiding may actually be dangerous or bad for them. One example used in the advance reader copy is avoiding shopping at night, for fear of being attacked in a dark parking lot. Exhorting patients to change this behavior is a stunning example of male privilege. Maybe the typical male feels safe in a dark parking lot alone at night, but the typical female does not. This is not avoidance. This is common sense.

The book doesn't do enough to stress that the purpose is to stop you from avoiding things you used to enjoy. If you're avoiding your family because they're toxic, maybe that's a good thing. If you're finding it increasingly difficult to go to work in the morning, maybe you need to find a new job. Avoidance itself isn't always unhealthy. Sometimes it's the best thing for you.

I also worry that someone with severe symptoms might be better off if they first engage in exposure in a clinical setting, rather than on their own. The book exhorts readers to avoid relying on other people as a crutch in exposure situations. Which may be fine in most situations, but I can also envision someone becoming triggered and having a severe reaction with no safety precautions in place.

If you suffer from anxiety, I don't recommend reading this book cover-to-cover in one sitting. Doing so triggered my anxiety. The workbook isn't meant to be used that way. It's meant to be a program you follow week-by-week, finishing one set of exercises before you start the next.

If you're tired of being caught in a trap of avoidance, this book is worth a look.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.

Different things to progress and grow on over an eight-week period - can be something to be an addition to what you are doing.

This book was extremely helpful to me. I liked the examples provided featuring the sample person “Mark”. I also loved that it was structured with weekly activities I can do so I feel like I am progressing. I would buy this in print format versus ebook so I can actually write in the charts and use it as a workbook.

I was excited for this book as I have dealt with avoidance all of my life but I did not find it useful in the least. Lots of talk, lots of psychological navel gazing, but nothing that actually helped me get things done. Sorry, this was a miss for me.

Useful handbook, very well constructed and filled with good practices and worksheets. Quite centered around behavioral therapy, but if you're a clinician using this type of therapy, it could be very useful !

—
I received an Advance Review Copy of #OvercomingAvoidanceWorkbook from #NewHarbinger via #NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Useful workbook balanced with theory and practice.

I'm pleasantly surprised by this book. The title immediately appealed to me because do recognize that avoidance is my instantaneous reaction to emotional distress; if you are anything like that, too, this book will definitely be a good tool to overcome this pattern of holding yourself back.

The book is organized into weekly readings and exercises, which I found greatly important- nothing too overwhelming at a time, or else I would have run away from this workbook, too. It starts off with defining avoidance and explaining why exactly is it so harmful in our day-to-day lives. It then goes on to explain the why behind these neurological reactions, which is then followed by various techniques. I learned how to challenge my coping mechanism by proving it wrong and use and reinforce other strategies.

Regardless of your diagnosis - whether it's anxiety, depression, OCD or anything else - if avoidance if your problem, this workbook is a good tool to help yourself get better.

*Thank you to the Publisher for a free advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is very helpful. I'm familiar with CBT, but still got value from this workbook. People suffering from anxiety and depression - as I do - will find value in here.

Great and resourceful workbook, this book is very insightful and provides exercises to help improve oneself.

I enjoyed this book as a way to assist some of the families I work with in mental health. I highlighted many approaches that can further assist me in working with families. I also enjoyed the insight into TBT.

This book provided a plethora of tips and insights to overcome avoidance, would highly recommend. I look forward to more books from this author.

The Overcoming Avoidance Workbook is designed to be transdiagnostic, meaning that it's focused on the symptoms of avoidance regardless of the diagnosis the symptom is associated with. In theory, I thought this would be fantastic, as I often encounter clients with avoidance linked to anxiety (and perfectionism), trauma, depression, and ADHD.

However, this workbook wasn't exactly what I was looking for. Because of the transdiagnostic approach, the workbook becomes very behavioral and approaches avoidance as a problem to be solved, rather than a symptom to understand. The interventions in place are largely focused on exposure. This workbook may be a good fit for consumers and therapists working from a behavioral lens, but as a relationally-focused therapist, it's not the right fit for my practice.

This workbook will require users to have some basic knowledge of psychological concepts and good insight.

This is a simple, easy to understand workbook for all those who feel that avoidance has somehow become one of their go-to behaviours when faced with situations that they are not comfortable with.
It starts with explaining the long term negative effects that avoidance has on our lives in a language that is very easy to comprehend.
It moves on to giving worksheets and easy techniques by which we can understand, track and take measures to reduce resorting to avoidance in our day to day lives. . The techniques are well explained and this makes it easier for us to try them.
This will definitely be helpful for people who want to understand themselves better and proactively take measures to improve the quality of their lives.
I would definitely recommend this to anyone who feels that they are missing out on a lot of elements simply because they find it difficult to change their thought and behavioural patterns.