Anxiety Management

Self-care is a term we hear all of the time in our profession; we discuss it with our clients, we encourage them to engage in it, we talk about it in supervision, and we generally understand the importance of self-care in our lives. However, as much as therapists talk about self-care, we don’t always practice it ourselves. I often find myself talking with clinicians studying for their licensing exams who, for one reason or another, are not regularly engaging in this process. While it most certainly can be challenging to integrate self-care into your study plan, especially when there are so many competing demands for your time and energy, it is a key component to preparing for your exam. In this month’s anxiety management blog, my goal is to help you build an understanding of what self-care really looks like and help you identify effective ways to integrate it into your study process.

A few days ago, I had the opportunity to speak with a TDC user who recently passed her MFT Clinical exam. Over the course of our conversation, I learned quite a bit about her path to licensure; it took longer than she hoped, as this was not the first time she took the exam. We discussed her experience using other test prep programs, how she felt following her first attempt at the exam, and the unique aspects of test anxiety that she encountered as she prepared to resit for her exam. The goal of this month’s test anxiety blog, born out of that conversation, is to provide guidance on how to manage the process of preparing to retest and offer some strategies and encouragement for those who find themselves in similar situations.

In my last two blogs on test anxiety, I provided psychoeducation about the benefits of moderate levels of anxiety, as well as guidelines for how to utilize self-compassion to temper anxiety when it becomes debilitating. The goal of this month’s blog is to help you identify some common and unhelpful behaviors you may be engaging in when anxiety gets the best of you, and identify strategies to shift away from these behaviors and instead prepare for your exam more effectively and confidently.

Last month I wrote about the role anxiety plays in preparing and sitting for your licensing exams. In particular, my goal was to assure you that anxiety is not only a normal part of the process, but can even benefit your study process. If you didn’t have an opportunity to read it, here is the link. As I discussed in the last blog, while a moderate amount of anxiety can be beneficial, too much or too little can actually be detrimental. In this month’s blog, my goal is to help you develop awareness around your anxiety and begin developing skills to temper it when it becomes too high.

Five years ago, I hadn’t yet been introduced to the concept of mindfulness and the idea of creating a daily meditation practice was far from my radar. As I entered into my first practicum experience where mindfulness was central both to the office culture and the mode of therapy used (DBT), I was unaware how foundational this would become to my own clinical and personal practices.

Greetings. My name is Asya Mourraille, LMFT 51838 and I am absolutely thrilled to introduce our meditation blog series. Incorporating a consistent meditation practice has been a passion of mine for over 10 years now and I am incredibly excited to share it with all of you in this way.