Groups
CABC is a firm believer in group cognitive behavioral therapy (GCBT). Research has consistently shown that GCBT is an effective method for treating a variety of mental health conditions. We have found that GCBT can be as effective and in some cases, more effective, than individual treatment alone. GCBT is a skills-based treatment that aims to educate clients on the fundamentals of behavioral change and anxiety reduction while allowing us to harness the power of observational learning (learning by watching others change their behavior and reduce their anxiety), allowing for a shared experience and a feeling of belonging, and goal setting with the group by holding individual members gently accountable for meeting their own goals.
Location: Rockville office / Virtual (Hybrid)
Group Facilitator: Gaby Grebski, LCSW-C
This is an ongoing supportive therapy group for neurodivergent adults in their late twenties to late thirties, providing a welcoming, neurodiverse-affirming space to connect with others, share experiences, and build practical skills for navigating a number of life goals including friendships/relationships/dating, work environments, independence, and everyday life. Topics will include the following:
- Managing stress and regulating emotions
- Identifying unhelpful thinking patterns
- Goal-setting and risk-taking
- Problem-solving
- Greater self-advocacy
- Building greater social connection, confidence and resilience
- Improving communication skills
- Maintaining boundaries
- Managing burnout
The group will incorporate psycho-education and skill-building with an emphasis on acceptance, mutual support, celebrating success, and learning from shared experiences.
Location: Rockville/Virtual (Hybrid)
Group Facilitator: Kimberley Montgomery, LCSW-C
The Anxiety Group for High Schoolers is a new, ongoing therapy group for teens whose anxiety interferes with friendships, school, extracurricular activities, or other important areas of daily life.
This group is launching with several motivated members who are transitioning from our highly successful middle school anxiety group, creating a strong foundation while welcoming new high school students. It is especially well-suited for adolescents navigating the unique challenges of high school, including increasing academic demands, greater independence, changing peer relationships, and preparing for the transition to college or young adulthood.
Functioning as both a skills-based and supportive space, the group helps teens better understand their anxiety, reduce patterns of avoidance, and build confidence in managing life’s challenges with greater independence.
Students will:
- Learn to recognize early signs of anxiety and understand how it contributes to avoidance
- Develop practical distress tolerance and emotion regulation skills
- Identify and challenge unhelpful thinking patterns that maintain anxiety
- Build confidence approaching situations they tend to avoid (school, social, performance, or other stressors)
- Practice gradual exposure strategies to reduce fear and increase psychological flexibility
- Strengthen problem-solving, resilience, and independence as they prepare for future transitions, including college and adulthood
- Process common high school stressors with peers who share similar experiences
- Set weekly goals focused on increasing participation and decreasing avoidance
The group combines psychoeducation, CBT- and exposure-based interventions, in-session practice, and between-session exercises. Members benefit from peer support while being therapeutically challenged to approach feared situations, build mastery through repeated exposure, and develop skills that will serve them well throughout high school and beyond.
Rockville, MD (Hybrid)
Dr. Jonathan Dalton
The group is designed to provide an environment that cultivates a sense of connectedness, inclusion, and interpersonal learning related to effective coping for female-identifying college students whose lives have been affected by anxiety. Importantly, many of the group members also have chronic health conditions including dysautonomia (POTS), Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, idiopathic pain disorders, chronic migraine, and sleep-based disorders. In the group we discuss appropriate coping skills including problems-solving and goal setting, do exposure therapy when warranted and appropriate, celebrate each other’s successes, and support each other through challenges. We find commonalities in experiences, compare notes on those lived experiences, and offer guidance and feedback to each other based on shared experiences.
Wednesdays, 7:00-8:30pm (virtual)
Dr. Mo Reynolds
Parenting a child with an anxiety or related disorder can be confusing and frustrating. Traditional parenting strategies such as reassuring a child when he or she is anxious can serve to reinforce and thereby strengthen the child’s anxiety. Parents often struggle with knowing how to respond to their child’s anxiety. For example, it’s important to know when to “push” a child to do something that makes them anxious and when to allow a child to avoid the situation or how to differentiate between “real” anxiety and defiant behavior.
Thankfully, a large body of scientific knowledge has identified evidence-based skills and techniques that parents can use to help their child overcome his or her anxiety disorder(s). Many of these techniques are counter-intuitive and involve the use of positive reinforcement to build specific coping skills and redirecting or ignoring specific anxiety-based behaviors.
CABC offers a parent training group to outline these specific, concrete parenting skills. The group meets for 90-minutes once per week for eight weeks. The group covers:
- The nature of fear acquisition, maintenance, and extinction
- How avoidance and fear are teammates
- The nature of the coping skills that are effective in dealing with high levels of anxiety and how to help children to confront their anxiety in a productive fashion
- The problematic role of reassurance and other safety behaviors and how to minimize them
- How to identify which behaviors to respond to and which to ignore
- How to develop a behavioral reinforcement system to assist the child
In addition, the parents in the group learn a great deal from each other, as each parent brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the group.
Thursdays, 4:30-6:00pm
McLean, VA (Hybrid)
Kathleen King, LCSW
Many kids experiencing this phenomenon do not know any other peers going through it and often feel “different” and “excluded” because of the anxiety and school refusal. This group is designed to address these concerns by including kids who are in various stages of re-entry into school. We have found that the modeling by same-aged peers who are showing concrete evidence that this problem can be treated effectively is invaluable. Also, meeting other talented kids who are experiencing the same difficulty can be eye opening and works to de-stigmatize the experience. In other words, they are in a room full of same-aged peers who “get it” and the kids can feel understood without needing to explain their situation.
In the groups we begin by reviewing the week and how effective the child is in meeting the goals that they set for themself the previous week. We offer support for anyone struggling and celebrate anyone’s success. We also review specific non-avoidant coping skills each week, help with problem solving, and then end with the kids setting a goal for themselves that are measurable and achievable within one week.
Functioning as both a skills development group and a support group, students:
- Learn to recognize anxiety before it gets in the way
- Develop age-appropriate distress tolerance techniques
- Practice challenging negative thought patterns
- Employ strategies to participate more fully in situations they may currently be avoiding
- Engage in exposures related to core fears in order to better tolerate the anxiety they face
Students set weekly goals related to decreasing avoidance and increasing participation in various aspects of their lives. The group setting provides a place where students feel understood and accepted, while simultaneously feeling challenged to push through avoidance patterns and re-engage in their lives.
Thursdays 6:00-7:30pm
Rockville, MD (Hybrid)
Dr. Jonathan Dalton
The School Refusal Group for high school students is an essential aspect of the comprehensive school refusal treatment. The group is designed to provide an environment that cultivates a sense of connectedness, inclusion, and interpersonal learning related to effective coping. Teens who are actively avoiding school often have diminished social supports that serve a critical function, especially for teens, in protecting our mental health. Being in an environment in which a school-avoiding teen can be intuitively understood by other teens going through very similar experiences and who can provide feedback on how they successfully coped with their challenges offers a roadmap for new group members to follow.
In the group we discuss non-avoidant coping skills, do exposure therapy when warranted and appropriate, celebrate each other’s successes, and support each other through challenges. We find commonalities in experiences, compare notes on what group members have found to be effective coping skills. Group members offer guidance and feedback to each other based on what they have learned though lived experience in overcoming school avoidance.
Wednesdays, 6:00-7:30pm
Rockville, MD (Hybrid)
Dr. Christina Diaz, PsyD
CABC offers a group for middle school aged children struggling with anxiety and school refusal. The group serves as a space to build meaningful connections between students facing similar challenges, develop skills to promote school attendance and build resilience, and to identify strategies to manage difficult situations that may arise during the week. A group setting offers participants an additional resource to manage mental health symptoms through peer-to-peer support and feedback. Group members are in various states of reentry to school with some gradually increasing the number of classes they attend each day and others attending school nearly full time.
Our middle school group is currently offered in a hybrid format on Wednesdays from 6:00-7:30. It is held at the Rockville office and any members are welcome to attend in person. The group is designed to be an ongoing source of support as participants move through middle school and is currently open to new members.