Intermediate Level CBT

Depression, anxiety, panic, anger, addictive behavior, and trauma-related symptoms can overlap in ways that tempt clinicians to rely on a general cognitive behavioral therapy approach. Yet similar behaviors may be maintained by very different beliefs, attentional patterns, emotional processes, and avoidance strategies. Effective treatment depends on recognizing those differences and choosing interventions that address the processes operating for a particular client.

Designed for behavioral health professionals with foundational cognitive behavioral therapy knowledge, this intermediate course moves from the general relationship among thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and schemas into condition-specific cognitive models. It shows how case conceptualization can guide treatment planning, session agendas, intervention timing, and documentation across depression, anxiety, panic disorder, anger, addictive behavior disorders, and posttraumatic stress disorder.

"Intermediate Level CBT: Understanding Depression, Anxiety, and Other Specific Cognitive Models" is one of three courses that comprise the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Training Certificate (CBTTC). Enroll in the full program and earn 15 total CEs and the CBTTC.

Jeff Riggenbach, PhD, trained at the Beck Institute for Cognitive Therapy and Research and has spent more than 20 years developing and directing cognitive-behavioral programs for mood, anxiety, anger, addictive behavior, and personality-related concerns across multiple levels of care. His clinical leadership and teaching experience allow him to connect research-based cognitive models with the practical decisions clinicians make in individual and group treatment.

Through didactic teaching, case conceptualization exercises, clinical examples, demonstrations, and humor, Dr. Riggenbach translates complex cognitive behavioral therapy concepts into tools clinicians can use in practice. He links automatic thoughts, cognitive distortions, schemas, behavioral patterns, and emotional arousal to concrete choices about what to target, when to intervene, and how to help clients internalize new learning.

Across depression, anxiety, panic, anger, addictive behavior, and posttraumatic stress, the course demonstrates how condition-specific cognitive models can guide more intentional case conceptualization and treatment. Rather than applying cognitive behavioral therapy as a uniform set of techniques, clinicians learn to identify the beliefs, emotional processes, avoidance patterns, and behavioral cycles maintaining each presentation, then adapt interventions to the client’s needs, readiness, safety, and pace of change.

Key Takeaways:

• Depression-focused cognitive behavioral therapy: Match behavioral activation, self-care, mastery, pleasure, meaning, and belief work to the client’s affective state and negative information-processing patterns.
• Anxiety and panic interventions: Use risk appraisal, resource building, metacognitive strategies, behavioral experiments, exposure, and interoceptive exercises to test feared predictions and reduce reliance on safety behaviors.
• Broader cognitive models: Apply practical formulations for anger, addictive behavior, and posttraumatic stress disorder, including moral resistance, stages of change, relapse review, and staged trauma treatment.

Why This Course?

• Move beyond generic cognitive behavioral therapy: Learn why similar symptoms may require different conceptualizations and intervention sequences.
• Strengthen clinical decision-making: Use case maps to connect assessment data, core beliefs, triggers, treatment goals, in-session work, and documentation.
• Practice with clinical nuance: Consider readiness, context, the accuracy of client beliefs, consent, medical safety, and realistic pacing rather than applying techniques mechanically.

Learning Objectives:

• Select behavioral activation activities to elevate affect in depressed patients to enhance cognitive change.
• Identify 3 cognitive distortions associated with anxiety and plan behavioral experiments disorders to help clients test assumptions to experientially internalize new learning.
• Discuss the role of moral resistance in the cognitive model of anger.
• Demonstrate strategies for breaking vicious cycles in addictive behavior disorders.
• Explain the 3 stages of treatment for clients with PTSD and describe interventions in each.

Enroll to strengthen your use of cognitive behavioral therapy beyond a one-size-fits-all approach and develop a more deliberate process for selecting interventions that fit the client’s presentation, stage of readiness, and treatment needs.