Dr. Andrea Ashbaugh, C.Psych: Working With Beliefs Around Emotions

Comments or feedback? Send us a text!

The beliefs held around emotions can lead individuals to resist and deny their internal experience.  This can have many potential downstream implications for being able to cope effectively, being properly attuned to one’s needs, and remaining effective in the face of difficult interpersonal situations.  Former president of the Canadian Association for Cognitive Behavioural Therapies,  Dr. Andrea Ashbaugh, C.Psych joins us for a discussion around assessing, conceptualizing and working with client's beliefs around emotions.  In this discussion we cover:     

• the kinds of clinical experiences or observations which have led Dr. Ashbaugh to become  interested in addressing the beliefs clients hold about emotions  
• the factors (e.g., early life experiences, temperament) that can shape one’s stance towards emotions
• prototypically "western" vs "eastern"  views about psychological & physical pain
• cues for the clinician that it is time to start to work on beliefs about emotions
• common types of beliefs about emotions that can cause challenges
• clinical presentations where clients may be more likely to experience challenging beliefs around emotions
• how perceptions around certainty influences the capacity to tolerate emotions
• the impact of our emotional state on perceptions
• the cognitive & behavioural strategies that can be used for beliefs about the dangers of expressing negative emotions to others 
• the cognitive & behavioural strategies that can be used for beliefs about feeling negative emotions 
• caveats around the role of medication in the context of psychotherapy focused on helping clients negotiate their relationship with emotions
• the potential utility of a transdiagnostic approach to working with emotions 
• the role of values & curiosity in helping clients to explore unpleasant emotions 

Dr. Andrea Ashbaugh, C.Psych is an associate professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa and is a licensed clinical psychologist in the province of Ontario, Canada. She obtained her master's and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry at McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

She is director of the Cognition and Anxiety Studies Laboratory (CASL) and the Sex and Anxiety Research Group (SAX-RG). Her research interests as part of CASL centre around understanding the causes and developing treatments for anxiety and fear-related problems. She has recently started a program of research to understand the causes and psychological effects of experiencing traumatic and non-traumatic events that transgress one’s moral beliefs in military personnel and veterans. Her research in the context of the SAX-RG centres around the impact of beliefs about arousal sensations and context on the interpretation of arousal, and its impact on sexual interest and functioning. She has received funding for her research broadly including from Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Dr. Ashbaugh regularly supervises CBT training and teaches courses on psychopathology and clinical psychology at both the graduate and undergraduate level. She has served on the Editorial Boards of Psychological Assessment. She is currently an Associate Editor for the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry and editorial board member for Behaviour Research and Therapy. She is a former president of the Canadian Association for Cognitive and Behavioural Therapies (CACBT) and was seminal in the development of national CBT training guidelines th