Facing Your Fears is a group program that uses a cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) approach for the reduction of anxiety symptoms (Facing Your Fears Facilitator’s Manual, 2011). There is a vast amount of literature supporting the use of CBT to manage children’s anxiety, resulting in CBT being the best practice for the management of this disorder.

The overall goal is to provide children with the skills for them to be able to successfully cope in a variety of anxiety-provoking situations.

The treatment goals are:

• Helping children to recognize signs of anxious arousal and to use these as cues for the use of anxiety management strategies
• Encourage children to identify negative self-statements in order to initiate more positive and constructive self-statements
• Helping children to use self-ratings and self-rewards
• Identifying the cognitive processes associated with excessive anxious arousal
• Training in cognitive strategies for anxiety management and behavioural relaxation
• Performance-based practice opportunities with learned skills applied to real-life situations
• Provide parents with the knowledge and skills needed to support their child in coping with anxiety

There are 14 sessions, which cover:

1. Welcome to Group: Words We Use for Worry
2. When I Worry
3. Time Spent Worrying
4. What Worry Does to My Body: Beginning to Measure Worry
5. The Mind-Body Connection
6. More Mind-Body Connections: Introduction to Exposure
7. Introduction to Exposure (Continued)
8. Practicing Exposure and Making Movies
9. Facing Fears and Making Movies
10. Facing Fears and Making Movies
11. Facing Fears and Making Movies
12. Facing Fears and Making Movies
13. Facing Fears and Making Movies
14. Graduation