What to Do When Your Child’s Tummy Hurts and No One Can Find Why: Understanding Functional GI Disorders and How to Help
Date: September 30 – October 09, 2026
Does this sound familiar? “We’ve been to four doctors. They all say nothing is wrong. But my child is still in pain every single day.”
Tummy aches and GI distress are not uncommon in children, especially in anxious ones! Very often, parents begin looking for a solution to help their child’s distress, only to be told that “everything is normal.” This can lead to conflict within the family on how to handle to tummy aches, a quest to find the source of the discomfort with multiple “treatments” and family accommodations that impact school, activities, social events and other family members. FGID makes a child’s world smaller and holds parents hostage.
WE KNOW HOW TO HELP! With a combined 50+ years of experience helping anxious families, Lynn Lyons and Mindy Szelap are teaming up to tell you WHAT TO DO.
You have two sessions to choose from, either September 30th (evening) or October 9th (daytime) Both sessions are the same, so choose the one that works best for your schedule. One ticket for the family, so parents can attend together (which we HIGHLY recommend!)
Three Day Masterclass: Treating Anxiety and Depression with Experiential and Hypnotic Strategies
October 21 – 23, 2026
Southern New Hampshire University, 2500 North River Road, Manchester, NH
When clients seek our help, they often know what they should do but somehow don’t; or have tried approaches to eliminate symptoms, only to make the problem worse. How can we get clients headed in the right direction and offer them something different? In this three day, in-person advanced masterclass, attendees will learn how to precisely determine the treatment targets for anxious and depressed clients. Then, knowing the target, we’ll create interventions that go after the ineffective patterns and help create and activate new ones.
Day One will focus on the skill of determining the treatment target, recognizing the patterns of the disorders, and how to intervene quickly to disrupt them.
Days Two and Three will focus on creating hypnotic interventions that combine suggestion, expectation and seeding with active homework assignments.
This is a small group, interactive workshop with time to learn, practice, and create. Some experience with hypnosis is recommended but not required. Preparing by reading Using Hypnosis with Children is highly recommended. Space is limited.
Past Events
Anxiety, Depression, and Teens: Creating Plans and Building New Patterns (Because “Coping Skills” Are Not Enough)
Friday May 1, 2026
Live Virtual Workshop, 10:30EDT to 4:30EDT
PLEASE NOTE: Listed times are EDT but are WEST COAST FRIENDLY!
If you’d like to use a PO to register, please email Lynn directly at [email protected] for instructions and code.
Young people continue to report high rates of loneliness, anxiety and depression. It seems our current approaches are not enough. What do teens and their parents need to know about anxiety and its common path into depression? How do we move beyond “mental health awareness”? Misinformation, self-labeling, and bad advice are everywhere, making the goal of developing emotionally and socially resilient teens increasingly difficult.
This full day virtual workshop will focus on creating effective school and family plans that don’t “do the disorder” but instead focus on the development of skills such as problem solving, social connection, emotional management and autonomy. The goal is a thorough understanding of HOW these disorders operate, a process-based approach to interrupt the patterns, and movement away from “coping strategies” that inadvertently support avoidance. We’ll also address the common “this is different” trap that occurs when anxiety has been present through childhood and into adolescence.
Anxiety, Depression and School Avoidance:
Breaking the Patterns of Childhood Anxiety:
What Parents, Schools, and Mental Health Providers Must Know (and Do)
Concord, NH
November 7th, 2025
Because anxiety is the most common mental health issue in both adults and children, it’s impossible to be in clinical practice, work in a school or see families in a medical practice and NOT have anxious families show up, desperate for help. The problem, however, is that common “coping strategies” that focus on controlling or minimizing symptoms do not address the larger patterns of family anxiety; instead, they often inadvertently strengthen anxiety and reinforce anxious family patterns. This full day in-person workshop will focus on HOW to get families engaged from the start with an active approach that is direct, skill-based, and works to decrease accommodations and safety behaviors. The goal? How schools and parents and clinicians can work together to foster consistency and skill-building.
More details and registration information.
