Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is one of the most studied and popular approaches in modern “third wave” CBT, or indeed in all of evidence-based therapy. A distinguishing feature of ACT is the empirical strength and breadth of application of its underlying “psychological flexibility model” and the processes it focuses on. Recently that model has been greatly expanded by seeing ACT as a form of “Process-Based Therapy” or PBT. PBT is not a new form of therapy, it’s a new way of looking at evidence-based therapy of any kind. Based on an “extended evolutionary meta-model” (EEMM), a process-based approach recently has been shown to require new “idionomic” forms of statistics, that profoundly alter how processes of change are modeled and applied to particular clients.
Psychological inflexibility is characterized by avoiding experiences, taking thoughts literally, buying into self-stories, and becoming entangled in the conceptualized past or future, while missing the opportunity to build larger patterns of meaningful action. These inflexibility processes are driven by positive human motives – yearning for belonging, feeling, competence, self-direction, orientation, and coherence – but they all provide only short-term benefits, thwarting the long-term achievement of these motives. Research suggests that the six primary psychological flexibility processes – experiential acceptance, cognitive defusion, flexible attention to the now, fostering a perspective-taking sense of self, values, and committed action – predict improvement in virtually any area of human psychological functioning.
With the arrival of PBT and the EEMM, however, this model has expanded enough that ACT is clearly entering into a new era. For example, thinking of experiential, avoidance as a form of emotional inflexibility, opens the door to other forms, such as emotional clinging, emotional shallowness, alexithymia, or having a limited range of emotions that can be observed and described. In each of the key areas of the traditional, psychological flexibility, model, recent evidence suggests a need for a coherent expansion. In addition, we now know that it is important to extend psychological flexibility principles to the social and cultural level, and to be aware of how these processes intersect with ones on body.
When processes of change are adequately identified, they need also to be measured and modeled in new ways that allow each person’s voice to be heard. That approach permits processes of change to be linked to kernels of intervention rather than to overall “one size fits all” protocols, so that smaller bits and pieces of ACT and other evidence-based therapies can be used to foster greater psychological flexibility in a coherent way.
In this two-day workshop, Dr. Steven C. Hayes, who originated ACT and has been guiding it`s development for 43 years, will show how to apply ACT as a form of process-based therapy and to target the expend psychological flexibility model as a corner stone of your clinical practice, integrating its ideas and methods into the work you do now.
Participants in this workshop will 1) learn the processes that comprise the expanded psychological flexibility model, 2) explore these processes personally, 3) learn to detect, measure, and model these processes, 4) learn how to select and deploy useful clinical techniques that target all of the key aspects of the model, 5) discover how to use technology to support this journey, and 5) leave knowing they can use these concepts and techniques to augment and empower their own clinical work.
This workshop assumes only that you are interested in ACT and would like to use some of its ideas and methods can empower your work, but the ideas are new enough that even experiences ACT therapist will gain a lot from the workshop.
During Day 1, Dr. Hayes will provide a comprehensive understanding of the psychological flexibility model. He will describe the expanded versions of the six inflexibility processes and show how they contribute to psychopathology, thwarting deep human yearnings, and how each of these can be transformed into flexibility processes that satisfy those underlying needs. He will have participants learn to detect these processes, in-flight, and to expand them to the sociocultural level, while also paying attention to the biophysiological level.
Therapists will be shown how to used this model to formulate cases and develop powerful, individualized treatment interventions that take advantage of the best of classical ACT methods as well as a wide variety of other clinical methods. Case demonstrations will give participants a `moment-by-moment` sense of ACT in action.
On Day 2, participants will learn more about the ACT model and how it can help them make their own approach to therapy more effective. Topics will include the strategic use of accepting acceptance, recognizing language traps and other rigid patterns that can hurt rather than help, coming consciously into the now in a way that is flexible, fluid, and voluntary, and focus on values and committed action. Through demonstration and practice Dr. Hayes will help you see how to apply these elements of the psychological flexibility model and to mix it with clinical methods you already know and care about.