Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

This workshop will be highly experiential with a focus on helping participants practice and build skills that they can readily integrate into their work with military clients. It’s designed to give participants a strong foundation in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) theory and practice. The workshop is ideal for beginning practitioners new to the model as well as those already practicing ACT at an intermediate level who want to broaden their repertoire.

Over the course of two days, we will work with participants to assess psychological problems using the Psychological Flexibility model, learn and practice skills relevant to each of the six core psychological flexibility processes, use the ACT skills to help clients differentiate between ineffective and meaningful actions, and to identify and address key indicators of psychological inflexibility.

In addition, the training will explore the ways in which language and metaphor influence behavior and can be used in therapy to help change behavior. We will use experiential exercises, small group work and dyad work to encourage participants to practice and enhance new skills.

Learning Objectives: 

Attendees will be able to:

• Facilitate an ideographic assessment by using the Matrix to conceptualize presenting problems of military clients.
• Apply the Psychological Flexibility model of psychopathology to create unique ACT treatment plans
• Utilize key theoretical concepts related to functional contextualism and relational frame theory to enhance clinical interventions
• Distinguish the 6 processes that promote psychological flexibility
• Facilitate Open skills to address experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion
• Facilitate Aware skills to address overidentification with ones’ self-concept and rigid attention to the past and/or future
• Facilitate Engage skills to address lack of meaning and purpose and ineffective behavior (e.g., procrastination, avoidant persistence)
• . Create committed action plans with clients to empower clients to values-based action
• Employ at least 2 Open, Aware, and Engage metaphors and/or in-session exercises
• Explain the function and importance of flexible sensitivity to context for client and therapist
• Apply ACT flexibility processes fluidly in response to changes in client behavior
• Integrate key research related to ACT and military clients into clinical decisions

​AGENDA

Day One

Day Two