What began as a resource for students and supervisees is becoming an invitation to connect the many corners of contextual behavioral science.
Over the past year, I have been developing a podcast called Deeply Functional.
It began for a fairly simple reason. In my work with students, supervisees, and clinicians I consult with, I found myself returning to many of the same questions. How do we think functionally about what is happening in the room? What does RFT actually change about the way we practice? How do we move beyond knowing the ACT model toward understanding why something works, when it works, and what we might do differently?
Many of these conversations were not really about learning another intervention. They were about understanding what sits underneath our interventions. Why this, and why now? What function might a behavior be serving, and what are we actually trying to influence when we intervene? What changes when we understand a process differently rather than simply naming it?
I started recording Deeply Functional as one way of exploring those questions and creating something I could share with students, supervisees, and colleagues rather than having the same conversation individually, again and again. As the project has developed, I have started to see another possibility for it.
There Is a Lot Happening in Our Community
One of the remarkable things about the ACBS community is the sheer variety of work taking place within it. People are conducting research, developing clinical approaches, writing books, experimenting with new ways of teaching RFT, adapting ACT for different populations, developing measures and technologies, reconsidering supervision, creating training programs, and building communities around contextual behavioral science.
The challenge is that we do not always encounter one another's work. We might belong to different SIGs, attend different conference sessions, read different journals, participate in different regional communities, or simply work in different parts of the world.
There are already many places within ACBS where this work can be presented, published, reviewed, and discussed, and I am not interested in recreating those structures. I often have to sit here for a bit and look through what I can to see what is happening. I am interested in helping create another pathway between them.
The Conversation as a Doorway
That idea has led to a new part of the podcast called Deeply Functional: In Conversation. Rather than conducting traditional interviews about someone's career, or asking guests to simply explain their work, I am interested in conversations organized around three questions.
What problem were you trying to solve?
What did you notice that other people might have been missing?
How does understanding this differently change what we actually do?
Those questions can lead in many directions. A researcher might talk about an observation that led to a particular study. A clinician might describe a recurring problem in the therapy room that caused them to change their approach. A trainer might explain why clinicians consistently struggle with a particular ACT process, and how they began teaching it differently. Someone working from RFT might help us understand why a familiar clinical phenomenon looks different when viewed through relational framing. An author might talk about the problem that eventually became a book. Someone developing an assessment, application, community program, or training model might explain why they thought it needed to exist in the first place.
The finished product matters, of course. I am particularly interested in the thinking that came before it.
Following the Conversation Back to the Work
There is another part of this project that feels increasingly important to me. I do not want the podcast episode to be the endpoint. Whenever possible, each conversation will provide links back to the guest's work, whether that means ACBS articles and resources, research papers, books, websites, training programs, clinical resources, SIGs, or projects the guest believes would help someone continue exploring the subject.
My hope is that the conversation becomes the doorway rather than the destination. Someone might encounter an idea during a forty minute conversation and become curious. That curiosity might lead to a research paper, and the paper might lead to an ACBS SIG, and the SIG might lead to colleagues working on similar questions. A discussion of a clinical problem might lead someone to a book, training, or resource that changes their practice. A graduate student might encounter an area of contextual behavioral science they did not previously know existed.
The podcast has served its purpose when someone follows the conversation somewhere else.
Building Bridges Across Contextual Behavioral Science
I have increasingly come to think that healthy professional communities need more than places to store knowledge. They also need pathways through which people can discover it. ACBS already contains an extraordinary range of people, ideas, research, clinical experience, and creativity. Sometimes what is missing is simply the bridge between someone doing interesting work and someone who would benefit from knowing that work exists.
Deeply Functional is a small attempt to help build some of those bridges. The conversations themselves are intentionally relaxed, generally lasting about thirty to forty five minutes. They are not intended to replace research papers, workshops, books, conference presentations, or other forms of deeper engagement. Quite the opposite. I hope they lead people toward them.
An Open Invitation
This brings me to the reason for writing this. If you are an ACBS member working on something you find interesting, I would love to hear about it.
It does not have to be finished. You do not need to have written a book or developed a major new model. Perhaps you are researching something, experimenting with a different way of teaching, developing a clinical resource, applying contextual behavioral science somewhere unusual, reconsidering something we routinely do, or simply pursuing a question you cannot quite leave alone.
Tell me what problem caught your attention, what you started noticing, and then let's talk about what understanding it differently might change. Perhaps someone listening has been wrestling with the very same question. If so, we have built another bridge.
You can reach me here: [email protected]
Todd J. Schmenk, LMHC
Peer Reviewed ACT Trainer