Doing Experiential Therapy

Doing Experiential Therapy

Workshop Leaders:
Matthieu Villatte, Ph.D.

While Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as well as other third wave therapy techniques have been widely disseminated over the past decade, their application within a truly experiential framework often remains a challenge for therapists. The desire for transparency, the need to make rapid progress, the requirements to use EBP –protocols, or simply the difficulty of transforming theoretical knowledge into concrete practice can lead therapists to be too directive and didactic, or conversely, abstract and confusing. The opportunity to develop the autonomy of clients in the sometimes subtle and pragmatic observation of their experience is thereby undermined. Experiential techniques lose their power of deep transformation; exchanges become less personal and meaningful; therapeutic work becomes less interesting and satisfying even to the therapist, and the therapeutic relationship is lost to application of impersonal techniques.

The goal of this training is to assist you in developing or furthering your skill in experiential and process oriented practice. Focus on the therapeutic relationship with emphasis on recognizing interpersonal and intrapersonal processes that can guide intervention. We will build on the principles of contextual behavioral science and relational frame theory, which have been particularly well developed for clinical work in ACT, but are adaptable to all 3rd wave approaches (ex. Mindfulness-based therapies, dialectical behavior therapy, meta-cognitive therapy) and experiential therapies in general (e.g. psychodynamic, hypnosis, gestalt).

What will you learn in this course?

• Doing experiential work without reliance on standard metaphors and exercises, in natural conversations with your clients.
• Grounding your clinical practice in a stance of curiosity, openness, and equality.
• Relying on the therapeutic process rather than on techniques topographically defined to carry your sessions.
• electing, building, and delivering experiential exercises and metaphors that are linked to the client’s experience and housed in the therapeutic relationship.

Through practical exercises, videos, demonstrations, and role plays:

• You will learn to shape your clients’ ability to be in touch with and observe their own experiences, and to draw conclusions adapted to their personal life choices (e.g. how to evoke observation rather than using didactic psycho-education).
• You will develop the ability to adapt to any situation without departing from your experiential stance (e.g. how not to fall into excessive explanations or battles of arguments with dependent, rigid, overly compliant or stuck clients).
• You will learn to use experiential exercises and metaphors in a way that strengthens the therapeutic relationship (e.g. how to co-develop metaphors with the client and how to integrate them into a natural conversation).
   

About Matthieu Villatte, Ph.D.: 

Matthieu Villatte, Ph.D. is an author and clinical trainer living in Seattle, WA in the United States. He obtained his doctoral degree in psychology in France, where he was trained as a clinical psychologist. He moved to the US in 2010 to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Nevada, Reno under the mentorship of Steven Hayes, Ph.D. He then worked as an assistant professor in clinical psychology at the University of Louisiana and at the Evidence-Based Practice Institute of Seattle for several years.

Matthieu Villatte is the author of numerous books and chapters on mindfulness, acceptance, experiential therapies, and contextual behavioral science, such as the first manual published in French on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and his new book, Mastering the Clinical Conversation: Language as Intervention, co-authored by Jennifer Villatte and Steven Hayes.

He is also a peer-reviewed trainer in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy recognized by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS). He has facilitated over 90 clinical trainings in the US, Canada, Australia-New Zealand, South America, and Europe. Over the past few years, he has also run dozens of online trainings gathering participants from all continents.

About Robyn D. Walser, Ph.D.:

Robyn D. Walser, Ph.D., is the assistant director at the National Center for PTSD at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. She also works as a consultant, workshop presenter, and therapist in her private business, TLConsultation Services. She received her doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno. During her graduate studies, she developed expertise in traumatic stress, substance abuse, and acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). She has been doing ACT workshop trainings, both nationally and internationally, since 1998, training in multiple formats and for multiple client problems.