Shared by Steven C. Hayes
All of my UNR students in the early days learned ACT by listening to a classic case that Sue McCurry, and I did together ...
Unfortunately, the tapes have been lost to history, but the transcripts still exist. Students would review the transcripts and listen to the tape and then go in session by session and try to follow that protocol.
I also soon had beginning ACT therapists learn to score ACT tapes for processes of change using a scoring system devised by Durriyah Khorakiwala. It is attached. Kelly Wilson tells the story of learning how to score tapes within a day of arrival at UNR before his first class. This system eventually lead to some of the competence manuals that are used in randomized trials on ACT
Students were not allowed to take session outlines into therapy sessions. They had to learn them well enough to follow them by memory. But after a small number of clients in which beginning therapists followed a manual, students were encouraged to set aside the manual, and to begin to read the processes and focus on what was most important in a given session.
The reason I always thought that pushing students to follow a manual at the beginning that's a good idea it's because it takes learners into every corner of the psychological flexibility model. Once you've done that, and can read the processes in the room, you no longer need to follow a particular manual ... but if you start there with a beginning therapist, it can be overwhelming AND you can almost guarantee that students will play to their strengths rather than exploring parts of the model that they feel uncomfortable with.
If you want a clear example of that, it's the way that creative hopelessness gets under done by beginning therapists because they misunderstand the whole purpose of that part of the protocol and they have not yet been moved by how uplifting it can be to clients.