Nurturing Roots to Reach New Heights - ANZ Pre-conference Workshop

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is defined by its behaviour analytic roots and its focus on building flexibility into the behavioural repertoire. Many ACT clinicians, however, find behaviour analytic language lacking in its ability to capture and inform the clinical work they do every day. Instead, ACT assessments and interventions are typically guided by less specific “mid-level terms,” such as acceptance, defusion, and values. While mid-level terms certainly reduce the barriers to learning ACT as a new approach, they may unnecessarily limit the clinicians’ application of ACT to the creation and use of techniques, exercises, and metaphors that target flexibility components. This workshop offers practice with an alternative approach to ACT mastery - ACT as clinical behaviour analysis.

ACT as clinical behaviour analysis is simply the direct clinical application of functional contextual behavioural science and behaviour analytic theory, typically in a talk therapy format. Many trained outside of the behavioural tradition have dismissed behaviour analysis as cold, rigid, or overly technical. However, practicing ACT as clinical behaviour analysis tends can facilitate connection, compassion, and close attunement to the therapist-client interaction. Far from building in rigidity, practicing ACT as clinical behaviour analysis fosters innovation and therapist growth.

Using an experiential approach that progressively builds skills across two full days, participants will practice the functional analysis of moment-to-moment therapy process in service of building clients’ psychological flexibility. These practice opportunities will begin with only the most basic philosophical assumptions underlying ACT and move through principles that are increasingly specific, converging on the ACT components that are typically described in mid-level terms. Participants will leave the workshop with a simple but effective behavioural framework in hand for providing clients opportunities to develop flexible, adaptive, and expansive patterns of behaviour that extend far beyond the therapy room.