Supervising trainees in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999) is a behaviorally based intervention designed to target and reduce experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion (holding the thoughts in one’s mind to be literally true) while at the same time helping clients to make powerful life enhancing behavioral changes that are in line with their personal values. As a therapeutic approach, ACT is specifically used to help clients come into contact with an experiential sense of knowing, rather than relying too heavily on verbal knowledge. That is, clients are taught to see themselves as a context for ongoing experiential events that include all things occurring inside the skin, emotion, thinking, memories, and bodily sensations, without excessive verbal involvement and control. The goal is to reduce experiential avoidance and move toward meaningful life paths, or more generally, to help the client who has fallen into rigid way of thinking and behaving to become more psychologically and behaviorally flexible.