If you are working with clients struggling with OCD, no matter where you are in the treatment, and no matter how familiar you are with exposure-based interventions, this workshop will augment your clinical skills on acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to guide your clients to tame OCD and fill the gap where they are and where they want to go.
All the content of this workshop aims to answer a specific question: how does ACT, as a process-based therapy approach, tackle OCD episodes that narrow a person’s life?
While exposure is the frontline treatment to tackle OCD, exposure-based interventions are not one-size-fits-all. Furthermore, the heterogeneous presentation of obsessions, degrees of fusion with obsessions, complex compulsive responses, and variability in the negative affect associated with obsessions require that clinicians take into account all these variables to facilitate a compassionate, skilful, and effective treatment for clients.
About this workshop
As the workshop progresses, you will train your eyes and ears to notice how the client is responding and how you need to deliver “acceptance-based interventions” or “change-based interventions.” You will have an opportunity to learn all these ACT shifts and experience first-hand the flexibility of the ACT model when treating OCD and facilitating exposure work.
Patricia will present you with ACT skills in a simple, uncomplicated, unpretentious, and jargon-free manner. More importantly, she will share with you all the ACT skills and processes that she teaches her clients to make a real turn from surviving to thriving!
You will learn how to:
- Guide your clinical work when blending ACT + ERP together for targeting OCD and related conditions.
- Facilitate acceptance-based and change-based interventions through different ACT processes.
- Model for clients that fears, anxiety, worry, and nervousness are part of life; we feel them, we think about them, and they just happen.
- Contextualise exposure exercises as values-based moves, personal choices and as a way of help clients to choose to feel all types of experiences – including yucky ones- and stay with them with openness, curiosity, and flexibility- in the service of what they care about.
- Introduce the W.I.S.E. M.O.V.E.S tool to facilitate both, planned values-based exposures and values-based exposures on-the-fly.
- Identify specific blocks that may show up when facilitating values-based exposures or W.I.S.E. M.O.V.E.S.
- Identify specific processes clients are stuck with that reinforce OCD episodes and narrow their lives.
Who would benefit from this workshop?
We recommend this workshop for mental health professionals including psychologists, psychiatrists, BCBAs, nurse practitioners and licensed mental health counsellors who see clients with OCD in their practice.
Please note that this is an intermediate level skills workshop, so you will need to be familiar with the ACT model before attending. Read more about introductory and intermediate level workshops here.