My name is Manuel Garayar and I’m from Peru. Since I’ve got back to my country, I've continued with my scientific blog about CBS in Spanish (http://conductistaenperu.wordpress.com/). It worked very well because, a few months later, I received an invitation to give a presentation about some topic related to Functional Contextualism. For my audience, I choosed the title: “Functional Contextualism: A contemporary monistic perspective to understand and influence on cognitive events” and my goal was to give a broad perspective about philosophical issues that underly CBS, and an introduction about their theoretical (RFT) and applied dimensions (ACT).
As I said in my poster presentation at Parma, I’ve continued doing workshops, helping others learn about ACT and Psychological Flexibility as a way of promoting personal development. I think that CBS can be promoted by demonstrating that its products are useful for the problems that common people label with their own words (low self-esteem, anger control, leadership, etc.). The interventions were planned, for example, using notions like self as context vs. self as content for deminishing the discriminative functions of the “negative” self-statements known as “low self-esteem”. I’ve shared some of this work through the ACT listserv (a power point presentations called “Lidiando con emociones no deseadas” [“Dealing with unwanted emotions”] for someone who was looking for some material in Spanish for his client).
As a therapist, I’ve been working with children, adolescents and adults (especially, parents). My experience is that the psychological flexibility model is a powerful and useful approach for the therapist in his role of helping the client to get a valuable life for him/her. A clear advance after the conference is that I’ve made an initial adaptation of the “feeding the tiger” metaphor for working with unwanted emotions in children, which I call “the story of the monster” who is presented as an analog of their emotions and thoughts and the notion that the problem comes when you always do “what the monster says”, adding to this some training in basic mindfulness repertoires.
In the same way, my Peruvian partner (Silvia Melgar) and I are preparing an experiential seminar with the goal of giving an introductory level of knowledge about CBS (ACT/FAP, RFT, FC). In April, I’ll travel to Buenos Aires (Argentina) to give a class about Functional Contextualism. Besides this class, I’m co-working on the possibility of a seminar about CBS topics too. For October, Silvia and I are organizing an ACT workshop (with Patricia Zurita) which will be the first one in my country.
In my country, it’s really important to show in both contexts, academic and professional, that there’s a powerful scientific approach, which emerging from the past behavioral and cognitive interventions, is giving new solutions from a contextual behavioristic point of view. The scholarship received from the ACBS (my new family around the world) was, of course, fundamental because I received more tools for achieving this goal. I’m sure that CBS approach can fill the void of dealing with suffering with verbal subjects in a human, pragmatic and scientific way. Our clients, the people who trust in us, will receive this benefit.
Are you wondering how you can help to disseminate CBS in the developing world through scholarship opportunities like this? Please consider donating to the Developing Nations Fund via Paypal by using the button below. Your donation will help us continue to bring attendees and presenters from developing nations to the ACBS world conference.
Every dollar/euro/yen goes to helping those in need -- not a nickel goes to administration. Money collected for this fund is distributed by an ACBS Developing Nations Fund committee. Scholarships are awarded based on need and merit.
Please note that this contribution does not qualify as a tax-deductible charitable contribution, according to USA tax law ... but it's a nice thing to do.