Hello
My colleagues and I have developed a 16-week group protocol for outpatient sex offender treatment. We have also been using it for the past year in our clinic. I am still working on the finalized version of the manual (ie with all of the theoretical background, etc.) but I wanted to finally get around to sharing some of the exercises because I think that ACT is highly applicable to this population, as well as to forensic/correctional populations in general. I think it is important to continue to have this discussion.
I will post the whole thing when I am satisfied with the write-up. Until then, here are a few exercises.
The introduction exercise we distribute on the 1st day and invite participants to complete it in the group and use that to introduce themselves.
The acceptance exercise we do near the end of the 16 weeks (maybe week 12?) and we have a discussion of acceptance and willingness, and work through some metaphors, but before that, we invite people to follow the instructions on the page (self-explanatory) and then at the end of the session we invite them to notice if and how they interacted with what they wrote on the page, etc. I believe this is adapted from something that Robyn Walser (?) does with veterans - only in our version we give people options about what to do with their unacceptable content (I think in the veteran version, people put the content on stickers on their chests, if I am not mistaken).
The values card sort - we found the VLQ-2 to be too complicated in terms of rating, having so many columns, etc, for our clients, so we put the valued domains on cards and we invite clients to consider these domains and sort the cards according to the various questions in the VLQ-2. Just cut out the cards and distribute a set of 12 to each group member. We do this exercise after we get through everyone's sex offense presentation - it seems to engage people well, and get them thinking about the present and the future. We got the idea of using a card sort from the
Methamphetamine treatment protocol by
Drug and Alcohol Services South Australia
Dr. Mathew Smout