Nurturing Roots to Reach New Heights: Revisiting Foundations of ACT as Clinical Behavior Analysis for Mastering Flexible, Process-Based Implementation

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is defined by its behavior analytic roots and its focus on building flexibility into the behavioral repertoire. Many ACT clinicians, however, find behavior 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 behavior analysis.

ACT as clinical behavior analysis is simply the direct clinical application of functional contextual behavioral science and behavior analytic theory, typically in a talk therapy format. Many have dismissed behavior analysis as cold, rigid, and overly technical. However, practicing ACT as clinical behavior analysis tends to bring clinicians closer to practicing in a way that is connected, compassionate, and closely attuned to the therapist-client interaction. Far from building in rigidity, practicing ACT as clinical behavior analysis fosters innovation and therapist growth.

Using an experiential approach that progressively builds skills across two 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 behavioral framework in hand for providing clients opportunities to develop flexible, adaptive, and expansive patterns of behavior that extend far beyond the therapy room.

About Emily K. Sandoz, Ph.D.: 

Dr. Emily K. Sandoz is the Emma Louise LeBlanc Burguieres/BORSF Endowed Professor of Social Sciences in the Psychology Department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Emily is the Director of the Louisiana Contextual Science Research Group and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Contextual Behavioral Science. She has co-authored three books on acceptance and commitment therapy for struggles with eating and body image, along with chapters and journal articles on ACT, Relational Frame Theory, values, the therapeutic relationship, and psychological flexibility. Emily has led more than 70 professional training workshops around the world, and serves as a peer-reviewed ACT trainer. She also practices as a Clinical Psychologist, focusing on clinical behavior analysis of body-related difficulties.