Nurturing Roots to Reach New Heights - Pre-conference Workshop

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

ACT as clinical behaviour analysis is simply the direct clinical application of functional contextual behavioural science and behaviour analytic theory, typically in a talk therapy format. Many trained outside of the behavioural…