Presented by Kirk Strosahl, PhD
Course Description
Join Kirk Strosahl, PhD, a co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), for this online course that will teach you the essentials of an important innovation in ACT: Focused ACT, or fACT. This highly practical course focuses on applying powerful brief intervention approaches to the treatment of depression, anxiety, trauma, and other common mental health and substance use concerns. There are four essential features of the fACT approach that will guide the session series. Strosahl also incorporates these features into the fACT approach with a mental heuristic called the CARE model.
The CARE approach will empower you to handle clinical conversations in a consistent way, across difficult clinical situations. This online course will focus on helping you develop clinical skills so that you can efficiently complete each aspect of the CARE approach. Along with didactic instruction, each session will consist of exercises designed to improve your clinical skills, and allow you to set both short- and long-term learning objectives for your clinical practice. We will also make use of video demonstrations that exemplify various aspects of the CARE approach.
Therapists are increasingly being asked to do more with less. That means using fewer and fewer sessions to effectively treat clients presenting with a wide range of mood and anxiety conditions, often involving co-occurring trauma histories. In this workshop, you’ll learn fACT, a brief version of ACT that treats every therapy session as if it might be the last. You’ll learn to optimize the impact of each meeting between you and your client. Using fACT, you’ll learn to employ a highly effective sequence of clinical activities, collectively known as CARE. The CARE framework will help you organize your the clinical conversations in each session to maximize the likelihood of transformational change even in your most challenging clients.
Learning Objectives
- Discuss the evolution of, and evidence for, brief interventions and the parallel evolution of fACT.
- Demonstrate the four core features of the CARE model and apply them to mood and anxiety problems.
- Discuss the three contexts of human experience and the role they play in the production of depression, anxiety, and human suffering.
- Demonstrate the basics of change oriented, contextual interviewing to create a new and different frame of reference for the client.
- Describe the important role of emotional and behavioral avoidance as key causes of depression and anxiety states, and as the root cause of most forms of suffering.
- Conceptualize, instigate, assess, and undermine unworkable client avoidance behaviors, using the therapy session as a training lab.
- Understand the important role that personal values play in the production of distressing emotional experiences.
- Demonstrate reframing strategies that help legitimize and humanize the client’s emotional pain, thereby reducing need for avoidance, in the name of pursuing important life outcomes.
- Discuss how fACT helps depressed and anxious clients behave their way out of suffering.
- Conceptualize key fACT strategies for setting up successful, motivation-building field experiments.
- Demonstrate how to apply fACT concepts to create a new understanding of what depression is, and is not.
- Apply this new perspective on depression to change oriented interviewing, attaching avoidance behaviors, re-linking avoided feelings to important personal values, and expanding the client’s willingness to engage in approach behaviors.
Audience
All health and mental health professionals, beginner to advanced
Prerequisites
Some level of familiarity with the ACT model in clinical practice is recommended but not required.
Recommended Readings
Brief Interventions for Radical Change: Principles and Practice of Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy by Kirk Strosahl, PhD, Patricia Robinson, PhD, Thomas Gustavsson, MSc
References
Strosahl, K. & Robinson, P. (2017) The mindfulness and acceptance workbook for depression: Using acceptance and commitment therapy to move through depression and live a vital life, 2nd Ed., Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.
Strosahl, K., Robinson, P. & Gustavsson, T. (2015) Inside this moment: A clinician’s guide to promoting radical change in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger Publications.
Strosahl, K., Robinson, P. & Gustavsson, T. (2012) Brief interventions for radical change: Principles and practice of Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. Oakland, CA; New Harbinger Publications.
Agenda
Session 1: An Overview of fACT, Brief Therapy Theory and the CARE Approach
June 14, 2018, 1 PM—3 PM EDT
Session 2: Contextualize the Problem
June 21, 2018, 1 PM—3 PM EDT
Session 3: Assess and Attack Avoidance
June 28, 2018, 1 PM—3 PM EDT
Session 4: Reconnect Values and Emotional Pain
July 12, 2018, 1 PM—3 PM EDT
Session 5: Experiment With New Approach Behaviors
July 19, 2018, 1 PM—3 PM EDT
Session 6: Depression Isn’t What You Think It Is
August 2, 2018, 1 PM—3 PM EDT
Details
This training is worth 12 CE credit hours if attended live. While we can only provide CE to those who are present – i.e. logged in – for live presentation(s), all Praxis webinars are recorded for later viewing. Registrants may then access these recordings at any time for up to six months from the conclusion of the training to which they pertain.
Continuing Education
Read more about our continuing education credits—how they work and how to get your certificate(s).
Technical Requirements
This is an online learning event. Access to a computer and high-speed internet is required. Refer to our FAQ page for further information on technical requirements for this training.
Disclosures
Refer to our FAQ page for our disclosure information.
All prices listed in US dollars and times in US Eastern time zone.