Pre-Conference Workshop Abstracts

Steve Hayes, Ph.D., Beginner Workshop:

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

Difficult clients tend to be both harder to treat successfully, and to be emotionally difficult for therapists, resulting in higher levels of stress and burn-out. These clients are generally more complex and chronic, and they often been through the therapy mill. Because of the growing popularity of empirically supported methods, difficult clients may have already had courses of more traditional empirical treatments (e.g., various forms of cognitive behavior therapy) and are unlikely to be moved by another attempt within the same model. Something else is needed that is empirically based, that provides relief for clinicians, and that allows for a new, more powerful approach to difficult cases. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is such an approach. The core conception of ACT is that psychological suffering is usually caused by experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and the resulting failure to take needed behavioral steps in accord with core values. According to this view, trying to change difficult thoughts and feelings as a means of coping might can be counter productive, but new, powerful alternatives are available, including acceptance, mindfulness, cognitive defusion, values, and committed action.

ACT teaches clients and therapists alike how to alter the way difficult private experiences function mentally rather than having to eliminate them from occurring at all. This empowering message has been shown empirically to help clients cope with a wide variety of clinical problems, including depression, anxiety, stress, substance abuse, and even psychotic symptoms. Research has shown that these methods are as beneficial for the clinician as they are for clients, quickly alleviating therapist burn-out.

This two-day workshop will discuss and demonstrate ACT techniques, particularly acceptance, cognitive defusion, and behavioral commitment strategies. While the procedures are broadly useful, the workshop will focus in particular on issues of multi-problem patients. Data supportive of this approach will be discussed. The workshop will at times be experiential, not merely didactic. The intention of the workshop is to provide clinicians with a workable set of ACT skills, and with personal experiences that will allow further development of these skills based on their application with difficult clients.

Workshop Objectives:
Attendees will learn:
• Why experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion underlie most forms of psychopathology
• How modern research in human language and cognition is revealing a key source of human suffering
• How to formulate cases in terms of experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion
• The major steps in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
• How to foster psychological acceptance
• How to quickly reduce the impact of negative thoughts
• How to mobilize and make use of the spiritual side of clients
• How to help clients get more into contact with their core values
• How to build larger patterns of committed action
• How to apply these same methods to the stressful impact of working with difficult clients

Target Audience: Beginners and above

JoAnne Dahl, Ph.D., Advanced Workshop on Chronic Pain:

ACT in the Treatment of Chronic Pain

The workshop is designed to conceptualize, demonstrate and offer each participant the opportunity to practice an ACT analysis and treatment of clients with chronic pain. A typical case example will be dramatized, analysed and treated with ACT core components. Participants will learn how chronic pain can be conceptualized using the values compass and fusion with typical verbal rules associated with pain. Everyone will get the chance to practice core ACT skills applied to clients with chronic pain. Dramatizations of the funeral excercise, Joe the Bum, the Bus metaphor will be played showing the application to chronic pain. Participants may want to bring examples of difficults clients or clients behaviors with them.

Target Audience: Advanced, clinicians

Kelly Wilson, Ph.D., Advanced Workshop:

ACTing Mindfully: Valued Living in the Present Moment

In a sense, it is odd to speak of values , acceptance, and being-in-the-present-moment in the same breath. Values are intrinsically about something one is willing to work for, to sacrifice for, to suffer for. It is this for-ness, this purposive-ness, which threatens to pull us from the present moment. It can pull us into stories about "befores" when we have done well, or failed, and "laters", when we might do so again. When values are a story about a "what" that we value, about a "when" in which we will do so, and about an "I" that will be there to do it, the moment is lost.

Moving in a direction consistent with one¹s values is central to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. However, values need not take us from the here and now. Valuing, in so far as it is important in ACT, is never about later or before. It is always about values lived in the present moment. It is
the valued act in flight, the valued act experienced in this very moment that dignifies and directs the necessary hard work of therapy. In the workshop, we will describe methods of bringing a vital sense of direction into the therapeutic work. We will examine experientially methods of disentangling clients from stories about values and freeing them to make valued living a creative act in the here and now. The workshop will focus on experiential components that will readily translate into clinical work. We will proceed through a series of exercises designed to enhance your ability to work with your most difficult clients.

Educational Objectives:
1. Use the Valued Living Questionnaire to generate a potent
therapeutic contract.
2. Recognize the emergence of aversive control over client behavior
and learn to facilitate mindful acceptance.
3. Recognize the emergence of aversive control over clinician
behavior and learn to practice mindful acceptance.

Target Audience: Clinicians, researchers, all levels

Sonja Batten, Ph.D., Beginner Workshop:

Clients frequently come to therapy with an agenda of the amelioration of symptoms – to feel less depressed, have fewer panic attacks, and have fewer cravings to use drugs and alcohol. Traditional treatment approaches are designed for exactly such a purpose – to assist in symptom reduction. But what if there were another way of approaching our clients’ difficulties in living? What if it were not the thoughts, memories, and feelings that are the problem, but instead that individuals presenting for treatment have lost touch with what is important to them? That they are not living a life in accordance with those things that they really value?
Often we find that years of disappointment, disenfranchisement, and avoidance have led our clients to make choices based on attempts to feel good, rather than based on building a life that is meaningful to them.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a contemporary behavior therapy, provides an alternative to the feel-good agenda and instead focuses on helping our clients to reconnect with those ideals and principles for living that are deeply important to them. This two-day workshop will provide clinicians with the tools to work with clients on identifying each person’s valued life directions and then help motivate behavior change in the service of those values. Structured experiential and written exercises, along with role pays and case material, will be used to demonstrate the process of values assessment and commitment to engage in valued life activities.

OBJECTIVES
*Understand problems in living as the result of behavioral choices that individuals make that are inconsistent with their personal values
*Identify the role of avoidance in the development and maintenance of psychopathology
*Learn to conduct a full-scale Values Assessment
*Recognize client barriers to identifying and acting upon values
*Be able to lead clients in experiential exercises designed to facilitate awareness of valued life directions and motivate valued behavior

Target Audience: Beginner to Intermediate, clinicians, students and professionals.

PLEASE NOTE: It is important that you understand the experiential nature of this workshop. These workshops teach ACT by creating an experience of what it is like to stand in the place where we ask ACT clients to stand. The workshop will be largely experiential and may be intense at times.