Joanne Steinwachs (pictured left) is a social worker in private practice in Denver, Colorado. She recently became the first social worker to be designated a peer-reviewed ACT trainer. She facilitates online and in-person trainings on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Functional Analytic Psychotherapy (FAP), and recently completed a article on using FAP to train ACT with Benjamin Schoendorff. She is a visible social work presence on the ACBS listserv and is the founding president of the Rocky Mountain Chapter of ACBS. She was invited to be interviewed by the Social Work ACT Special Interest Group, and questions were posed by Julie Hamilton (pictured right), a coleader of the Social Work ACT SIG.
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Julie: Please share with us your journey of how you came upon CBS/RFT/ACT and the development of CBS in your professional life as a social worker.
Joanne: I was extremely burned out when I came into the ACT community. I came out of my social work graduate training in 1990 with a lot of half formed scientistic theory, and realized pretty quickly I needed to have a better sense of what I was doing. From early on in my career, many of the people who came to see me had pretty serious struggles--major mental illnesses, addictions, very painful marriages, and significant trauma. Sometimes all at once. So I felt pretty incompetent for a lot of the time. I started looking for a theory that would help me organize the work and spent a lot of time in the psychodynamic/psychoanalytic realm, dabbling also in CBT and even got a lot of training in EMDR. However, none of these models helped me understand what was going on in the room much. So I got more and more frustrated and felt like a fraud. I did have a really busy practice, though.
Julie: What was the response of your clients and colleagues to this transition?
Joanne: I really drank the Kool-Aid. I went to the first Summer Institute, and my first workshop was with Steve. I felt like I had the Answer. So I came back to my colleagues and clients to tell them. I lost about 2/3 of my clients and almost all of my referral sources. Remember, I was working from the 2-3 sessions a week for 5 years model, working assiduously to get rid of the pain. People were definitely not impressed. I did connect with the then tiny behavioral community here in Denver, though. It helped a lot, but I had no understanding of behaviorism or learning theory or behavior analysis, so I was kludging ACT onto my "get rid of pain" agenda without even knowing that I was doing it. I realized that I really didn't understand what people were saying in the ACT community, I was fundamentally misconstruing things because I didn't have the basic theoretical grounding-- so I went to John McNeil, who taught the behavioral sequence for the Psy.D program at the University of Denver, and asked him to be my teacher. I had to start with undergraduate texts and work my way up to the basic texts that people in the ACT community suggested. I spent a LOT of time being frustrated and confused, but I think learning the basics of clinical behavior analysis was crucial for my growth as a functional contextualist. I don't know how I could have transformed my life and my practice without it. I'm back up to more than full time and I find myself being able to do clinical and training work that I've never been able to do before.
Julie: You have become a respected leader in the ACT/CBS training community. Can you share how this came about and what you believe is important regarding the training of colleagues?
Joanne: Regarding being a respected leader, I don't really think of myself like that. I have been able with functional contextualism to stand for my values. I value being of service, helping out people who are struggling to do this difficult and often lonely work. So I try to show up as much as I can. I think when I get stuck on thoughts about My Place in the ACT Community, none of that is available to me. So I just try to keep my attention on helping out. That's why I was a part of forming the ACBS chapter here in Denver in 2009. I was really shocked when the people I started it up with asked me to be the first president. It was a huge honor. It's been with great pride I've seen the board transition to all new people, who are doing an amazing job bringing CBS to the Rocky Mountain region. It's also why I became a peer reviewed ACT trainer, I wanted to help out, and I wanted other social workers to see that it can be done, even if you've never taken a philosophy of science class in your life.
Julie: How has this impacted you personally/professionally?
Joanne: Learning to distinguish between who a person is, and what they know how to do, freed me both personally and professionally. Until I came into the ACT community, it was a dark secret of mine that I fulfilled diagnostic criteria for many of the Axis II disorders in the DSM. Not all the time and not all of them, but enough to feel very shameful. I'm really fortunate that that whole worldview has just evaporated for me, and I think my clients probably appreciate it too.
Julie: What do you see the role of the social work community playing in the continued proliferation of CBS?
Joanne: I think that social workers can take over the world with peace love and understanding and functional contextualism. Seriously, I cannot think of a theory that is more in line with social work values than functional contextualism. We provide the bulk of mental health care in this country and it breaks my heart that more social workers don't know about contextual behavioral science. I feel really good coming home to social work after all these years of hanging out with psychologists. There's a deep sense of "these are my people" that I feel when I talk functional contextualism with social workers.