ACT Training Made Simple (all levels of experience)- Kevin Polk, Jerold Hambright, John Agee, Chad Drake, & Katharine Mocciola

ACT Training Made Simple

Registration is now closed.

Workshop Leaders: Kevin Polk, Ph.D., Togus (Maine) VA, Jerold Hambright, Ph.D., Togas VA, John Agee, Ph.D., Togas VA, Chad E. Drake, M.S., Togus VA, & Katharine Mocciola, Psy.D., Togas VA

Dates & Location: May 26 & 27, 2008, 9:00am - 5:00/5:30pm at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago).

Workshop Description:
This workshop is offered as a streamlined and simplified means of training ACT therapists and/or providing ACT treatment. The structure and organization of the workshop will resemble ACT as it is delivered at the VA center in Togus, Maine, to groups of veterans suffering from PTSD. The workshop will begin with a didactic review of the ACT model and quickly transition to more experiential training in that model. In addition to instructions in the techniques and skills necessary to conduct the Togus VA protocol, there will be an emphasis on relating the work back to Functional Contextualism and RFT. Over the two days, the providers will both demonstrate the model and present opportunities for attendees to practice delivering the model. Subsequently, attendees will be able to begin incorporating these new skills in their own lives and/or their clinical work.

Learning Objectives:

1. Provide a simple model for training and implementing ACT.
2. Explore the clinical relevance of functional contextualism in training and implementing ACT.
3. Review the basic skills underlying mindfulness in training and implementing ACT.

Target Audience: This workshop is for all levels of experience with ACT.

Introductory ACT Experiential Workshop (introductory)- Sonja Batten

Sonja BattenIntroductory ACT Experiential Workshop - CLOSED
(this workshop has reached its 36 participant max.)

Workshop leader: Sonja V. Batten, Ph.D., VA Maryland Health Care System and University of Maryland School of Medicine

Dates & Location: May 26 & 27, 2008, 9:00am - 5:00/5:30pm at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago).

General description/abstract: 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.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand problems in living as the result of behavioral choices that individuals make that are inconsistent with their personal values
2. Identify the role of avoidance in the development and maintenance of psychopathology
3. Recognize client barriers to identifying and acting upon values
4. Be able to lead clients in experiential exercises designed to facilitate awareness of valued life directions and motivate valued behavior

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.

Target Audience: Clinicians who have not previously attended a 2-day ACT introductory training.

Introductory ACT Workshop (introductory/intermediate)- Steve Hayes

Steve HayesIntroductory ACT Workshop

Registration is now closed.

Workshop Leader: Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D., University of Nevada

Dates & Location: May 26 & 27, 2008, 9:00am - 5:00/5:30pm at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago).

Workshop Description:
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.

Learning Objectives:

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

Target Audience: Beginners and above.

ACT Case Conceptualization Workshop (intermediate/advanced)- Kelly Wilson

Kelly WilsonACT Case Conceptualization Workshop

Registration is now closed.

Workshop Leaders: Kelly G. Wilson, Ph.D., University of Mississippi, Emily Sandoz, M.S., University of Mississippi, Regan M. Slater, University of Mississippi, Stephanie N. Nassar, University of Mississippi, & Lindsay Martin, University of Mississippi

Dates & Location: May 26 & 27, 2008, 9:00am - 5:00/5:30pm at the Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago).

Workshop Description:
ACT does not allow a neat division between people doing treatment and people needing treatment. It is hard to get what is important about ACT without confronting the fact that in a very deep sense, we are all in the same boat. The purpose of this workshop will be to learn some core ACT strategies, but, more importantly, to learn some things that are not well transmitted in written form. The workshop will contain a mix of didactics and experiential work.

The workshop will begin with a brief introduction to the hexaflex multidimensional diagnoses, assessment, and treatment and to the Hexaflex Worksheets. This fully dimensional model allows clinicians to examine psychological difficulties across a wide range of presentations. For example, examining fusion/defusion, we will see how it is possible to view problems in thinking ranging from full-fledged thought disorders seen among psychotic patients to the “thought disorders” of everyday life. The linkage between assessment and intervention on these various dimensions will be examined throughout the workshop in the context of a series of experiential exercises and observation of these exercises.

Exercises will be completed in groups of four and the results will be processed both within the foursome and in the workshop as a whole. The clusters of four individuals will consist of two pairs. Each pair will engage in an exercise while the other pair observes and makes notes using Hexaflex Worksheets. Hexaflex Worksheet conceptualizations will be applied to both the therapist and the client in the exercises. Therapist fusion and non-acceptance is often as much an obstacle as client fusion and non-acceptance. Both observing and participating pairs will work out case conceptualizations. Through the series of exercises, we will examine a variety of interventions stemming from the hexaflex model.

The workshop has two primary aims. The first target of the workshop is to increase therapist ability to make discriminations central to ACT case conceptualization using the Hexaflex Worksheets and to apply these conceptualizations to both client and therapist difficulties. The second target of the workshop is to increase therapist ability to perform present moment focused ACT interventions with clients, as opposed to interventions done to clients.

As has been common in my recent workshops, we will examine the centrality of mindfulness processes in other ACT interventions. This workshop will contain significant use of mindfulness and present-moment focused work. Although formal mindfulness meditation practice is not necessarily emphasized in ACT, mindfulness processes are central to the work. These exercises will show how we can bring the values directed, present moment focus directly into clinical interactions and even to case conceptualization (yes, it is possible!).

Learning Objectives:
Learning objectives will be taught through both direct teaching and experiential learning methods. However, the predominant learning method will be experiential throughout the training. Learning objectives include:

1. Case conceptualization from and ACT perspective
2. Practice in acceptance, defusion, present-moment focus, self-as-context, values, and commitment interventions.
3. Practice at conceptualizing therapist obstacles using the ACT model.
4. Practice at using the ACT model to understand and create a powerful therapeutic contract and relationship with your most difficult clients.

Target Audience: This workshop is intermediate/advanced. It is intended for those who have attended a previous ACT workshop. (If you have never taken an ACT workshop before, please consider taking one of the two Introductory Pre-Institute workshops available.)