Using Present-Moment-Awareness with Posttraumatic Stress

Editor’s note: The following has been adapted from Inside This Moment: A Clinician’s Guide to Promoting Radical Change Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (Link), by Kirk Strosahl, PhD, Patricia Robinson, PhD, and Thomas Gustavsson, MSc.  When severe violations of safety, trust, or vulnerability occur, including outright threats to survival, humans are wired to shut down […]

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The Sanctuary: Present-Moment-Awareness and the Clinical Benefits of Being There

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from Inside This Moment: A Clinician’s Guide to Promoting Radical Change Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (LINK), by Kirk Strosahl, PhD, Patricia Robinson, PhD, and Thomas Gustavsson, MSc.  Mindfulness techniques are often thought of as being synonymous with present-moment-awareness interventions; however, while the two are clearly related, they are […]

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The Present-Moment-Awareness Intervention for Post-Traumatic Stress

Strosahl and Robinson’s Five Phase Model The core dilemma of post-traumatic stress is how to carry painful personal history forward in life. If clients use fragmented attention and avoidance to cope with what has happened, living a vital life is all but impossible. The alternative is to carry the objective reality of the trauma without […]

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In-Session Escape Routines

Editor’s note: This article was adapted from Inside This Moment: A Clinician’s Guide to Promoting Radical Change Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (LINK), by Kirk Strosahl, PhD, Patricia Robinson, PhD, and Thomas Gustavsson, MSc.  Imagine feeling totally lost with a client. The client has just disclosed an extremely painful story, and you feel stuck about […]

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An Overview of Inside This Moment: Promoting Radical Change in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Mindfulness has come a long way from the fringes of psychotherapy to a widely used, empirically-supported tool with a host of proven benefits. But when it comes to communicating about present moment experiences and intervening with those experiences, clinicians often fall short. As humans, it’s not surprising that clinicians struggle to stay present enough to […]

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