Many children and young people with emotional and social health problems are unable to access help. Focused ACT clinicians aspire to be generalists, providing front-line services to any person of any age for any behaviorally influenced problem. The standard tools of FACT (e.g., the Four-Square Tool and the Assessment and Options Worksheet) are helpful to […]
When I teach FACT, I sometimes hear people talk about resistant patients or clients. In my experience, I get further with patients and clients that I find challenging when I explore what’s going on inside me at the moment I see them as difficult. Am I feeling afraid or frustrated? Am I assuming that I […]
Forget everything you thought you knew about depression. Drs. Strosahl and Robinson’s recent book, The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Move Through Depression and Create a Life Worth Living, Second Edition, offers a different (inspiring) lens on how to view depression. In a recent interview, Dr. Strosahl urges […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]