Acceptance, Commitment Therapy – Daniel J Moran

Acceptance, Commitment Therapy – Daniel J Moran
Description:

Integrate ACT techniques and skills into your current practice
Simplify and implement ACT concepts
Case examples, video clips and role-play

Integrating Acceptance and Commitment Therapy into your practice offers a new way for you to achieve positive therapeutic outcomes with difficult-to-treat clients.
Join experienced ACT presenter Daniel J. Moran, Ph.D., BCBA-D, as he delivers an exercise and technique-heavy course that will give you the tools needed to more effectively treat clients with depression, anxiety, trauma, and the personality disorders.
Dr. Moran will teach you the main concepts of ACT, including mindfulness, acceptance, and defusion–demonstrating how these create greater psychological flexibility. Discover a variety of techniques for helping clients who are struggling to make difficult behavior changes due to the presence of painful thoughts, feelings and memories. You will learn how to effectively use metaphors, custom techniques and experiential exercises to help your clients identify their values and translate them into behavior goals.
Through case examples, video clips, and role-play you will be able to integrate ACT techniques and skills in your practice tomorrow!

Define ACT concepts such as experiential avoidance and cognitive defusion.
Illustrate the role of psychological flexibility in ACT and list techniques for increasing it.
Identify how to reduce experiential avoidance by implementing emotional and behavioral willingness techniques with clients.
Demonstrate how ACT incorporates elements of exposure therapy to reduce experiential avoidance.
Discover core ACT concepts through the use of role-playing, case examples and clinical videos.
Integrate ACT techniques into treatment for specific disorders including depression, anxiety, trauma and the personality disorders.

ACT in a Nutshell

The role of values: mindfulness, acceptance, commitment, behavior
Experiential avoidance
Existential behaviorism
Psychological flexibility
ACT for anxiety, depression, trauma and personality disorders
Disorder-specific strategies

Common treatment elements
Metaphors, paradox and experiential exercises

Role of Exposure in ACT

Translate client values into behavioral goals
Barriers to behavioral goals: external and internal avoidance
External Exposure

Situations
People

Internal Exposure

Thoughts
Emotions
Memories
Bodily sensations

ACT in Action

Anxiety

Client avoidance strategies (including rumination)
Clean vs. dirty anxiety
Attack reason giving
Anxiety detector exercise
Turn up the willingness knob
Mountain of food metaphor
Passengers on the bus metaphor
And vs. but

Trauma

Function of trauma symptoms
Specify treatment goals
Target self-harm behaviors
Increase psychological safety
Tin can monster exercise
Mindfulness exercises

Depression

Role of avoidance in depression
Target suicidality
Evaluation vs. description exercise
Buy thoughts and defuse language
Observing self-exercise

Personality Disorders

Increase emotional tolerance
Values clarification
Mind vs. experience
Man in the Hole analogy
Target the client’s story
Work with client anger
Role of therapist self-disclosure
Chessboard metaphor