General Blog Items

/General Blog Items
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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and religious clients

Recently, I received this excellent question about using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with religious clients and thought I'd share it so others could benefit: I'm learning ACT and am familiar with it's concepts, but I'm left with a few specific questions in terms of how it can be applied for persons who are deeply religious: [...]

By |August 8th, 2017|General Blog Items|Comments Off on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and religious clients

Favorite Values Exercises to Use In Therapy

We've pulled together seven favorite values exercises that you can use with your clients. These are based on work with hundreds of clients and repeated use in workshops and other training events. Most of these exercises originated from others and what we have tried to do is take some of our favorite ACT values exercises and [...]

By |July 16th, 2017|General Blog Items|Comments Off on Favorite Values Exercises to Use In Therapy

Milk Milk Milk: Breaking down a defusion exercise

Dr. Akihiko Masuda and colleagues recently published a really interesting study where they broke down components of the ACT Milk Milk Milk exercise. In this exercise, the therapist may take a word that has a strong negative self-referential quality to the client (e.g., “fraud,” “ugly,” stupid,” “damaged”); the client then repeats the word over and [...]

By |April 5th, 2010|General Blog Items|5 Comments

ACTing on diabetes

Diabetes requires knowledge about proper self-care in order to prevent health complications, so hospitals frequently offer courses in diabetes self-management. However, managing diabetes requires a lot more than simply knowing what to do, it also takes overcoming the emotional barriers to living healthy. A recent randomized clinical trial shows how ACT can help with these [...]

By |February 18th, 2010|General Blog Items|Comments Off on ACTing on diabetes

Distress tolerance and nicotine addiction

How long can you hold your breath? If you are a smoker, the results of this test would predict the likelihood of being successful at quitting those cigarettes. This is not because holding your breath is related to your lung capacity. Rather, it has something to do with distress tolerance. We probably all know someone [...]

By |January 6th, 2010|General Blog Items|Comments Off on Distress tolerance and nicotine addiction

On Being a Mindful Therapist

Have you ever wondered why ACT experts encourage experiential workshops as part of the training regimen? There are a few answers to this question, but a new study out of Germany suggests that mindfulness training can help therapists be generally better at what they do. Therapy is complex. Consider all the possible sources of information [...]

By |August 28th, 2009|General Blog Items|Comments Off on On Being a Mindful Therapist

New data on experiential avoidance in Trichotillomania

A blog called Psychotherapy Brown Bag has done a good job of reviewing a recent paper which continues to add to the pile of evidence on the centrality of experiential avoidance in maintaining a variety of psychological disorders. This paper is about the Trichotillomania and is worth a read. Here's what they had to say [...]

By |August 5th, 2009|General Blog Items|Comments Off on New data on experiential avoidance in Trichotillomania

New data on ACT for chronic pain

Fresh data on ACT and RFT seem to be surfacing almost continuously these days. In this edition of our newsletter, we are especially intrigued by a forthcoming article on the use of ACT with children experiencing chronic pain. One of the distinctions that we often make as ACT therapists with our clients is that between [...]

By |February 16th, 2009|General Blog Items|2,977 Comments

The Hexaflex as a Dynamic Therapy Tool

The Hexaflex Dimensional  Approach to Diagnosis and the ACT ADVISOR Psychological Flexibility Measure are both relatively new iterations of the Hexaflex that have exciting applications for ACT clinicians. Let’s take a look at them… […]

By |July 11th, 2008|General Blog Items|33 Comments

Intro to Defusion Lecture, Part 2

A few months ago I gave an introductory lecture on the ACT concept of defusion to a group of professionals that are participating in an online learning community called Practice Ground, led by Kelly Koerner, a well-known trainer of Dialectical Behavior Therapy. Make sure you check out part 1 before you listen to part 2, [...]

By |May 9th, 2008|General Blog Items|Comments Off on Intro to Defusion Lecture, Part 2