With its rapidly expanding and robust evidence base, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a third-wave behavioral therapy, has become known as a powerful and broadly applicable approach to mental health.  Join Lou Lasprugato, Peer-Reviewed ACT Trainer, for this live, highly-interactive, in-person introductory workshop designed to integrate a conceptual, experiential, and practical understanding of ACT.  Over the course of two days, you will learn to:

• Conduct a clinical interview and formulate case conceptualization with the user-friendly and adaptable ACT Matrix

• Leverage the therapeutic relationship through a collaborative, curious, and compassionate ACT-consistent stance

• Apply ACT grounded in functional assessment as informed by its underlying philosophy of science and behavior analytic account of human language and cognition

• Describe how psychological inflexibility contributes to human suffering through misdirected efforts to satisfy human yearnings

• Create a context that evokes a client-centered willingness to change unworkable behavioral patterns

• Affect clinical outcomes by directly influencing processes (mechanisms) of change

• Demonstrate how to experientially work with the six core processes of psychological flexibility:
  

  1. Contact with the present moment

  2. Self-as-context

  3. Defusion

  4. Acceptance

  5. Values

  6. Committed Action

• Alleviate suffering across various conditions and diagnostic categories, including depression, anxiety, OCD, trauma, and substance use

• Promote wellbeing by helping individuals live meaningful and fulfilling lives

Learning Objectives:

1. Relate ACT to its philosophy of science and theoretical underpinnings

2. Explain the concept of workability and how it informs the entire ACT model

3. Describe the ACT therapeutic stance, informed consent and goal formulation

4. List the six core processes of psychological flexibility/inflexibility

5. Illustrate how to use creative hopelessness to motivate a change in the control agenda

6. Demonstrate how to facilitate contact with the present moment

7. Demonstrate how to evoke an observing self and flexible perspective-taking through self-as-context processes

8. Demonstrate how to facilitate defusion from sticky cognitions

9. Demonstrate how to foster acceptance of painful feelings

10. Demonstrate how to identify and clarify values to foster meaning and fulfillment

11. Demonstrate how to increase commitment to values-based actions

12. Conduct a clinical interview and formulate case conceptualization with the ACT Matrix

This workshop is designed for mental/behavioral health professionals and students who are either new to ACT (introductory) or have some experience with the model (intermediate).

Hosted by University of North Texas Psychology Department

NOTE: While this is a FREE event, UNT students/staff are prioritized for registration. Non-UNT professionals/students must request a spot here. Someone from UNT will reach out to you to confirm your registration by late April.