Therapist Training

ACCEPTANCE and COMMITMENT THERAPY
"We teach what we practice, we practice what we teach."

Therapist Training brought Kelly Wilson and Robyn Walser to Australia to conduct the first ACT trainings here. Since then there have been more Australian workshops teaching Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) than any other approach to therapy. Of concern to us has been feedback from many people we have met whilst presenting other workshops around the country that in many cases ACT has been presented in an excessively "evangelical" manner. ACT is not the be all and end all of therapy, indeed it's developers caution against seeing it as such. We must not forget that much good therapy was done before ACT came along. You don't have to abandon that base when you do ACT, you can build on it. It's about promoting therapist flexibility, not therapist rigidity.

For 2011 an entirely new ACT workshop will be offered, covering everythng that has traditionaly been included in ACT trainings, but adding explicit links to other empirically supported therapies, including CBT, EMDR, Schema Focused Therapy and DBT.

** Page last updated 2 May 2011. Press Refresh bottom of your browser just in case the page has been updated.

Workshops conducted by Graham Taylor

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Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT said as a word) is one of the so-called Third Wave Behaviour Therapies, along with Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT), Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy and others. ACT is unique amongst these developments because it is the direct clinical application of a solid theoretical foundation that has considerable empirical and experimental support.

David Barlow, famous for his work on anxiety, and developing the scientist-practitioner model, writes of ACT:

“Once in a while, there is a unique contribution to psychotherapy. Even more rare is the grounding of that contribution in sound philosophy, on the one hand, and firm data on the other. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy represents such an effort. In a truly creative leap forward, the authors present a new approach to behaviour change that is “must” for everyone in the field of psychotherapy….. Challenging the assumptions and methods of cognitive therapy, this is amongst the most significant new approaches to behaviour change of the past three decades.”

ACT uses metaphor, paradox, mindfulness, acceptance skills and experiential exercises to undermine the power of destructive cognitive, emotive and behavioural processes. It helps clients create a rich, full and meaningful life, to take action guided by their deepest values, and to free themselves from the grip of self-limiting thoughts, painful memories, negative emotions and painful bodily experiences.

The Contextual Psychology website is the key repository for information on ACT. Take some time to explore this site.

Hayes, Wilson, et al. on Experiential Avoidance (PDF document, 29 pages) Destined to be a citation classic, this paper describes a key concept in ACT. Experiential Avoidance is the human tendency to try to avoid (control) unwelcome internal experiences such as distressing memories, images, negative emotions, body sensations, etc. Such attempts may meet with short term success (e.g., drinking, distractions, dissociation, behavioural, cognitive and emotional avoidance) but such 'solutions' often magnify problems in the longer term.

A study which demonstrates the power of ACT describes a brief (4 hour) intervention which reduced subsequent re-hospitalisation of psychotic patients rates by 50%. To read this paper in full, see Bach & Hayes (2002) (PDF, 11 pages).

Another recent study is that of Dahl, Wilson & Nilsson (Behavior Therapy, 2004) who compared a brief (4 x 1 hour) ACT treatment with a conventional multi-disciplinary treatment for nurses at risk of going on long term sick leave due to work related injury. Mean number for sick days taken in the 6 month period post-intervention was 0.5 for the ACT group, 56 for the treatment as usual group. That is not a typo error, it really was 0.5 vs 56.