Steven Hayes – Developing ACT Skills

Description Of Developing ACT Skills

Acceptance and mindfulness is having a profound impact on clinical practice. Both empirically-supported and focused on deep clinical issues, acceptance and mindfulness approaches have been shown to help clients cope with a wide variety of clinical problems including:

• Depression
• Anxiety
• Stress
• Substance Abuse
• Psychotic Symptoms
• Trauma

Many have described ACT as the next DBT!  Don’t miss this opportunity to learn how Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can empower your clinical work. ACT takes the view that trying to change difficult thoughts and feelings as a means of coping can be relatively ineffective. However, new, powerful acceptance and mindfulness-based alternatives are readily available.

When combined with values–and committed action–ACT skills can quickly mobilize even some of our most stuck clients. The intention of the workshop is to provide you with the foundation of ACT and a beginning set of skills and experiences that will direct further development.

What You’ll Learn In Developing ACT Skills

Target Audience

Addiction Counselors, Social Workers, Psychologists, Counselors, Nurses, Marriage & Family Therapists, Other Mental Health Professionals

Objectives

• Develop psychological acceptance in clients
• Reduce the impact of negative thoughts
• Establish and make use of the spiritual side of clients
• Apply ACT skills and help clients get into contact with their core values
• Apply ACT methods to reduce the stressful impact of working with difficult clients

Outline

Developing ACT Skills

• Challenging the system: Creative hopelessness
  1. Control as the problem
  2. Self as context: Finding a place for experiential acceptance
  3. Defusion methods
  4. Language traps

The Therapeutic Relationship

• Embody
• Instigate

Developing ACT Skills

• Values and choice
• Willingness
• Commitment

About Steven Hayes

Steven C. Hayes, PhD, is the co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), best-selling author of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life and Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of 44 books and nearly 600 scientific articles, he has shown in his research how language and thought leads to human suffering, and has developed ACT as a way of correcting these processes. Hayes has been president of several scientific societies and has received several national awards, such as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

His popular book Get Out Of Your Mind and Into Your Life was featured in Time magazine among several other major media outlets, and for a time was the number one best-selling self-help book in the United States.

Steven Hayes speaks internationally on acceptance and mindfulness and is one of the world’s most influential and cited clinical psychologists.

Speaker Disclosures:

Financial: Dr. Steven Hayes has an employment relationship with the University of Nevada. He is the President of the Institute for Better Health and the research director at Praxis Continuing Education and Training. He receives royalties as a published author. Dr. Hayes receives a speaking honorarium and recording royalties from PESI, Inc. He has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.

Non-financial: Dr. Steven Hayes is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, and the Association for Behavioral Analysis International. He is a member of the PROSOCIAL Executive Committee.

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