ACT with Challenging Clients: Integrating Acceptance & Commitment Therapy to Enhance Your Interventions

Instructor: Dr. Richard Sears

Cost: $169 Individual, $109 Early Bird (register by 1/15/26)

$99 5+ Group (same organization), $50 Grad Students


This program is designed to provide an introduction to ACT, and  is appropriate for psychologists, social workers and mental health practitioners (LMHC’s, LMFT’s, and LCAT’s).


CLICK HERE TO REGISTER!

Overview
If you or your clients are feeling stuck, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can give you a bigger perspective on the dynamics of why and where the inertia is happening. ACT is an evidence-based approach that can incorporate any other effective intervention. Acceptance processes, which include mindfulness, help clients let go of struggles with their own internal experiences with strong thoughts and feelings. Commitment processes help clients clarify and move toward their own values in the service of living a more meaningful life. Join experienced ACT presenter Dr. Richard Sears 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 personality disorders. Richard 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 lecture, case examples, and experiential exercises, you will be able to integrate ACT techniques and skills in your practice immediately!

Learning Objectives
1. Demonstrate how ACT incorporates elements of exposure therapy to reduce experiential avoidance.

2. Define cognitive defusion and how clients can use it to change their relationship to distressing thoughts.

3. Help clients clarify their values to give them direction and willingness to engage with challenges.

4. Practice mindfulness skills to teach clients to better understand unhelpful automatic patterns of thinking, feeling, and reacting.

5. Integrate ACT techniques into treatments for specific disorders including depression, anxiety, trauma and personality disorders.