Don’t just think your clients are getting better. See them getting better.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy focuses on processes, not problems, resulting in changes so profound you’ll know you’re helping clients live rich, rewarding lives. Includes over 12 hours of videos featuring Steven Hayes in session with real clients, 12.25 CE credits, and more.

Volume 1: Facing the Struggle

Steven Hayes, PhD, founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), will guide you through the core processes and principles used in this evidence-based approach.

First Hayes works with Jerry, a man suffering from significant social anxiety who has very little access to his emotions. You’ll then watch other leading ACT therapists demonstrate techniques and interventions used in the opening stages of therapy with a variety of clients, including a young mother struggling with anxiety and depression, a teacher with panic disorder and a woman who suffers from chronic pain. Offering commentary throughout, Hayes illustrates the key concepts of ACT as they are unfolding moment-to-moment in these riveting therapy sessions.

Volume 2: Control & Acceptance

Working with a client who struggles with intense social anxiety, Hayes demonstrates the principle of accepting what we cannot control and living in accordance with our highest personal values. However, there’s also a risk of falling too quickly into what Hayes calls “pseudo-acceptance.” With Hayes’s insightful commentary, you’ll learn to identify the signs and manage this pitfall with your own clients.

Hayes also introduces us to the classic principle of cognitive defusion, and demonstrates how to help your clients detach from their thoughts and engage more deeply in therapy.

Volume 3: Cognitive Defusion

Hayes and master ACT clinician Rainer Sonntag, demonstrate a variety of cognitive defusion techniques that you can easily integrate into your clinical practice.You’ll learn how to use key ACT interventions such as “deliteralization,” separating words from their meanings to create some space between thoughts and emotions. You’ll also learn about “physicalizing” thoughts—giving them shape, form and definition so that clients can more easily disidentify from them.

Synthesizing both mindfulness and cognitive behavior techniques, cognitive defusion is a therapeutic tool that every therapist should have in their toolbox and will help your clients move from depression and anxiety to hope.

Volume 4: Mindfulness, Self and Contact With the Present Moment

Get an in-depth look at core mindfulness techniques that should be in every therapist’s repertoire. Hayes demonstrates “eyes-closed” exercises and other in-session methods for helping clients slow down and connect with themselves so that they can engage more deeply in therapy. With commentary throughout, Hayes offers a script for bringing mindfulness practices into the therapy room.

You’ll also see ACT cofounder Kelly Wilson conduct a powerful piece of clinical supervision with a struggling therapist. Seeking support for her work with a hostile, resistant client, Wilson introduces several techniques to help the therapist manage her anxiety and engage more deeply with the fear and loneliness behind her client’s hostility. A brilliant example of how ACT can improve not only your client’s lives but your own.

Volume 5: Values & Action

Learn how to start putting ACT’s powerful interventions together to help your clients come into contact with their most deeply-held values and beliefs and uncover the link between values and emotional pain, laying the groundwork for clients to create goals imbued with meaning and purpose.

You’ll see how the ACT model is applied to working with chronic pain patients in sessions with a teenager and an adult, each of whom struggle with severe daily pain. And in an impressive session with a depressed young mother, master ACT therapist Rainer Sonntag quickly and deftly helps her define her values as a parent and set goals for herself. Your clinical work will never be the same after watching these transformative sessions.

Volume 6: Psychological Flexibility

Discover how to integrate various ACT processes into actual treatment scenarios and how therapists of every orientation can use the ACT model in a variety of contexts.

We first meet a mother having trouble letting go of her adult children. In session she comes to realizations about her own values and sees new ways to move forward. Then Maggie, an ACT therapist, is the client in a session conducted in a “fishbowl.” Utilizing a brief-therapy model of ACT, master ACT clinician Kirk Strosahl helps Maggie come to terms with her difficult relationship with her brother. Lastly, Hayes conducts a session with a man diagnosed with OCD. Beginning with a detailed explanation of how exposure is integrated into ACT, Hayes carefully guides the client through the exposure.

BONUS: Victor Yalom Discusses ACT Immersion with Dr. Steven C. Hayes

ACT founder, Dr. Steven Hayes, knows that by going beyond constraining protocols and focusing instead on the underlying therapeutic processes, therapeutic changes happen in real time. Featuring clinical demonstrations, discussions with Psychotherapy.net founder, Victor Yalom, and audience Q&A, this webinar replay will show you how to use the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy model to help your clients thrive.

Steven C. Hayes, PhD is Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. He is the founder of the ACT model, and author of 35 books and over 500 scientific articles. Hayes has received numerous awards and accolades for his contributions to the field, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies

Victor Yalom, PhD, is the founder and resident cartoonist of Psychotherapy.net. He is a licensed psychologist with over 30 years of clinical experience and has conducted workshops in existential-humanistic and group therapy in the US, Mexico, and China. He has produced over 100 training videos in psychotherapy, counseling, and addictions treatment.

General Disclosure

This Disclosure Statement has been designed to meet accreditation standards; Psychotherapy.net does its best to mitigate potential conflicts of interest and eliminate bias in all areas of content. Experts are compensated for their contributions to our training videos; while some of them have published works, the purchase of additional materials are not required for any Psychotherapy.net training. Each experts’ specific disclosures can be found under the heading, ‘Therapist Disclosure.’

Psychotherapy.net offers trainings for cost but has no financial or other relationships to disclose.

Therapist Disclosure

Steven Hayes was compensated for his contribution to this course. None of his books or additional offerings are required for this course. Should such materials be referenced, it is only as additional resources.

Psychotherapy.net defines ineligible companies as those whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients. There is no minimum financial threshold; individuals must disclose all financial relationships, regardless of the amount, with ineligible companies. We ask that all contributors disclose any and all financial relationships they have with any ineligible companies whether the individual views them as relevant to the education or not.

Additionally, there is no commercial support for this activity. None of the planners or any employee at Psychotherapy.net who has worked on this educational activity has relevant financial relationship(s) to disclose with ineligible companies.

In Volume 1: Facing the Struggle you’ll learn how to…

• Describe the core theoretical principles of ACT
• Explain how creative hopelessness contributes to ACT’s effectiveness
• Design ACT strategies that incorporate your own personal style

In Volume 2: Control & Acceptance you’ll learn how to…

• Explain how to help clients effectively process their thoughts and feelings
• Recite methods for introducing cognitive defusion to clients
• Apply ACT techniques into your clinical

In Volume 3: Cognitive Defusion you’ll learn how to…

• Describe cognitive defusion
• Discuss the introduction of cognitive defusion to clients
• Explain the common pitfalls of and remedies for cognitive defusion

In Volume 4: Mindfulness, Self and Contact with the Present Moment you’ll learn how to…

• List different eyes-closed exercises you can integrate into your work
• Plan mindfulness exercises that increase your effectiveness
• Prepare to utilize your own observing self with your clients

In Volume 5: Values & Action you’ll learn how to…

• Compare the ACT concepts of values and goals
• Describe the connection between pain and values
• Apply effective ACT techniques in your work with adolescents

In Volume 6: Psychological Flexibility you’ll learn how to…

• Describe ways to adapt ACT to brief-therapy settings
• Explain how to integrate exposure therapy into the ACT paradigm
• List ways to incorporate relational work within the ACT model