Crisis Integration With Acceptance And Commitment Therapy

Practical skills grounded in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) to help you bounce back when life knocks you down. Whether it’s the loss of a loved one or a job, the end of a relationship, a pandemic, or a natural disaster—nothing really prepares us for those moments when life hits hard and turns our world upside down. The good news is that you can move forward. There are tools you can use to find your way back from despair and live a fulfilling life. In this candid self-help guide, psychotherapist Russ Harris offers powerful and doable skills grounded in evidence-based ACT to help you recover from grief, loss, and crisis; transcend your pain and suffering; and build a rich and meaningful life—even in the face of adversity. You’ll also find tools to help you deal with painful memories, create your own healing “grief rituals,” and transform difficult emotions into unexpected allies. Finally, you’ll learn how mindfulness and self-compassion can help keep you grounded, even when it seems like your world is in free fall. If you’re ready to start building the resilience needed to heal from loss or thrive in the face adversity, this guide will show you how to get there, one step at a time.

In this ground-breaking volume, the first of its kind written for psychiatric and nonpsychiatric clinicians, readers will learn the principles and practices of ACT as they apply to psychiatric assessment, case analysis, and treatment. The book explains how to conduct a streamlined assessment of the patient's symptoms as they are nested in the patient's life context, how to detect and intervene with the patient's unworkable emotional and behavioral avoidance strategies, and how to blend the use of pharmacotherapy and behavioral interventions.

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Interpersonal Problems presents a complete treatment protocol for therapists working with clients who repeatedly fall into unhealthy patterns in their relationships with friends, family members, coworkers, and romantic partners. These clients may blame others, withdraw when feeling threatened, react defensively in conflicts, or have a deep-seated sense of distrust—all interpersonal problems that damage relationships and cause enormous suffering. This book presents an acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) approach—utilizing a schema-based formulation—to help these clients overcome maladaptive interpersonal behavior. First, clients learn how schema avoidance behavior damages their relationships. Second, clients face “creative hopelessness” and practice new mindfulness skills. Third, clients examine what they value in their relationships and what they hope to gain from them, and translate their values into clear intentions for acting differently in the future. And lastly, clients face the cognitive and emotional barriers standing between them and values-based behavior in their relationships. By learning to act on their values instead of falling into schema-influenced patterns, clients can eventually overcome the interpersonal problems that hold them back.

Since the original publication of this seminal work, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) has come into its own as a widely practiced approach to helping people change. This book provides the definitive statement of ACT--from conceptual and empirical foundations to clinical techniques--written by its originators. ACT is based on the idea that psychological rigidity is a root cause of a wide range of clinical problems. The authors describe effective, innovative ways to cultivate psychological flexibility by detecting and targeting six key processes: defusion, acceptance, attention to the present moment, self-awareness, values, and committed action. Sample therapeutic exercises and patient-therapist dialogues are integrated throughout. New to This Edition *Reflects tremendous advances in ACT clinical applications, theory building, and research. *Psychological flexibility is now the central organizing focus. *Expanded coverage of mindfulness, the therapeutic relationship, relational learning, and case formulation. *Restructured to be more clinician friendly and accessible; focuses on the moment-by-moment process of therapy.

As a mental health professional, you know it’s a real challenge to help clients develop the psychological skills they need to live a vital life. This is especially true when you are working with time constraints or in settings where contacts with the client will be brief. Brief Interventions for Radical Change is a powerful resource for any clinician working with clients who are struggling with mental health, substance abuse, or life adjustment issues. If you are searching for a more focused therapeutic approach that requires fewer follow-up visits with clients, or if you are simply looking for a way to make the most of each session, this is your guide. In this book, you’ll find a ready-to-use collection of brief assessment and case-formulation tools, as well as many brief intervention strategies based in focused acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT). These tools and strategies can be used to help your clients stop using unworkable behaviors, and instead engage in committed, values-based actions to change their lives for the better. The book includes a practical approach to understanding how clients get stuck, focusing questions to help clients redefine their problem, and tools to increase motivation for change. In addition, you will learn methods for rapidly constructing effective treatment plans and effective interventions for promoting acceptance, present-moment awareness, and contact with personal values. With this book, you will easily integrate important mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based therapeutic work in their interactions with clients suffering from depression, anxiety, or any other mental health problem.

This book will help readers balance the essential scientific concepts underlying Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) with their clinical practice, reconnecting ACT with its behavioural therapeutic roots and Relational Frame Theory. Clinicians often struggle to understand the science (the “head”) that should underpin their clinical practice/work (the “heart”). Without a core understanding of the scientific concepts underlying ACT, clinicians struggle to understand how to adapt ACT in practice for specific client or group situations and why. In response to that, this book is structured to help readers understand the why of each intervention and how to use that to guide the next move. Through a mix of explanations, personal examples, exercises for the therapist, short cases, and metaphors, the book provides a series of science‐driven concepts that teach the reader to use the ACT toolbox with skilful interventions. This manual is a must‐read for any ACT trainee or practitioner, helping them systematically connect techniques with the rationale for their use.

Harness ACT to live a healthier life Do you want to change your relationship with painful thoughts and feelings that are holding you back from making changes to improve your life? In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy For Dummies, you'll discover how to identify negative and unhealthy modes of thinking and apply Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) principles throughout your day-to-day life, creating a healthier, richer and more meaningful existence with yourself and others. Closely connected to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), ACT is an evidence-based, NICE-approved therapy that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies mixed in with commitment and behaviour-changing strategies to help people increase their psychological flexibility in both their personal and professional lives. With the help of this straightforward and authoritative guide, you'll find out how to target unpleasant feelings and not act upon them—without sending yourself spiraling down the rabbit hole. The objective is not happiness; rather, it is to be present with what life brings you and to move toward valued behaviour. Shows you how to banish unhelpful thoughts Guides you to making room for painful feelings Teaches you how to engage fully with your here-and-now experience Helps you cope with anxiety, depression, stress, OCD and psychosis Whether you're looking to practice self care at home or are thinking about seeing an ACT therapist, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy For Dummies makes it easier to live a healthier and more productive life in spite of—and alongside—unpleasantness.

This book is the most practical clinical guide on Acceptance and Commit ment Therapy (ACT said as one word, not as initials) yet available. It is designed to show how the ACT model and techniques apply to various disorders, settings, and delivery options. The authors of these chapters are experts in applying ACT in these various areas, and it is intriguing how the same core principles of ACT are given a nip here and a tuck there to fit it to so many issues. The purpose of this book, in part, is to emboldened researchers and clinicians to begin to apply ACT wherever it seems to fit. The chapters in the book demonstrate that ACT may be a useful treat ment approach for a very wide range of clinical problems. Already there are controlled data in many of these areas, and soon that database will be much larger. The theory underlying ACT (Relational Frame Theory or "RFT"-and yes, here you say the initials) makes a powerful claim: psy chopathology is, to a significant degree, built into human language. Fur ther, it suggests ways to diminish destructive language-based functions and ways of augmenting helpful ones. To the extent that this model is cor rect, ACT should apply to a very wide variety of behavioral issues because of the centrality of language and cognition in human functioning.