ACT Naturally: Increasing Your Therapeutic Effectiveness by Incorporating RFT In-session

The activity has approval for 6 CEs for psychologists, counselors, and Maryland social workers. Please check with your licensing board if you an unsure about APA CE credits. You must attend the course in its entirety in order to receive continuing education credits. CE credits are not given for the 8:30 – 9:00 AM coffee/tea time, lunch time, or the 15-minute breaks.

The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The Association for Contextual Behavioral Science maintains responsibility for this program and its content

Refunds: A $15 processing fee will be charged for registration refunds up to Feb 20th. We regret that after Feb 20th refunds cannot be made, but you may request credit toward a future program. If you need a refund, please contact us via email at drmirandamorris@gmail.com.

Course Description:

This workshop is designed to introduce individuals who are already familiar with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to the foundations of the model: Behavioral Analysis (BA), Functional Contextualism (FC), and Relational Frame Theory. The purpose of the training is two fold: 1) to demonstrate the relevance of ACT theory and philosophy to clinical work, 2) to help clinicians increase the precision and efficacy of their interventions with clients. The workshop is ideal for practitioners who are already practicing ACT (intermediate or advanced) who want to broaden their repertoire and deepen their understanding of ACT

​The workshop will begin with the basics of BA and will include a review of operant and respondent conditioning. From there, we will explore FC, with an emphasis on the pragmatic truth criterion and functional analysis. With this foundation in place, we will explore the basics of language and cognition through an RFT lense. We will use didactic methods, metaphors and experiential exercises to help give participants a strong grasp on concepts that can be hard for clinicians to hold on to (e.g., arbitrarily applicable relational responding, multiple exemplar training, generalized operants, mutual entailment, combinatorial entailment, and transformation of stimulus function). In addition, we will use experiential exercises to help participants identity and work with different relational frames and to enhance their sensitivity to context and flexible responding. Throughout the workshop, we will use case examples, group exercises and role/real play exercises to help participants put concepts into practice.

After attending this training you will be able to:

1. Explain operant and respondent conditioning
2. Explain the terms "function" and "context" as used in functional contextual philosophy
3. Describe the pragmatic truth criterion in functional contextualism and how it informs therapeutic intervention.
4. Explain how derived relational responding is the fundamental element in human language and is a generalized operant
5. Describe the defining features of relational frames: mutual entailment, combinatorial mutual entailment and transformation of stimulus function
6. Identify and describe at least 3 relational frames
7. Practice using the ABC model in order to create a functional analysis of client behavior
8. Explain rule governed behavior and describe how augmenting, tracking and pliance respectively influence human behavior