Supervising trainees in acceptance and commitment therapy for treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder.

Abstract

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999) is a behaviorally based intervention designed to target and reduce experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion (holding the thoughts in one's mind to be literally true) while at the same time helping clients to make powerful life enhancing behavioral changes that are in line with their personal values. As a therapeutic approach, ACT is specifically used to help clients come into contact with an experiential sense of knowing, rather than relying too heavily on verbal knowledge. That is, clients are taught to see themselves as a context for ongoing experiential events that include all things occurring inside the skin, emotion, thinking, memories, and bodily sensations, without excessive verbal involvement and control. The goal is to reduce experiential avoidance and move toward meaningful life paths, or more generally, to help the client who has fallen into rigid way of thinking and behaving to become more psychologically and behaviorally flexible.

Conceptualizing and Treating Comorbid Chronic Pain and PTSD

“…The symptoms of PTSD may be conceptualized as an interactive cycle, in which reexperiencing phenomena lead to or become associated with feelings of increased physiologic arousal, which in turn results in a tendency to avoid trauma reminders or triggers in efforts to regulate the noxious physiologic hyperarousal. However, attempting to control reexperiencing symptoms and hyperarousal symptoms of PTSD by avoidance may actually worsen or intensify the experience of the event [13], perpetuating the cycle just described.…”

Evolving Prosocial and Sustainable Neighborhoods and Communities

“…In a motivational interviewing intervention to reduce college students' drinking (Carey et al 2006), project staff gently questioned the students about their drinking and its consequences and provided tips for changing their behavior—if the students chose to do so. Interventions for those who have negative reactions to trauma help them accept what happened to them, accept the distress they may be experiencing, and move forward in their lives (Batten, Orsillo, & Walser 2005, Orsillo & Batten 2005, Walser & Hayes, 2006). Interventions for families with parental depression receive help in understanding and accepting what is happening and in developing a shared approach to coping with it (Beardslee et al 2003).…”

Mindfulness-based acceptance and posttraumatic stress symptoms among trauma-exposed adults without axis I psychopathology

“…Thus, numerous types of mindfulness skills have been targeted across relevant intervention programs for a relatively wide array of clinical conditions (Hayes et al, 1999; Kabat-Zinn et al, 1987; Linehan, 1993; Parks et al, 2001). In the case of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), specifically, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT; Hayes et al, 1999), a mindfulness-relevant intervention emphasizing experiential acceptance, has gained promise as a potentially effective treatment (Orsillo, Roemer, Block-Lerner, LeJeune, & Herbert, 2005; Varra & Follette, 2005; Walser & Hayes, 2006; Walser & Westrup, 2007). Emerging research suggests that mindfulness practice has the potential to be a clinically significant intervention strategy for posttraumatic stress; as increased levels of mindfulness facilitate a present-oriented stance, and may therefore, assist in the development of nonjudgmental acceptance of past traumatic life experiences as well as increased awareness and acceptance of ongoing trauma-relevant cognitive and affective experiences (Orsillo et al, 2005; Walser & Hayes, 2006; Walser & Westrup, 2007).…”

“…Several scholars have recently extrapolated upon the clinical utility of mindfulness, generally, and acceptance (one component of mindfulness), in particular, in the treatment of traumatic stress (Orsillo et al, 2005; Walser & Hayes, 2006; Walser & Westrup, 2007). Here, the psychological benefits of engaging in an active process of experiencing emotions and related internal events (e.g., memories) are cited as explanatory mechanisms by which to lessen dysfunctional psychological states (Hayes et al, 1999).…”