Shaping Bravery and Flexibility in Children, Adolescents, and their Families

This workshop for clinicians with some experience with cognitive behavior therapy, behavior therapy, or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) will explore how to use ACT to enhance psychological flexibility with children, adolescents, and parents through supporting curiosity, willingness, mindfulness, and values-guided trial and error learning.

Specifically, the presenter will introduce a transdiagnostic process-based developmental model of ACT (the DNA-V; Hayes & Ciarrochi, 2015) and discuss how to shape psychological flexibility through incorporating specific ACT strategies in exposure-based treatment. Clinical examples, role play demonstrations, and opportunities for participants to practice will augment the workshop’s didactic content to illustrate case conceptualization and pragmatic applications of therapeutic techniques.

Clinicians can expect to leave the workshop with an understanding of how to identify and address skills deficits contributing to psychological inflexibility in disorders of childhood and adolescence. The practical skills in contextual behavioral, process-based assessment and treatment they will gain can be used as stand-alone intervention or may be incorporated into other cognitive behavioral or behavioral approaches.