Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

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Acceptance and CommitmentTherapy (ACT)

• Group Work
• with Adolescents
• Shane Curley

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The ACT Hexaflex
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Resources

• Greco and Hayes - Acceptance and Mindfulness
  Treatments for Children and Adolescents
• Louise Hayes, Joseph Ciarrochi and Ann Bailey,
  forthcoming self-help book for teenagers - Get
  Out Of Your mind And Into Your Life For Teens

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Youth Gone Wild!
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What do we know or presume about young people?

• Family and peer relationships are top of the list
  
• Prefrontal cortex not fully developed
• Reward centre is more active than adults
• What do we see
• Low attention span
• Difficulties with intense emotions
• So keep it all as fun, brief and concrete as
  possible

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Group work
Its like making a movie
And you usually stuff it up the first time
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Ubiquitous Human Suffering Creative Hopelessness

• Introduce these concepts via a fun collection of
  video clips, paused at sections for debrief and
  sharing.
• Watch DVD

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Get to VALUES as soon as possible, values based
action is the key

• Generally speaking most groups could be split
  into two categories
• Those that readily explore values and find this a
  significant intervention on its own
• Those that find it difficult to explore their
  values. Where you find values you find suffering.
  
• But its still important to go there early and
  provide additional support where necessary
• Revisit this often and introduce Committed Action
  as soon as its appropriate.
• 10 Million Exercise or Two Sides of the Coin

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Mindfulness Self As Context

• Introduce it in progressive stages, for example
• Begin with simple eyes open breathing exercises
  breath into your stomach like its a balloon
• Then eyes open five senses experiences notice
  five sounds you can hear
• Mindful eating
• Progress finally to the most difficult, eyes
  closed thought watching
• Add SAC components Weather Metaphor, Body as a
  House.
• Get with the group, keep pace with them
• Use language that they identify with, especially
  if they generate it
• High, Medium and Low energy exercises.
• A client said after a thought watching
  exercise, I saw an ipod with songs going past on
  random, so I just let them come and go.
• Getting in the Zone Watch brief video

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Defusion Acceptance
Exercises to introduce what you mean by
'thoughts', dont presume everyone uses words the
same. Example 5 senses experience and notice
your feet exercises.

• Use terms the group generates

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• The essence of RFT is arbitrarily applicable
• derived relational responding that is
• non-arbitrarily applied.
• Relational responding refers to the ability to
• respond to relations between stimuli
• rather than just responding to each stimulus
• separately. Relations between stimuli can be
• derived (from the processes of mutual and
• combinatorial entailment)

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For every new ACT process

• Combine it with a fun activity Burning building
  (acceptance), golf (defusion), building a bridge
  (values), mindfully eating lunch in the park,
  team building exercises like toxic swamp and the
  human knot (defusion and acceptance).

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Be realistic, dont try to do too much!

• However, here are additional components Ive
  experimented with
• Connecting with family each week
• Text messaging the task for the week
• Creative ways to record the main take home
  message the art from this presentation comes
  from this
• Filming exit interviews
• DVD for each participant of individual interview,
  weekly white board work, fun photos and video of
  the activities