ACT Essentials (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy training).
ACT Essentials is a 3-day course from the Association for Psychological Therapies (APT), a leading provider of accredited Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) training courses.
It is the only ACT training that is APT-accredited and also gives you access to APT’s relevant downloadable resources for use post-course. The course is available for teams and individuals and can be attended face-to-face or online. It can also be completed as part of The APT Diploma in Psychological Therapies.
Executive Summary:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) moves away from focusing too closely on ‘symptom reduction’ towards teaching how to live in a stable and rewarding way. So it teaches how to get in touch with your values, how to act in accordance with them, how to be aware of ‘the you that is always there’, how to see your passing thoughts and feelings for just that, how to accept thoughts and feelings you don’t like without over-struggling with them, and so how to live mainly in the present.
Who should attend?
People who attend this course normally fall into one of two categories:
1. Professionals who see patients in 1:1 treatment settings and have a significant degree of clinical skill.
2. 'Whole teams' (either in inpatient or community settings) seeking to add to their common approach.
The ACT Essentials course covers a great deal:
- The differences between ACT and traditional cognitive behavioral therapy. Noticing, accepting and embracing thoughts and feelings, including unwanted ones, and taking action on them.
- Getting in touch with "self-as-context" - the part of you that observes and experiences but is different from the part of you that has feelings, sensations, and memories.
- Clarifying personal values and acting in accordance with them, thereby enhancing the quality of one's life.
- The idea that the normal human state is one of distress, rather than distress being pathological.
- Experiential avoidance, cognitive entanglement, and psychological rigidity, all of which may prevent one from acting in line with one's real values.
- The FEAR acronym as a summary of what causes us problems:
Fusion with your thoughts
Evaluation of experience
Avoidance of your experience
Reason-giving for your behavior - And the ACT acronym that summarizes a more adaptive way of behaving:
Accept your reactions and be 'present'
Choose a valued direction
Take action - Cognitive defusion: Learning how to overcome the natural tendency to regard our thoughts, images, emotions, and memories as sacred.
- Acceptance: Accepting our thoughts and allowing them to come and go without fighting them.
- Awareness of the here and now, experienced with openness, interest, and receptiveness.
- Observing the self: Accessing a transcendent sense of self, the ever-present part of you that observes and experiences.
- Values: Finding out what is most important to you and having clarity on it.
- Committed action: Acting responsibly in line with your values.
What this Acceptance and Commitment Therapy course will do for you:
- You will have a clear idea of what is meant by the 'third wave' in therapy – and the first and second too.
- You will know exactly what is involved in ACT, and be able to use ACT approaches with your patients, and perhaps especially with those for whom traditional CBT has proved less effective.
- You will be better at accepting your own thoughts and feelings, as a prerequisite for helping others.
- You will be more in contact with your own personal values and more prepared to act responsibly on them, and to help others do the same.
- You will be less distressed by your distress when you are distressed, and able to show others how to achieve that.
What you receive as a result of attending the training:
You will be registered as having attended the course, thereby gaining APT's Level 1 accreditation, and receive a certificate to this effect. The accreditation gives you access to online resources associated with the course and access to the online exam if you wish to uprate your APT accreditation to Level 2.
Your registration lasts indefinitely, and your accreditation lasts for 3 years and is renewable by sitting an online refresher which also upgrades your accreditation to APT Level 2 if you are successful in the associated online exam.
Your accreditation is given value by the fact of over 150,000 people having attended APT training. See APT accreditation for full details.
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Feedback Ratings.
We continuously monitor the quality of our training by obtaining feedback on the two key scales of relevance and presentation from every course delegate. Below are the average ratings for the last ten runnings of this course, which are updated periodically.
Face-to-Face
Presentation: 94%
Relevance: 90%
Online Live
Presentation: 95%
Relevance: 94%
Reviews.
APT prides itself on the feedback we receive about our courses. Below are just some of the great comments the ACT Essentials course has received.
"Absolutely fabulous - this should be taught to everyone.”
"This was an excellent course with a very practical clinical focus. There was just the right balance between theory, clinical exercises and case discussion. It was informative, lively and fun!”
