The Association for Psychological Therapies' top 10 most ordered courses.

10.

ACT Essentials (Acceptance & Commitment Therapy).

A 3-day course.

'Once in a while there is a unique contribution to psychotherapy.'

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.

9.

CBT Plus, for Suicide Prevention.

A 3-day course.

There is more to working with suicidality than risk assessment and management, and having mastered those, we need then to be able to help people to build lives that are much more rewarding. It is unrealistic to think we can create lives that are completely free of suffering, but perfectly realistic to help create lives that are worth suffering for. And this 3-day course strives to achieve just that.

Some professionals become anxious about seeing patients who are suicidal, so what this course aims to do is to help us become relaxed and optimistic about seeing suicidal people, because we will know how to give them hope, and how to deliver as well as possible on that hope.

8.

Trauma-Focused CBT, for all ages.

A 3-day course.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is literally a life changing disorder. It is famously difficult to treat, yet Cognitive Behavioral Therapy can produce impressive results.

Experiencing a life-threatening event can leave the person with effects including: persistently re-experiencing the event (e.g. intrusive thoughts and images of it), a numbing of general responsiveness (e.g. less interest in significant activities and a feeling of detachment from others), persistent hyperarousal (e.g. difficulty sleeping, irritability, exaggerated startle response) adding up to significant distress or impaired functioning. This course examines effective Cognitive Behavioral Therapy based interventions (a) to ameliorate these effects and (b) to greatly improve the patient's quality of life where some effects cannot be mitigated.

7.

Positive Behavior Support

A 3-day course.

This course meets demands for a thorough, consistent and values-led approach to Positive Behavior Support.

The course covers the background and rationale for PBS and then looks at understanding an individual’s needs, analysing their behavior and understanding the role it fulfils. Positive and proactive, the training will empower delegates to develop individual PBS plans aimed at improving their clients’ environment and wellbeing, thus decreasing the likelihood of disturbed behavior. Using skills and understanding from the course delegates will be able to develop specific client-centred plans, also considering their situation and family / carers.

Given that some incidents will inevitably still occur the course also covers steps to manage a crisis and to continually review and improve the plan.

This is a powerful approach that improves the environment and wellbeing of both clients and staff. This is the only PBS course that is APT accredited and gives access to relevant web-based APT resources after the course.

6.

CBT Essentials (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy).

A 3-day course.

A favorite introduction to this powerful, evidence-based technique.

Now in its latest form this course has introduced Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to thousands of people ever since 1983. It addresses Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in a way that you can use after the course. It covers: the history and meaning of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, conceptualising cases in CBT terms, the format of a standard CBT session, and the most important CBT techniques. All in a way that applies it constantly to practical examples.

5.

Motivational Interviewing, and how to use it effectively.

A 3-day course.

This course is available 'Open' (where you come to us) or Onsite (we come to you and deliver it to a group of up to 15 delegates).

Based on Miller and Rollnick's latest book, this course describes an organized way of helping people to recognize their problems and to do something about them. Principally it addresses behavior about which the client has mixed feelings: drinking and substance misuse for example, but a suprising array of common mental and physical health problems as well. Issues from taking psychoactive medication through to eating more healthily can all be addressed using motivational interviewing.

4.

DBT-A: DBT for Adolescents.

A 3-day course.

Instruction in the key components of DBT for those who want to apply DBT to working with adolescents.

DBT brings together a series of skills and techniques which are powerful and well chosen ones, and DBT-A focuses it on working with adolescents. Whether you want to simply learn about DBT and how to apply it effectively, or are thinking of establishing a full DBT service, this course has it covered. The course covers the delivery of effective DBT at its most relevant for adolescents, including: confusion about self, impulsivity, lack of emotional control, interpersonal problems, family problems and dilemmas, high risk behaviors, including suicidal behavior and non-suicidal self-injury.

3.

SFT Essentials (Solution-Focused Therapy).

Also known as SFBT (Solution-Focused Brief Therapy).

A 3-day course.

An approach to problems that is fundamentally positive and comes as a breath of fresh air to professionals and clients alike.

Another of APT's top courses, this aims to introduce you to the principles of SFT / SFBT in a way that gives you a firm grasp of them and enables you to use them in a safe and helpful way. You should become at home with the approach which is often seen as a 'breath of fresh air' both to client and professional, looking for and finding effective solutions for problems, rather than being sucked further and further into the problem itself.

2.

The RAID^® Course. The positive approach to working with disturbed and challenging behavior.

A 3-day course.

A relentlessly positive approach to working with disturbed and challenging behavior.

The 3-day RAID^® course is a leading positive psychology approach for tackling disturbed and challenging behavior at source: over 20,000 professionals have attended it. It is a comprehensive approach which teaches staff a philosophy and practice not only to deal with disturbed and challenging behavior when it occurs, but also to prevent it by tackling it at source. Staff feel pleased to share a unified system and to know what they are doing and why they are doing it, while clients delight in a relentlessly positive and empowering approach. The essence of the RAID^® approach is to play down disturbed and challenging behavior as far as safety allows, and to nurture and develop positive behavior so that it systematically overwhelms and displaces the disturbed and challenging behavior.

1.

DBT Essentials.

A 3-day course.

Instruction in the key components of DBT for those who want to add them to their repertoire without necessarily becoming 'a DBT therapist'.

DBT brings together a series of skills and techniques which are powerful and well chosen ones, for working with personality disorder as well as in other areas. Many people want to familiarize themselves with these skills without necessarily becoming a DBT therapist exclusively, and this 3-day course is for you if you are one of those people as well as if you are thinking of taking the first step in becoming a DBT therapist. As well as covering the 'overall concept of DBT', it covers its 'essential elements', namely the concepts of: Validation; Metaphor; Relentless Problem Solving; and Contingency Management, and the skills of: Mindfulness; Distress Tolerance; Interpersonal Effectiveness; and Emotional Regulation.