Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)

1. Group Work with Adolescents Shane Curley Acceptance and CommitmentTherapy (ACT)

2. The ACT ‘Hexaflex’

3. 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

4. Youth Gone Wild!

5. 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

6. Group work It’s like making a movie And you usually stuff it up the first time

7. Ubiquitous Human Suffering & Creative Hopelessness Introduce these concepts via a fun collection of video clips, paused at sections for debrief and sharing. Watch DVD

8. 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 it’s appropriate. $10 Million Exercise or Two Sides of the Coin

9. Mindfulness & Self As Context Introduce it in progressive stages, for example: Begin with simple eyes open breathing exercises ‘breath into your stomach like it’s 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

10. Defusion & Acceptance Use terms the group generates Exercises to introduce what you mean by 'thoughts', don’t presume everyone uses words the same. Example: ‘5 senses experience’ and ‘notice your feet’ exercises.

11. The essence of RFT is arbitrarily applicable derived relational responding that is non-arbitrarily applied. Relational respondingrefers 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)

12. 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).

13. Be realistic, don’t try to do too much! However, here are additional components I’ve 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