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 Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) training courses and approved by the American Psychological Association (APA).
Completion of the course results in 18 CE credits* and 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?
This is an ‘introductory’ course to ACT and people who attend 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.
What the course covers:
- 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.
Learning Outcomes:
At the end of this course, the learner will be able to:
- Explain the underpinning of the ACT approach and what is meant by the terminology “first wave”, “second wave” and 'third wave' therapeutic approaches.
- Describe the key concepts of the “Hexaflex” and the “Triflex” in the ACT approach.
- Identify the important components of a patient’s situation that will enable them to construct a case formulation.
- Plan how to construct a first treatment session integrating the use of mindfulness practice.
- Prepare a standard treatment session using the key concepts of Acceptance & Defusion.
- Demonstrate how to help the patient identify their personal values as part of the ACT approach.
- Describe techniques that can be used to help the patient engage in committed action to live by their personal values.
- Demonstrate how to help patients understand the concept of “self-as-context” in the ACT approach.
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 (note, the exam is inbuilt into the 'online anytime' version of the course).
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.
CE Credits from the APA:
*The Association for Psychological Therapies (APT) is approved by the American Psychological Association (APA) to sponsor continuing education for Psychologists. The Association for Psychological Therapies (APT) maintains responsibility for this program and its content.
Upon completion of this course you can apply for CE certification for an additional cost of $20 USD (for training purchased after 05/26/2023).
Requirements for completion: To be awarded CE credits for this course 100% attendance is required for live training. For the 'online anytime' (self-paced) version, you are required to complete the course in full and complete a multiple choice exam whereby a pass marks of 85% is required (failure on the third attempt would result in having to go back through the content again). A feedback survey is also required to be completed.
Note: there may be other professional licensing boards that accept CE credits earned from APA-approved sponsors. Because CE regulations vary by state and profession, we recommend that participants check with their state licensing board to inquire whether credits will be accepted for renewal of licensure. We do not have any authority over whether credits earned will be accepted, as this authority rests with the state licensing boards.
Instructor credentials and endorsements:
Note, all APT tutors are consultant clinical psychologists (or similar) and have not received any commercial support for this program or its contents and will not receive any commercial support prior to or during this program. Similarly, no benefit of endorsements have been received.
Booking is easy...
|
|
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!”
