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Therapy role-play · ACT
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy builds psychological flexibility: the capacity to be present, to open up to difficult experience, and to act on what matters even so. You practise the six core processes of the hexaflex with clients whose avoidance has left them stuck.
Why this therapy
Sometimes the struggle to control thoughts, feelings or pain has itself become the problem. Much of what the client has tried has been a way of not feeling something, and it has not worked. ACT offers a different route. Rather than fighting inner experience, the client learns to hold it more lightly and put the energy into what matters to them. The hard part for a new therapist is not reaching for the old tools: arguing with the thought, or teaching relaxation as a way to make the pain go away.
Each protocol follows its published treatment model, and so does your feedback.
Simulated clients are a training aid. They do not replace supervised work with real clients.
Each one is reviewed in your debrief, with one concrete thing to try next time.
Help the client make room for a difficult feeling instead of fighting it. Acceptance here means willingness, not resignation; “you’ll just have to live with it” is the opposite of the point.
Help the client step back from a thought and watch it, rather than obey it or argue with it.
Bring attention back to what is happening now, in the room and in the client’s week.
Help the client notice the part of them that observes all of this, and is not the same as any of it.
Clarify what matters to the client, in their own words. A value is a direction; “walk five kilometres” is a goal, and mixing the two sets the client up to fail.
Plan a step towards a value, and take it with the discomfort still there. Rich talk about values with no action is a common place to stall.
Speak as one person to another, not from a podium. Ask whether a strategy is working for the client, rather than whether a thought is true.
The same client carries across modes. Start where you feel comfortable, then stretch.
Each client comes with a history, a presentation and measures. Read the referral as you would on placement, then begin.
The client responds to how you work. Make your mistakes here, where they cost nothing; hints come only if you ask for them.
A clear debrief on the core skills of your model (the CTS-R for CBT). Then take any one skill into a focused drill and work on it until it holds.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a third-wave behavioural therapy. Its aim is psychological flexibility rather than symptom control.
Transdiagnostic work: chronic pain, anxiety and depression where avoidance dominates, and distress linked to psychosis.
Traditional cognitive therapy tests an unhelpful thought and works to change it. ACT changes the client’s relationship with the thought and turns them towards their values. It is counted as a third-wave CBT.
Practise ACT with us
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