Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

***This session is open to staff within the mental health & addictions division of Health PEI***

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is an innovative approach to both understanding and addressing psychological pain. It is a process-based therapy with demonstrated effectiveness through over 40 years of research. From a mental health perspective, this makes it a relatively new model of therapy (this is a snail’s pace relative to physical health research).

This presentation serves to answer the question “what are you going to do when psychological pain shows up?” by offering a new perspective on how we, as clinicians, perceive pain in the first place. We will work through six types of psychological struggle accompanied by six paths to psychological flexibility. What is psychological flexibility? Picture approaching life with arms open, ready for the ups and downs that are an inevitable part of the human experience, while moving towards what is meaningful for you.

Della LeClair, MSW, RSW is an active member of the Atlantic chapter of the Association of Contextual Behavioural Science which a global foundational research society dedicated to all applications of functional contextual science, ACT included. She has been an ACTive practitioner (😉) in this approach for 15 years - as a mental health therapist for HealthPEI, private practice organizations, and non-profit.