Steven Hayes – Control And Acceptance

Description Of Control and Acceptance by Steven Hayes

In this second video of the ACT in Action series, you will learn how ACT takes on the power of our unruly thoughts and unwanted feelings.

Working with a client who struggles with intense social anxiety, ACT founder Stephen Hayes, PhD, demonstrates the principle of accepting what we cannot control. Though his client believes eliminating his anxiety is that path to freedom, Hayes helps him understand that he may never eliminate his anxiety, because he cannot control his inner world. Instead, he can choose to accept it without struggle and live in accordance with his highest personal values.

However, there’s also a risk of falling too quickly into what Hayes calls “pseudo-acceptance,” which is what we see in the next session with a teacher struggling with panic disorder. With Hayes insightful commentary, you’ll learn to identify the signs and manage this pitfall with your own clients.

Then in a poignant session with a mother suffering from depression, Hayes introduces us to the classic principle of cognitive defusion, which he employs to help his client detach from her thoughts and engage more deeply in therapy.

What You’ll Learn In Control And Acceptance

In Depth

By watching this video, you will:

• Learn how to help clients accept their thoughts and feelings, releasing the need to control or eliminate them.
• Begin to understand cognitive defusion and learn methods for introducing it to clients.
• Learn to seamlessly integrate ACT “eyes closed” techniques into your sessions with powerful effects.

Specs

• Length of video: 1:44:00
• English subtitles available

About Steven Hayes

Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D., is the co-founder of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), best-selling author of Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life and Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada.

An author of 44 books and nearly 600 scientific articles, he has shown in his research how language and thought leads to human suffering, and has developed ACT as a way of correcting these processes. Hayes has been president of several scientific societies and has received several national awards, such as the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

His popular book, Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life was featured in Timemagazine among several other major media outlets, and for a time was the number one best-selling self-help book in the United States.

Steven Hayes speaks internationally on acceptance and mindfulness and is one of the world’s most influential and cited clinical psychologists.

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