A CBT-Practitioner's Guide to ACT: How to Bridge the Gap Between Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Interest in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is expanding rapidly. Many of those who are interested in ACT are trained using a mechanistic cognitive behavioral therapy model (or MCBT). Utilizing both ACT and MCBT together can be difficult, because the approaches make different philosophical assumptions and have different theoretical models. The core purpose of the book is to help provide a bridge between ACT and MCBT.

The emphasis of this book will be applied psychology, but it will also have important theoretical implications. The book will highlight where ACT and MCBT differ in their predictions, and will suggest directions for future research. It will be grounded in current research and will make clear to the reader what is known and what has yet to be tested.

The core theme of A CBT-Practitioner's Guide to ACT is that ACT and CBT can be unified if they share the same philosophical underpinnings (functional contextualism) and theoretical orientation (relational frame theory, or RFT). Thus, from a CBT practitioner's perspective, the mechanistic philosophical core of MCBT can be dropped, and the mechanistic information processing theory of CBT can be held lightly and ignored in contexts where it is not useful. From an ACT practitioner's perspective, the decades of CBT research on cognitive schema and dysfunctional beliefs provides useful information about how clients might be cognitively fused and how this fusion might be undermined. The core premise of the book is that CBT and ACT can be beneficially integrated, provided both are approached from a similar philosophical and theoretical framework.

The authors acknowledge that practitioners often have little interest in extended discussions of philosophy and theory. Thus, their discussion of functional contextualism and RFT is grounded clearly in clinical practice. They talk about what functional contextualism means for the practitioner in the room, with a particular client. They describe how RFT can help the practitioner to understand the barriers to effective client action.

Customer Reviews:

Building Bridges And Improving Therapy

By Dr. Russell Harris - December 1, 2008

Just wanted to give a big thumbs up to "A CBT Practitioner's Guide To ACT" by Joe Ciarrochi and Ann Bailey. They have done a superb job of building bridges between ACT and CBT, honoring and appreciating both models, and looking openly and honestly at areas of overlap and areas of differences, without judging either one as "better" or "superior" to the other. They also show how you can use ACT techniques to enhance your CBT while staying within that model, or, if you choose to move from the CBT model to the ACT model, how you can bring most of CBT with you, (provided you tweak certain parts of it, and make the philosophical shift from mechanism to contextualism). Of particular interest to me was the section on differences and similarities in exposure, as done in each model. Another really fascinating section of the book looks at where RFT would predict cognitive challenging to be effective, and where RFT predicts it would be ineffective. Also some great stuff in here tying ACT with... read more

Providing new skills and techniques for improving people's lives

By Todd B. Kashdan - February 2, 2009

Most clinicians and researchers writing books underestimate the scope of their audience. Reading the title of this book, you would think it's only relevant to you if you are a practitioner or if you are unsure whether mindfulness and acceptance based treatments are going to improve the welfare of your clients. Ignore the title of this book. If you are in any helping profession, this book is going to be useful for you. If you want to improve your own life, this book is going to be far more useful than the vast majority of self-help books on the market. If you are looking to help a friend, family member, or romantic partner, this book offers insights for how to intervene. If you are a scientist and want to better understand the notions of mindfulness, acceptance, and living in a way aligned with important values, this book is going to open up new insights. Once again, ignore the title of this book and just start reading.

This book provides one of the clearest, succinct... read more

A must read for all practitioners and teachers!

By Emma Hanieh "Clinical Psychologist" - July 5, 2009

A CBT Practitioner's Guide to ACT is an incredibly valuable book that is written in a very easily digestible and useful format for clinicians and teachers. The authors have structured this book in such a way that you don't have to finish reading every chapter before being able to implement their techniques and exercises. This makes it an incredibly useful supplement to therapists already existing skills, and a wonderful way of enriching what you may already be doing with clients. Even more exciting than that is the way the authors have managed to weave these two therapies together in a way that is so wonderfully respectful and clever, allowing the reader to choose for themselves what is valuable to them from each model. A fantastic read!