Are you facing the ever-growing challenge of how to optimize client outcomes with as few treatment sessions as possible? Around the globe, the demand for brief therapy is rapidly growing, but fortunately, Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT) is well suited to a brief intervention format.

In this advanced-level 6-week online course, you’ll learn how to do ACT effectively in anything from 1 to 6 sessions of 20 to 30 minutes each, using an approach better known as FACT: Focused Acceptance & Commitment Therapy. FACT is a brief but powerful behavioural intervention approach, pioneered by Kirk Strosahl and Patricia Robinson, and widely used in the USA and Europe.

There are 8 CE/CME hours available. Prior to registering, please visit thispageto review CE/CME details, course objectives, speaker/planner conflict of interest disclosure and more.

This course is open to any professional who works with physical or psychological health. This includes therapists, coaches, counselors, physicians, nurses, psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, physios, dietitians, occupational therapists, youth workers, BCBAs, speech therapists, and any other type of health professional - as well as students and researchers in these fields.

This engaging online course, 8 hours in total, rolled out over 6 weeks, will take you step-by-step through the practice and principles of FACT.

The FACT model is ideal for anyone who wants to do ACT more efficiently, especially for practitioners in time-limited settings, including primary care, short in-patient stays, school or university counselling, prisons, EAPs, and crisis intervention services.

You’ll learn how to use FACT as brief intervention for depression, anxiety disorders, addictions, stress, medical problems and a wide range of other common clinical issues.

FACT is a radically different approach to therapy, which will give you a wealth of new ideas and effective strategies.

In this 6-week online course you will:

• Discover exciting new research about the surprisingly high effectiveness of brief therapy interventions, and learn how to apply this approach with your clients and patients
• Observe demonstrations of the specific clinical techniques that make up the FACT approach
• Learn the art of focused interviewing skills
• Learn how to do rapid case formulation and treatment targeting
• Learn how to do an effective ACT intervention in as little as 5 to 10 minutes

Each week, Dr. Russ Harris will take you step-by-step through the core principles of FACT, supported by instructional videos, engaging animations, videos of therapy sessions, written materials, audio recordings, client handouts and worksheets, and interactive quizzes to test your learnings as you go.

To complete your interactive experience, the course also includes a fully supported forum where you can ask questions week by week and share your experiences with Russ and your peers from around the world.

This is an advanced level course, which assumes at least a beginners-level knowledge of ACT. Before enrolling, you must do at least one of the following:

• Attend an introductory level 2-day ACT workshop (with any trainer).
• Complete our online ACT for Beginners course.
• Thoroughly work through a beginners-level ACT textbook from start to end, such as ACT Made Simple or Learning ACT. (This means not just reading it, but actively doing the experiential exercises. An ACT self-help book such as The Happiness Trap will not suffice; it must be a textbook.)

• Describe the fundamentals of Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (FACT) and how to use it as a brief intervention for depression, anxiety disorders, addictions, chronic pain syndrome, medical problems, and a range of other common clinical problems.
• Discuss how to work in a brief intervention format, in 1 to 6 sessions of 30 minutes duration or less.
• Discuss techniques to rapidly conceptualize a wide range of common DSM disorders and clinical issues in terms of the FACT model.
• Identify ways to plan treatments based on individualized case conceptualizations.
• Discuss how to facilitate optimism and hope and get client ‘buy-in’ from the start.
• Identify how to distill the six core ACT processes into three larger overarching processes – and move rapidly, fluently and flexibly between them.
• Develop self-compassion in both practitioners and clients.
• Use mindfulness-based cognitive strategies and values-guided behavioral activation strategies to motivate clients to make meaningful between-session behaviour changes.
• Use values as the foundation for problem-solving, goal-setting, action-planning, and ongoing motivation for sustained behavioral change.
• Describe how to elicit and respond to clients’ feedback, measure progress, and prevent relapse.
• Identify and assess resistant or unmotivated clients, and engage them in therapy, and overcome obstacles to homework.
• Implement specific strategies for coping with physical pain, addiction and grief.