192 | Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for Brain Injury – A Conversation With Drs. Abigail Methley and Will Curvis

[on-hold music] All right, Abby and Will, thanks so much for joining us.

Really excited for, uh, having this conversation today.

Thanks for having us.

Today we're talking about acceptance and commitment therapy, or ACT, for people with brain injuries.

We're gonna focus the early part of the discussion on the fundamentals of ACT itself and then transition to more directly applying it to disorders of brain and behavior.

But to start, can either or both of you give us a, a quick high-level definition of ACT?

Yeah.

So it's, um, an empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies together with commitment and behavior change strategies.

And the goal is really about increasing psychological flexibility.

So this is about kind of, um, contacting the present moment fully, changing or persisting in behavior, but specifically in the service of chosen values.

So really kind of intentional action.

I love it.

So while we are laying the groundwork here, let's get into two terms that are really important to know.

I think Russ Harris would call this, um, geeking out, um-

Mm-hmm

... which is totally allowed and encouraged on Nav Neuro.

So we'll, we'll lay the groundwork here, and then we'll get into some of the more practical stuff.

Um, so I'm thinking of functional contextualism and relational frame theory.

So briefly, functional contextualism is a philosophical framework that investigates how behavior operates in different situations.

It's all about the purpose or function of a behavior across contexts.

Meanwhile, my understanding of relational frame theory, or RFT, is a model based in operant conditioning that describes how human language affects our behavior.

This link between language and our experiences can promote either flourishing or suffering, and it depends on the context.

So reading a little bit about RFT gave me the sense that it really helps us understand how we can experience all this pain and distress simply based on our own thoughts, the stories we tell ourselves about how successful or unsuccessful we are, about what other people think about us, our regrets, wishes, et cetera.