Inside This Moment: A Clinician's Guide to Promoting Radical Change Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

"A practical guide that presents a user-friendly approach to helping patients enact radical change and acceptance through mindfulness in their personal lives." 
—Family Medicine 

In this breakthrough book, cofounder of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), Kirk Strosahl and two fellow ACT psychologists offer a brief, five-stage model to help you recognize, assess, and take advantage of the subtle shifts of awareness that occur during therapy to achieve the most effective intervention and successful treatment outcomes.

In therapy, it is essential for both clinicians and their clients to pay attention to each moment in-session as an opportunity to create change. In addition, clients must be willing to experience pain in the present moment in order to make lasting change and begin to live according to their values. But staying in the moment is harder than it sounds. Inside This Moment offers a powerful skill set for learning to live in the now—even when it hurts.

To help you and your client make the most of your time in treatment sessions, this book includes clinical examples of working with clients via self-related processes, and offers tips for what to do when faced with certain non-verbal and verbal client behaviors, such as:

• looking away or down
• body positioning
• respiration rate
• giving general answers to specific questions
• changing the topic
• forgetting what was asked
• repeating oneself over and over
• changes in rate of speech
• voice volume

You'll learn that you don't need to go looking for radical change opportunities—but rather that the opportunities are transpiring right in front of you. This book will allow you to relax and trust in the power of the "now" in your therapy sessions.

Kirk D. Strosahl, PhD, is cofounder of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), a cognitive behavioral approach that has gained widespread adoption in the mental health and substance-abuse communities. He is coauthor of Brief Interventions for Radical Change and other core ACT books. Strosahl works as a practicing psychologist at Central Washington Family Medicine, a community health center providing health care to medically underserved patients. He also teaches family medicine physicians how to use the principles of mindfulness and acceptance in general practice. Strosahl lives in Zillah, WA.
 
Patricia J. Robinson, PhD, is director of training and program evaluation at Mountainview Consulting Group, Inc., a firm that assists health care systems with integrating behavioral health services into primary care settings. She is coauthor of Real Behavior Change in Primary Care and The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Depression. After exploring primary care psychology as a researcher, she devoted her attention to dissemination in rural America, urban public health departments, and military medical treatment facilities. Robinson lives in Portland, OR.
 
Thomas Gustavsson, MSc, is a licensed psychologist and cofounder of Psykologpartners, a company providing residential psychology and psychiatry services for self-harming clients in Scandinavia.