ACT for Anxiety Disorders

A comprehensive clinical training in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, applied to generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, agoraphobia, and social anxiety.

You see it week after week in your practice: despite thorough psychoeducation, relaxation techniques, and well-conducted cognitive restructuring, some anxious patients remain trapped in their fear. The harder they fight to control it, the more their world shrinks. What if the problem were not anxiety itself, but the permanent battle they wage against it? Acceptance and Commitment Therapy proposes a fundamental shift: rather than eliminating fear, helping the patient reclaim the course of their life. This training gives you concrete clinical tools to conduct ACT therapy from the first session to the end of treatment.

What You Will Learn

Upon completing this training, you will be able to:

• Identify experiential avoidance as the central transdiagnostic process that maintains and worsens anxiety
• Mobilize the six processes of the Hexaflex to formulate a clinical case and choose your therapeutic entry point
• Conduct cognitive defusion work to help the patient unhook from their anxious thoughts
• Distinguish acceptance from resignation, and accompany the patient's active willingness to experience discomfort
• Rethink exposure in the service of expanding the behavioral repertoire, not merely reducing symptoms
• Clarify the patient's values and connect them to discomfort in order to give meaning to action
• Build graduated action plans that allow the patient to move forward with anxiety rather than against it
• Anticipate relapse and prepare a therapy ending in which the patient becomes their own ACT therapist

Detailed Curriculum

Module 1 — Understanding Anxiety Differently From control to experiential avoidance: why fighting anxiety makes it worse, and how to open the therapeutic pathway through creative hopelessness.

Module 2 — The Psychological Flexibility Model The Hexaflex and its counterpart, the Inflexahex: the six processes of psychological health and their reversal in the anxious patient.

Module 3 — Cognitive Defusion Unhooking from anxious thoughts, understanding the foundations of Relational Frame Theory, and mastering four defusion techniques.

Module 4 — Acceptance Making room for discomfort, distinguishing acceptance from resignation, and fundamentally rethinking the role of exposure.

Module 5 — Present-Moment Contact and Self-as-Context Grounding the patient in the here and now, and helping them distinguish themselves from their own mental contents through the observing self.

Module 6 — Clarifying Values Rediscovering a life direction beyond fear — with concrete clarification tools and the central question of ACT.

Module 7 — Committed Action Building a values-based staircase of actions, addressing barriers to action, and defusing the threat of relapse.

Module 8 — Clinical Integration Conducting an ACT therapy from beginning to end, illustrated by two complete case studies: a panic disorder and a generalized anxiety disorder.