1. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT)
Group Work
with Adolescents
Shane Curley I

2. The ACT ‘Hexaflex’

3. Resources
Greco and Hayes - Acceptance and Mindfulness Treatments for Children and Adolescents
Louise Hayes, Joseph Ciarrochi and Ann Bailey, forthcoming self-help book for teenagers - Get Out Of Your mind And Into Your Life For Teens

4. Youth Gone Wild!

5. What do we know or presume about young people?
Family and peer relationships are top of the list
Prefrontal cortex not fully developed
Reward centre is more active than adults
What do we see:
Low attention span
Difficulties with intense emotions
So keep it all as fun, brief and concrete as possible

6. Group work It’s like making a movie
And you usually stuff it up the first time

7. Ubiquitous Human Suffering & Creative Hopelessness
Introduce these concepts via a fun collection of video clips, paused at sections for debrief and sharing.
Watch DVD

8. Get to VALUES as soon as possible, values based action is the key
Generally speaking most groups could be split into two categories:
Those that readily explore values and find this a significant intervention on its own
Those that find it difficult to explore their values. Where you find values you find suffering.
But its still important to go there early and provide additional support where necessary
Revisit this often and introduce Committed Action as soon as it’s appropriate.
$10 Million Exercise or Two Sides of the Coin

9. Mindfulness & Self As Context
Introduce it in progressive stages, for example:
Begin with simple eyes open breathing exercises ‘breath into your stomach like it’s a balloon’
Then eyes open five senses experiences ‘notice five sounds you can hear’
Mindful eating
Progress finally to the most difficult, eyes closed ‘thought watching’
Add SAC components – Weather Metaphor, Body as a House.
Get with the group, keep pace with them
Use language that they identify with, especially if they generate it:
High, Medium and Low energy exercises.
A client said after a ‘thought watching’ exercise, ‘I saw an ipod with songs going past on random, so I just let them come and go’.
Getting in the ‘Zone’ Watch brief video

10. Defusion & Acceptance
Exercises to introduce what you mean by 'thoughts', don’t presume everyone uses words the same. Example: ‘5 senses experience’ and ‘notice your feet’ exercises.
Use terms the group generates

11. The essence of RFT is arbitrarily applicable
derived relational responding that is
non-arbitrarily applied.
Relational responding refers to the ability to
respond to relations between stimuli
rather than just responding to each stimulus
separately. Relations between stimuli can be
derived (from the processes of mutual and
combinatorial entailment)

12. For every new ACT process…
Combine it with a fun activity: Burning building (acceptance), golf (defusion), building a bridge (values), mindfully eating lunch in the park, team building exercises like toxic swamp and the human knot (defusion and acceptance).

13. Be realistic, don’t try to do too much!
However, here are additional components I’ve experimented with:
Connecting with family each week
Text messaging the task for the week
Creative ways to record the main ‘take home message’ – the art from this presentation comes from this
Filming exit interviews
DVD for each participant of individual interview, weekly white board work, fun photos and video of the activities