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Trauma Training
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) Training
A 1-Day Fundamentals Course for Trauma Clinicians
A grounded introduction to the six core processes of ACT, taught by a clinical psychologist who blends evidence-based rigor with lived experience.
Your most complex clients rarely fit cleanly into a single protocol. The trauma is there, and so is the chronic worry, the health anxiety that never quite resolves, the perfectionism that no amount of insight seems to soften, the rumination that loops back the moment the session ends. Trauma processing is essential, and on its own it does not always reach the suffering that lives inside thought patterns, avoidance, and the long quiet costs of trying to control what cannot be controlled.
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy is one of the most extensively researched psychotherapies of the last two decades, with over a thousand randomized controlled trials supporting its use across anxiety, depression, chronic pain, and trauma-related symptoms. For trauma clinicians, it offers something specific. It gives you a flexible, process-based way to work with the suffering that surrounds trauma, the cognitive fusion, the experiential avoidance, the disconnection from values, without requiring a new diagnosis or a different treatment plan.
This one-day fundamentals training introduces the full ACT framework in a way that is immediately useful in the room. By the end of the day, you will understand the six core processes, recognize psychological inflexibility when it shows up in session, and have concrete interventions you can begin integrating into the work you are already doing.
Practical Skills
Practical Interventions You'll Learn
Throughout the day, you will learn how to:
- Use the Tug of War with a Monster metaphor to help clients recognize the cost of their control agenda and what becomes possible when they stop fighting.
- Guide clients through the Passengers on the Bus exercise to introduce acceptance and committed action in a way that holds difficult thoughts and feelings without giving them the wheel.
- Apply the E.A.S.E. expansion skill (Examine, Allow, Soften, Expand) to teach clients how to make room for distress instead of bracing against it.
- Use the Three As of Acceptance (Acknowledge, Allow, Accommodate) as a simple, repeatable framework for working with difficult emotion in session.
- Practice cognitive defusion exercises including Leaves on a Stream, This Is Me Thinking, the Three Ns of Defusion (Notice, Name, Neutralize), and short clinical phrases that interrupt fusion in the moment.
- Teach mindfulness skills built for clinical use including the STOP skill, Dropping Anchor, 5-4-3-2-1 grounding, mindful breathing, and the Notice and Name practice.
- Locate the Observer Self with clients and use the Continuous You framework to help them recognize they are more than their distress.
- Run a values clarification process using the Magic Wand Question, the 80th Birthday Party exercise, the Values Card Sort, and the One Year From Now reflection.
- Apply the HARD framework (Hooked, Avoiding discomfort, Remoteness from values, Doubtful goals) to identify what is blocking committed action and choose the right ACT skill in response.
- Use the workability question to shift clients out of debating thought content and into evaluating whether their behavior is moving them toward the life they want.
- Integrate ACT with trauma work including defusion and Observer Self skills for managing dissociation, values-linked exposure, and acceptance-based approaches to memory work.
What You Get
What's Waiting for You Inside This Training
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Conceptualize psychological inflexibility
Recognize how cognitive fusion, experiential avoidance, and disconnection from values show up across anxiety, depression, perfectionism, and the layer of suffering that surrounds trauma, so your case formulation reaches what symptom reduction alone does not.
Work with the six core processes
Move fluidly between acceptance, defusion, contact with the present moment, self-as-context, values, and committed action, knowing which process to bring into the room when a client is stuck.
Apply the HARD framework in real time
Use Hooked, Avoiding discomfort, Remote from values, and Doubtful goals to identify what is blocking your client and choose the right ACT skill in response, without losing fidelity to the model.
Use the workability question as a clinical anchor
Shift clients out of debating thought content and into evaluating whether their behavior is moving them toward the life they want, one of the most reliably useful moves in the entire ACT toolkit.
Run named defusion exercises with confidence
Bring Leaves on a Stream, This Is Me Thinking, the Three Ns of Defusion, and Thank Your Mind into session with ready-to-use phrasing, so clients can begin to see thoughts as thoughts rather than facts.
Learn on your schedule
On-demand access means you go at your own pace. Lifetime access is included, so you can return whenever you need it.
Teach mindfulness skills built for clinical use
Use the STOP skill, Dropping Anchor, 5-4-3-2-1 grounding, and the Notice and Name practice, including how to introduce them to clients who are skeptical of mindfulness or who have struggled with it before.
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Meet Your Trainer
About Your Trainer
Jennifer Caspari
PhD
Jennifer Caspari, PhD is a registered and licensed clinical psychologist practicing in British Columbia and Colorado. Her clinical background spans medical clinics, academic hospitals, VA hospitals, outpatient settings, and integrated health clinics, with a specialty in health psychology and work with adults living with acute and chronic health conditions, chronic pain, chronic fatigue, sleep difficulty, health anxiety, cancer, body image concerns, and the suffering that surrounds them.
Jennifer's clinical approach focuses on enhancing psychological flexibility and functioning, engagement in values-based behaviors, and quality of life. She brings both professional expertise and lived experience to her work, drawing on her own life with cerebral palsy to inform how she teaches and how she sits with clients facing experiences that will not simply resolve.
She is the author of You Are More Than Your Body: 30+ Evidence-Based Strategies for Living Well with Chronic Illness, a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail, and the writer behind the Psychology Today blog Living Well When Your Body Doesn't Cooperate. Her therapy style has been described as collaborative, warm, and direct, and she is widely regarded as one of the more grounded teachers of ACT working today.
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Build Psychological Flexibility in Practice
Many clients continue to suffer even when they understand their trauma. This foundational training teaches the core principles of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), helping you address avoidance, cognitive fusion, and values-disconnected living through practical, evidence-based interventions you can use immediately.