Process-Based Therapy

For decades, evidence-based therapy has been defined in terms of scientifically validated protocols focused on syndromes. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has historically been identified with that approach, but it is rapidly changing. CBT has been an enormous empirical and practical success over its more than 50+ year history. The situation surrounding evidence-based care has dramatically changed, however, and it is important for CBT to change as well. A process-focus is now emerging for a number of methods within the family of CBT as the era of “protocols for syndromes” passes away. This workshop will feature didactic presentations, demonstration of practical strategies, “real plays,” and exercises focused on how to utilize the core competencies of CBT more generally in a pragmatic way that honors the behavioral, cognitive, and acceptance and mindfulness wings of the tradition. The approach that results represents a new form of idiographic functional analysis guided by models that integrate a coherent set of change processes. This workshop will feature process-based therapy (PBT). PBT is not a new therapy – it is a new model of evidence-based therapy more generally that alters how we thing about all existing forms of evidence-based intervention. Attendees will leave the workshop better able to apply evidence-based work from any competing model, and to apply a broader range of change processes to their cases nested under the consilience provided by a functional contextual evolutionary account. The workshop will feature didactic presentations, demonstration of practical strategies and exercises how to utilize the core competencies of CBT in a pragmatic way that honors the behavioral, cognitive, and acceptance and mindfulness wings of the tradition in a new form of process-based CBT. Additional goals include gaining an up-to-date understanding of the transdiagnostic core processes; using a functional diagnostic system that has treatment utility; and establishing more progressive models and theories in clinical practice.