Defusion and Trauma: Dos and Don’ts
Booz Allen
Department of Veterans Affairs
Yale University
University of Nevada, Reno
Key Points
- Defusion distinguishes ACT from more traditional modes of cognitive behavioral therapies.
- The therapist works with the client to change their relationship with difficult thoughts.
- The therapist should be on the lookout for opportunities to model defusion in response to the client’s content.
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Transcript
So now, I’ll talk about some specific considerations for working with defusion, especially with trauma survivors.
As you’re working with defusion, the ACT therapist is working hard not to invalidate or minimize the difficult thoughts and beliefs that a client holds by reducing them to a series of meaningless sounds, but rather is working to help the client respond differently when those thoughts arise. This can be distinguished from some approaches within the cognitive or cognitive behavioral therapy traditions that are working more specifically on the content of thoughts.
Batten, S. V. (2011). Essentials of acceptance and commitment therapy. SAGE Publications Ltd.,Harris, R. (2009). ACT made simple: An easy-to-read primer on acceptance and commitment therapy. New Harbinger Publications.
In ACT, the goal is not to change the content of thoughts or replace negative content with more accurate content. The goal of all of these defusion exercises and language conventions is to help the individual gain more distance from those thoughts so that he or she can make choices based on values and workability in the natural environment rather than based on believing his own thoughts as truth or following inflexible verbal rules. The ACT therapist works to show clients how to put more space between themselves and their thoughts.
Batten, S. V. (2011). Essentials of acceptance and commitment therapy. SAGE Publications Ltd.,Harris, R. (2009). ACT made simple: An easy-to-read primer on acceptance and commitment therapy. New Harbinger Publications.