ACT for OCD: Creative Hopelessness, Behavior Tracking, and Homework
Key Points
- Explore and reflect on what they noticed or learned following the creative hopelessness exercise.
- Normalize and validate their experiences, decision making, and behaviors.
- Demonstrate the utility and downsides of a problem-solving mindset through metaphors and examples.
- Allow them to be confused and uncertain.
- Introduce behavior tracking and set homework.
Materials Downloads
Transcript
Congratulations! You’ve reached the end of this module. I’m going to go through the take-home messages from this entire module.
So, following the creative hopelessness exercise, I want you to be thinking about exploring and reflecting with the client what they noticed or what they learned. You want to normalize and validate their experiences, their decision making, and their behavior. This can be achieved through describing the behavioral principles of immediate and delayed consequences.
And you want to demonstrate the utility of a problem-solving mindset through metaphors and examples to help them see that this isn’t a bad thing that their minds are doing. And likewise, you can use metaphors to demonstrate the downsides of only taking a problem-solving approach to things, things that can lead to exhaustion, that the problem isn’t always solvable, and that they might be missing out on life.
