The GO-RFT Workshop, ACBS, Seville 2017

‘The GO-RFT Workshop: Reticulating (From the Bottom Up) with ACT’, a 2-day workshop led by Dermot, Yvonne and Ciara in Seville 2017, was the first to emerge from what is currently the largest single grant awarded for RFT-focused research. The title of the workshop reflected the location (Ghent University) and source of the funding (an Odysseus Type 1 award from the Flanders Research Foundation; FWO): the Ghent Odysseus RFT Workshop. The title also aimed to capture the sense in which the workshop (and others that will follow) may be seen as a type of shared journey or odyssey as both workshop presenters and those who attend the workshops aim to build together an increasingly coherent set of verbal practices that serve to guide the behavior of basic and applied researchers and clinical practitioners toward the goals of prediction-and-influence with precision, scope, and depth. The overarching aim of the workshop was to build and strengthen the much needed links between basic experimental models of human psychological suffering and their treatment, on the one hand, and the theoretical and conceptual analyses that are emerging from mindfulness-based cognitive-behavior therapies, such as ACT, on the other hand. The workshop was roughly divided into five parts. Part 1 involved a brief introduction to key concepts in basic behavior analysis, which pre-date RFT, and how they may be used to understand human psychological suffering and its treatment. Some of the limitations of these concepts was also reviewed. Part 2 involved a brief introduction to RFT, focusing on its basic concepts and how it provides a bottom-up account of human language and cognition, with a particular focus on how it explains human psychological suffering. Part 3 examined “cutting-edge” developments in RFT, focusing on the Multi-Dimensional Multi-Level (MDML) framework for analyzing the dynamics of arbitrarily applicable relational responding (AARR) and the Differential AARR Effects (DAARRE) model, and how in combination they may be used to conceptualize and explain clinically relevant behaviors. Part 4 reviewed videos of in vivo therapy sessions in which the therapist engages in verbal functional analyses that involve “drilling down” into the relational networks that appear to be central to a client’s psychological suffering. Part 5 used the therapy sessions presented in Part 4 to illustrate how RFT, and in particular the MDML framework and the DAARRE model, may be used to facilitate and support reticulation between basic and applied research and clinical practice.