ACT in Perspective - A prosocial podcast using behavioral science to address human suffering

Tom Szabo is a peer-reviewed Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) trainer, board certified behavior analyst, and faculty member of Capella University in the masters and doctoral behavior analysis programs. Over the last fifteen years, Tom has focused his practice on teaching people ways to ignite psychological flexibility in their personal lives and with others in clinical practice, schools, board rooms, shop floors, and community centers. He has developed iterations of ACT for autistic people, their parents and caregivers, siblings, and staff members. His research focuses on the development of ACT functional analysis and treatment that addresses issues related to race, gender, class, ethnicity, neurodiversity, disability, language, and dialect.

Welcome to another episode of ACT in Perspective podcast. I’m your host Hugh Simonich.

Today we’re talking to Dr. Matthieu Villatte. Matt is trined as a cliniclak psychologist and is now an Assistant Professor at Bastyr University in Seattle, Washington. He is the author of numerous books and chapters on mindfulness, acceptance, experiential therapies, and contextual behavioral science, including Mastering the Clinical Conversation: Language as Intervention (Guilford Press, 2015), co-authored by Jennifer Villatte and Steve Hayes. As a peer-reviewed trainer in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy recognized by the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS), he has facilitated over a hundred clinical trainings in the US, Canada, Australia-New Zealand, South America, and Europe. Over the past few years, he has also run dozens of online trainings gathering participants from all continents.

Today, we’ll be discussing the details of his book Mastering the Clinical Conversation which provides psychotherapists with evidence-based strategies for harnessing the power of language to free clients from life-constricting patterns and promote psychological flexibility.  Techniques are demonstrated for activating and shaping behavior change, building a flexible sense of self, fostering meaning and motivation, creating powerful experiential metaphors, and strengthening the therapeutic relationship.

Please help welcome Dr. Matthieu Villatte.

Welcome everyone to another episode of ACT in Perspective podcast. I’m your host Hugh Simonich.

Today we’re talking with Dr. Thomas Szabo.

Tom is an internationally recognized ACT trainer, a practicing Board Certified Behavior Analyst, and a graduate of the University of Nevada, Reno. Over the last 10 years, Tom has focused his practice on teaching people ways to ignite behavioral flexibility in their personal lives and with others in clinical practice, schools, board rooms, shop floors, and community centers. He is particularly interested in teaching people ways to use ACT to support individuals with high functioning autism and their families.

Today Tom gives us a personal journey into his experience with recovery from alcohol. He provides us deep insights into the behavior analysis of recovery and what it means to him. We discuss his personal struggles, the power of the recovery group, prayer and his naturalistic explanation of a higher power. We discuss connections with ACT Training and the recovery program, and what the steps to recovery actually mean in behavior analytic language among other things.

We open with his journey when he was in grad school and how that led to his bottom and ultimate recovery. Please help welcome Dr. Tom Szabo.

John Astin is an internationally known scholar in the field of mind-body medicine, his research focusing on the applications of meditative-awareness practices in psychology and health care. He received his PhD in Health Psychology from the University of California, Irvine, and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford Medical School.

Nathan Gates, MS, LPC, and Brian Pilecki, Ph.D, discuss the benefits of psychedelics in the therapeutic process, particularly with the psychological flexibility of ACT and other process-based therapy models. We discuss the history of psychedelics, the major key players, the fears which led to government control in the late 60s and beyond, the underground psychedelic culture, and the recent resurgence of legitimate research of the past 20 years.  We discuss the exponentially growing peer reviewed research that's leading the way to treat depression, social anxiety, PTSD, the fears of those with terminal illnesses.  We are just scratching the surface of the transformative power of psychedelics when used correctly with psychological flexibility processes of behavior change.  There's an incredible amount of work left to do, but the evidence clearly shows the potential benefits that far exceed what psychotherapy and psychotropic medications could ever do alone.    Watch, enjoy, subscribe and leave a comment!  Thanks!

https://youtu.be/Wjiy5PrfOxU

Today we’ll be discussing the different ways we tend to experience the world from the perspective of left and right brain processes. Our guest today is Dr. Chris Niebauer, a cognitive neuropsychologist who is a tenured professor at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania where he teaches courses on consciousness, mindfulness, left and right brain differences, and artificial intelligence. He is the author of The Neurotic's Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment: How the Left-Brain Plays Unending Games of Self-Improvement and his most recent and popular No Self No Problem - How Neuropsychology Is Catching Up To BUDDHISM

In this groundbreaking book, he writes that the latest research in neuropsychology is now confirming a fundamental tenet of Buddhism, what is called Anatta, or the doctrine of “no self.” Niebauer writes that our sense of self, or what we commonly refer to as the ego, is an illusion created entirely by the left side of the brain. He had found this Buddhist-neuroscience connection when he was a student in the early 1990s,, but since then, this connection has practically become its own genre in bookstores. Today, Niebauer admits that we’re just beginning to scratch the surface on the link between Eastern philosophy and the latest findings in psychology and neuroscience and what this really means for the human experience.

Please help welcome Dr. Chris Niebauer.

For video content and additional info:

https://youtu.be/ZxynnHmR-KI

Today, I’m very excited to be sitting across from Dr. Anthony Biglan. Dr. Biglan is a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute that partners with others around the world to promote behavior change toward sustainable health and wellbeing. Their emerging areas right now include genetics, health economics, Alzheimer’s Disease and opioid addiction. Tony is Co-Director of Promise Neighborhood Research Consortium, a community-based network that works to improve wellbeing in high-poverty neighborhoods. For over 30 years, he’s been conducting research on the development and prevention of child and adolescent problem behaviors. He is former president of the Society for Prevention Research, dedicated to advancing scientific investigation focused on the causes and prevention of social, physical and mental health, and academic problems. He was a member of the Institute of Medicine Committee on Prevention and of Oregon’s Alcohol and Drug Policy Commission. His books, the Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World and Rebooting Capitalism: How We Can Forge a Society That Works for Everyone. are a culmination of his life’s work that lay the framework for a model of societal change. He has also created the nonproft Values to Action to advance the reforms he calls for in his book Rebooting Capitalism, where solution-focused action circles are created around societal issues where we apply the principles of contextual behavioral science. If there is a problem you see in our society or in your community, an Action Circle is the way that you can address it to achieve concrete results. Join Values to Action.org and contribute just $47 to become a lifetime member.

Dr. Mark Solms is one of the leading neuroscientists in the world, best known for his contributions into the mechanisms of dreaming, and his use of psychoanalytic methods in modern neuroscience.  His new book The Hidden Spring:  A Journey to the Source of Consciousness offers a comprehensive understanding of why we feel a subjective sense of self and how it arises in the brain.    Here we discuss the dawn of consciousness, the essential role of feelings and emotions and where they come from, the role of the cortex to make predictions in an uncertain world, and how that relates to our complex behavior.  We’ll discuss the basic drives of all organisms, and how these drives relate to the development of the brain and central nervous system.  We’ll get into the elementary physics of the Free Energy Principle, entropy, and homeostasis and how this all relates back to why we behave as we do.  We’ll get into the discussion of voluntary behavior, free will and choice and how to properly conceptualize what these terms represent.  We’ll talk briefly about the origins of self, the relationship of all living things, his thoughts on the possibility of constructing an artificial mind, and much more.    Solms breaks highly complex concepts down throughout this book and synthesizes these concepts into a clear, unified theory of consciousness.    Solms is the Director of Neuropsychology in the Neuroscience Institute of the University of Cape Town, South Africa where he lives, and honorary lecturer in neurosurgery and an honorary Fellow with the American College of Psychiatrists.     He has received numerous honors, has published about 350 journals, articles and book chapters, and authored eight books.  He is the editor and translator of the forthcoming 24-volume Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud and the 4-volume work of the Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud.    We had a lengthy conversation exploring many of the concepts in his book, but we begin our conversation with a fascinating story related to his experience growing up in the pits of apartheid in South Africa, and how this influenced him to do his part in redressing racial and class disparity in his own country.