Deeply Functional

We all carry stories about who we are: I’m anxious. I’m broken. I’m the responsible one. I’m someone who always fails. These stories can help organize our experience, but they can also become prisons when we begin treating them as fixed truths rather than ways of making sense of ourselves.

In this installment of Deeply Functional, we explore the conceptualized self through the lenses of functional contextualism and Relational Frame Theory. We look at how identity stories are built, how they shape behavior, and how clinicians can help clients loosen their grip without arguing with the story or replacing it with a more positive one.

The goal is not to discover the client’s “true” identity, but to create enough flexibility for them to act beyond the limits of who they have learned to believe they are.

In this FLEX LAB conversation, we work through a clinical vignette to examine what the clinician did, why those choices made sense, and how a functional understanding of the case shaped what happened next.

Rather than searching for the “right” ACT intervention, the discussion focuses on tracking function, noticing opportunities for movement, and responding flexibly to what is happening in the room.

The conversation also builds on questions and ideas raised in the online FLEX LAB community at RIACT.org, bringing several clinician perspectives into the discussion.

Together, we explore how case conceptualization becomes a practical, collaborative process—one that helps us think more clearly while remaining responsive to the person in front of us.

Find out more to join us monthly here - FLEXLAB Online

What changes when ACT stops being something a clinician does and begins shaping how they understand therapy?

In this episode of Deeply Functional: In Conversation, Todd Schmenk sits down with Peter Binnings, LICSW, to reflect on their shared journey from discovering ACT to developing a deeper, more functionally grounded way of practicing it. Together, they revisit what initially attracted them to ACT, what they misunderstood along the way, and when the model began to feel like more than a collection of interventions.

You’ll explore:

• What first draws many clinicians toward ACT
• Common misunderstandings during the early stages of learning
• How Functional Contextualism changes the way clinicians understand therapy
• What remains meaningful after years of practicing ACT
• Why becoming an ACT clinician requires continued curiosity and growth

Clinician takeaway: Developing fluency in ACT is not simply a matter of learning more techniques. It involves learning to see behavior differently, question your assumptions, and allow your clinical practice to keep evolving.

Learn more about Peter here: https://journal.riact.org/author/peter/

For further learning, resources, training, and connection, visit riact.org.

Hey All, pulling this format back into the rotation. The Quick Blip is one topic delivered in less than 2 minutes. No fuss no muss and these will often be addressing common questions fielded in my work in consultation, supervision and teaching.

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 3 of 7

What happens when efforts to protect ourselves from discomfort begin organizing more and more of our lives?

This episode explores experiential avoidance as an inflexibility process within ACT. Todd examines avoidance not as weakness, resistance, or pathology, but as an understandable attempt to gain safety and relief. Difficulties develop when thoughts, memories, emotions, and physical sensations acquire threatening functions, leading behavior to become increasingly organized around controlling, escaping, or preventing internal experience.

You’ll explore:

• How avoidance can provide immediate relief while gradually narrowing behavior
• How emotional withdrawal, intellectual explanation, constant activity, topic changes, and postponement can function as avoidance
• Why the form of a behavior matters less than what it accomplishes in context
• How acceptance and willingness help clients remain in contact with experience while moving toward what matters
• Why acceptance involves making room for experience rather than approving of it, enjoying it, or giving up

Clinician takeaway:

You will learn to look beneath the visible form of avoidance and identify the protective function it serves. Rather than forcing exposure or persuading clients to feel differently, the clinician helps them build the capacity to remain in contact with difficult experience while choosing meaningful action.

The central question shifts from “How do we make this feeling stop?” toward “Can this person carry this experience and still participate in the life they want to build?”

For further learning, articles, training, and connection with the contextual behavioral community, visit https://riact.org.

Read more about inflexibility reads here

When does holding space support meaningful change, and when might it unintentionally help a client remain stuck?

This episode offers an AI generated conversation created through NotebookLM and based entirely on Todd Schmenk’s article, “Beyond Holding Space: Helping Clients Get Unstuck.” Todd reviewed the conversation for accuracy and consistency with Functional Contextualism and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

The episode examines a central clinical tension: therapeutic presence and validation are essential, yet they may become unhelpful when they function primarily to support avoidance or maintain patterns that are no longer workable. The alternative is not greater confrontation or less compassion. It is compassionate disruption, where warmth and understanding are paired with enough direction to create psychological movement.

You’ll explore:

• Functional listening, which looks beyond what a client is saying to examine what their behavior is doing in the moment
• Strategic validation, which honors the client’s history and experience without reinforcing continued stagnation
• Structured direction, which uses values and workability to give the session a meaningful trajectory
• Productive discomfort, which recognizes that movement may require both the client and clinician to remain present with uncertainty and unease
• How clinicians can balance compassion, presence, and active engagement without becoming overly directive

Clinician takeaway:

You will learn to distinguish between holding space that expands flexibility and holding space that may inadvertently reinforce avoidance. The goal is not to abandon validation, rush the client, or force change. It is to listen functionally, validate strategically, and introduce enough direction and productive discomfort to help the client move toward a fuller and more workable life.

This recording is part of an experiment using AI to make longer clinical articles more accessible through conversation. I would genuinely like to hear whether you find this format useful.

Read the original article: Beyond Holding Space: Helping Clients Get Unstuck

For further learning, articles, training, and connection with the contextual behavioral community, visit https://riact.org.

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 2 of 7

What happens when a thought stops functioning as one possible description of experience and begins operating as reality itself?

This episode opens the first inflexibility process in the ACT model: cognitive fusion. Todd explores how language can organize attention, emotion, and action so completely that behavior narrows around what the mind is saying. Fusion often offers the nervous system a sense of certainty, prediction, or protection. The difficulty emerges when verbal rules begin overriding direct experience, present context, and other available choices.

You’ll explore:

• How thoughts acquire the functions of the events they describe
• Why fusion can feel protective, compelling, and difficult to question
• What rigid rules, absolute language, repetitive reasoning, and identity statements can reveal in session
• How shifting from “this is true” to “this is a thought I am having” can create greater flexibility

Clinician takeaway:

You will learn to recognize when language is dominating behavior and use a simple defusion move to create space between the client and the thought. The goal is not to challenge, correct, or eliminate the thought. It is to change the client’s relationship with it so that context, experience, and chosen direction can influence what happens next.

For further learning, articles, training, and connection with the contextual behavioral community, visit https://riact.org.

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 1 of 7

Clients rarely enter therapy naming fusion, avoidance, attentional rigidity, attachment to self story, disconnection from values, or inaction. They arrive describing suffering, conflict, fear, exhaustion, and patterns they cannot seem to change.

Todd opens the Hexagon in Reverse series by showing how clinicians can hear these descriptions as functional signals. The episode challenges the tendency to use ACT as a sequence of six processes or a protocol for selecting techniques. Instead, it introduces a simpler orienting principle: function leads, process follows, and form comes last.

You’ll explore:

• Why beginning with suffering often provides a more natural entry into process based formulation
• How the six inflexibility processes appear behaviorally in the room
• The difference between labeling a process and conducting a functional analysis
• How practical microinterventions can respond to the process that is active now

Clinician takeaway:

This episode offers a foundation for reading psychological inflexibility in real time so ACT can function as a clinical orientation rather than another checklist.

For further learning, articles, training, and connection with the contextual behavioral community, visit https://riact.org.

The therapist is not standing outside the clinical system. Our attention, language, pacing, avoidance, and responses all help shape what can happen next.

Todd uses a process based lens to examine therapist behavior as part of the functional context of treatment. Rather than judging moments of overexplaining, filling silence, or hesitating to intervene as mistakes, clinicians can study when these patterns occur, what evokes them, what immediate consequence they produce, and where they take the work over time.

You’ll explore:

• Time, Trigger, and Trajectory as a structure for therapist self observation
• How internal cues and learning history influence clinical decisions
• The difference between reflective self supervision and performance based self criticism
• Questions for reviewing stuck moments and identifying more flexible alternatives

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a practical method for functional self supervision that helps you notice your contribution to the clinical system, learn from difficult moments, and respond with greater intention in future sessions.

For further learning, consultation, supervision, training, and connection with the contextual behavioral community, visit https://riact.org.

Psychological flexibility is not only something clinicians help clients develop. It is also a quality of therapist behavior that shapes the relational context of every session.

Todd turns the ACT processes toward the clinician and examines what happens when self doubt, urgency, discomfort, or a need to get therapy right begins to organize our responses. Interrupting silence, overexplaining, avoiding a difficult intervention, or reaching too quickly for a technique can all be understood as functional behavior rather than personal failure.

You’ll explore:

• Defusion from self critical thoughts about competence and performance
• Willingness to remain with uncertainty and discomfort in session
• Present moment contact with the client rather than the clinician’s internal agenda
• Perspective, professional values, and committed action when the next step is unclear

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with a more compassionate and precise way to notice your own rigidity, return to what matters, and make small adjustments that strengthen presence and responsiveness in the room.

Want more on this? Visit RIACT.ORG

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠Experience ACT Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠