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.

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What changes when pain does not resolve and the continued pursuit of symptom elimination begins to make life smaller?

Todd explores chronic pain through a functional, ACT informed lens. Medication changes, activity restriction, reassurance seeking, and constant symptom monitoring can all make sense as attempts to reduce discomfort and uncertainty. When these strategies become the organizing center of life, relationships, movement, pleasure, and purpose may be postponed until pain improves.

You’ll explore:

• Fusion with pain related rules about safety, damage, and capability
• Avoidance patterns organized around controlling symptoms
• Values drift as pain becomes the primary reference point for decision making
• How defusion, willingness, pacing, and values directed action can restore meaningful participation

Clinician takeaway:

The aim is not to deny pain or promise its removal. It is to help free behavior from pain’s rule so that meaningful action can return to the center of life, even when discomfort remains present.

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How do clinicians hold compassionate space for suffering while continuing to shape movement toward flexibility?

Todd approaches trauma as more than an event, story, or diagnostic category. From a functional contextualist perspective, trauma also includes what has been shaped over time: avoidance, emotional numbing, hypercontrol, fusion with fear based rules, narrowed identity, and the gradual loss of values directed living. Survival strategies are honored for the work they have done without allowing them to define the limits of the client’s future.

You’ll explore:

• Fusion with trauma narratives and identities
• Experiential avoidance, hypervigilance, and safety seeking
• Values collapse as protection becomes the center of life
• Ways to validate suffering while reinforcing defusion, willingness, perspective taking, and meaningful direction

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a process sensitive way to hold what happened, understand what was shaped, and help clients build a life that becomes larger than the trauma story.

Holding space matters.
Shaping flexibility matters too.

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Anxiety is a natural human response. Suffering expands when a person’s life becomes increasingly organized around predicting, controlling, and avoiding it.

Todd begins a series on applying a functional, ACT informed lens to specific clinical concerns. Rather than making anxiety reduction the central goal, he focuses on what clients do in the presence of fear and how understandable efforts to gain safety can gradually narrow relationships, choices, and valued activity.

You’ll explore:

• Fusion with threat based predictions and rules
• Experiential avoidance and the short term relief that keeps it going
• Values drift as safety becomes the organizing principle of life
• How defusion, willingness, and meaningful action can expand behavior while anxiety remains present

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with three functional targets for anxiety work and a clearer way to help clients stop organizing life around symptom management and begin building a broader behavioral repertoire in the presence of fear.

For companion articles, clinical resources, training, and connection with the contextual behavioral community, visit https://riact.org.

🎧 Episode Extras
This episode is accompanied by a written article and supplemental materials that expand on the functional framework, clinical targets, and in-session moves discussed here.

👉 Access the full article and extras

If you’re ready to stop managing anxiety and start helping clients live more fully with it, this episode sets the foundation.

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Encountering ACT, Relational Frame Theory, or Process Based Therapy can leave experienced clinicians believing they must abandon what they already know and rebuild their practice around an entirely new set of methods.

Todd offers a different possibility. Existing clinical skills do not become obsolete when the lens changes. They become more precisely organized around function, context, and workability. The shift is less about model loyalty and more about learning to ask what a behavior is doing and whether the clinician’s response expands or constricts what becomes possible next.

You’ll explore:

• Why symptoms can be treated as signals without becoming the sole target of therapy
• How familiar interventions change when they are selected by function rather than diagnosis
• What RFT contributes to understanding thoughts without arguing with their content
• How a process based lens can simplify clinical reasoning rather than add another layer of complexity

Clinician takeaway:

You already have useful skills. This episode shows how to see them with new eyes and organize them around the processes that matter in the room.

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You’re not your thoughts or feelings.

You’re the space that holds them, and that shift changes everything.

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A metaphor becomes clinically useful when it does more than explain an ACT concept. It should alter the context around an experience, evoke something the client can contact directly, and open a new behavioral possibility.

Todd examines what gives metaphors their functional strength and why familiar examples sometimes land powerfully with one client while falling flat with another. Using the Ball in the Pool, Passengers on the Bus, and the Chessboard, he shows how delivery, timing, and the client’s response matter more than selecting the perfect script.

You’ll explore:

• The difference between explaining a metaphor and creating an experience
• How to connect metaphors to the client’s language, history, and present context
• Common problems, including overexplaining, forcing meaning, and using metaphors to persuade
• How to assess whether a metaphor actually shifts behavior, emotion, or perspective

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a practical way to choose, adapt, and deliver metaphors that move the work rather than simply sounding memorable or clever.

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

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠Experience ACT Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

A three-step compass to keep sessions process-focused—evoke the process, model it, and reinforce flexibility in the moment.

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⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠