Deeply Functional

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.

Want to supplement this? Consider joining us here RIACT.ORG

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠Experience ACT Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

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.

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠Experience ACT Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

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.

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠Experience ACT Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

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.

Want to learn more about this project?

Click here to find out more

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠Experience ACT Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

You’re not your thoughts or feelings.

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

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

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.

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

How can clinicians use the six ACT processes without turning the model into a checklist or searching for the correct intervention box?

Todd brings the core processes together into the Deeply Functional Map, a flexible framework for tracking movement between constriction and expansion as it happens in the room. The map helps clinicians organize what they are observing while continuing to let function, context, and workability guide the next move.

You’ll explore:

• How fusion, avoidance, attentional rigidity, and attachment to self story interact
• How awareness, openness, perspective, values, and action can emerge together
• Ways to use the map during sessions, case formulation, documentation, and supervision
• Why reinforcing small shifts in flexibility may matter more than completing a particular exercise

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with a practical framework for reading process in real time and selecting interventions according to the behavior in front of you rather than a predetermined sequence.

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠Experience ACT Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

A quick look with Todd at why it’s not pain itself that keeps clients stuck, but the struggle against it—and how openness creates freedom.

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠

Defusion is sometimes reduced to a clever phrase or exercise designed to make thoughts less uncomfortable. Its deeper purpose is to change how language functions so that thoughts can become information or possibilities rather than instructions that automatically organize behavior.

Todd examines how fusion appears through rigid rules, identity labels, repetitive reasoning, and efforts to prove or disprove what the mind is saying. The episode then turns toward process focused ways of interrupting these patterns without becoming trapped in the content of the thought.

You’ll explore:

• How language hooks behavior through relational framing
• Why defusion is not positive thinking, distraction, or cognitive debate
• Practical moves such as naming the voice, “I am having the thought,” and metaphor based pivots
• How to tell whether an intervention has changed the function of a thought rather than merely its wording

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a functional way to identify fusion, evoke greater distance from language, and reinforce flexible responding without requiring clients to replace difficult thoughts with better ones.

Learn More Functional Contextualism Here⁠⁠

⁠⁠Experience ACT Here⁠⁠

⁠Learn more about Todd Here⁠