You Are Not Your Trauma: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy for Healing

In this episode, I'm joined by two remarkable clinicians who together have over 60 years of combined experience working with trauma: Dr. Darrah Westrup and Dr. Robin Walser. These two have been collaborating for nearly two decades and three books. Their latest book, "You Are Not Your Trauma" published by Guilford Press, offers something different from traditional trauma treatments.

While many approaches focus primarily on symptom reduction, Darrah and Robin take us further—into the territory of meaning, values, and vitality. They're not just asking "How do we make the pain go away?" but rather "How do you want to live your life, even while carrying a difficult history?"

In this conversation, we explore:

• What Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) is and why it's so effective for trauma work
• The three pillars of ACT: Open, Aware, and Engaged
• The paradox of avoidance—how our natural instinct to run from pain can actually keep us stuck in it
• Why battling trauma is like swatting at a bee—you might survive if you let it pass, but once you engage in battle, things escalate
• The distinction between the self that experiences trauma and the experiences themselves
• How values don't compete and don't depend on history
• Why trauma survivors don't need to wait until symptoms disappear to start living meaningful lives

Powerful stories from this conversation:

• A client who spent 30 years stuck in a trauma story, believing they couldn't move forward until the trauma was "resolved"—and the breakthrough that came from accepting that history only goes in one direction
• A survivor of childhood sexual trauma who discovered that new memories surfacing no longer frightened her because she realized: "I'm larger than that"
• A veteran who learned his values were still available to him, regardless of what he'd seen or done
• Darrah's personal experience with a visualization exercise that changed everything for her

About our guests:

Dr. Darrah Westrup began her career at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, where she was director of a 90-day residential treatment program for military women with trauma and severe PTSD. She has been working with ACT since her dissertation work and brought ACT into residential treatment for the first time in 2000.

Dr. Robin Walser worked at the National Center for PTSD and studied under Dr. Steve Hayes, the developer of ACT, at the University of Washington. She was part of Dr. Marsha Linehan's DBT team during graduate school and has been practicing ACT since 1991.

Resources mentioned:

• You Are Not Your Trauma by Dr. Darrah Westrup and Dr. Robin Walser (Guilford Press)
• Learning ACT, Second Edition by Dr. Robin Walser
• Association for Contextual Behavioral Science (ACBS)
• Online mindfulness meditations accompanying the book

The Self Careapist Therapist Podcast is a biweekly conversation with Lorain Moorehead, LCSW a therapist in private practice. With guests ranging from expert psychologists, therapists, researchers and authors, each episode offers a deep dive and keeps listeners from intern to advanced supervisor in mind while dropping gems and aha moments for everyone who loves to learn! If you love learning and want to keep track of some future learning opportunities, grab your personal curriculum here!

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