2025 Keynote Talk Summaries
THURSDAY – JULY 31, 2025
When Ungrieved Sorrow Pervades Personality
Working with Depressive and Self-Defeating Patterns
Nancy McWilliams, Ph.D., ABPP
July 31, 2025 – TBD
Summary coming soon.
Objectives
- TBD
- TBD
The Clinical Components of Solution Focused Brief Therapy
Essential Tools & Approaches for Your Practice
Elliott Connie, M.S., LPC
July 31, 2025 – TBD
Summary Coming Soon
Objectives
- TBD
- TBD
The Fastest Route to a More Effective Practice
Target the Most Important Skillset in All of Mental Health
Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D.
July 31, 2025
The last half a century of research on mental and behavioral health has failed in simplifying our lives as practitioners or in making our work more effective. There are more than 10 million combinations of signs and symptoms that can lead to a DSM diagnosis, which is hardly simplifying. Our diagnostic system has not been shown to guide practitioners to effective intervention, and the impact of our intervention methods is not increasing over time. One bright spot may point to a way forward, however: personalizing interventions to the particular needs of the people we serve does in fact improve outcomes. This talk is about how we can best accomplish that task.
Almost hidden from view, there are thousands of studies that have examined the things that our clients actually do during treatment that leads to positive outcomes. I and my team have examined every one of them, and it turns out you can summarize all of that knowledge in a 20-word sentence that captures the most important skillset in all of mental and behavioral health. I will provide that sentence and suggest that if can you learn to target and change these core processes of change, your practice will become both simpler and more effective. Importantly, everyone implicitly knows what these processes are, but the organ between our ears hides this knowledge from us.
When we personalize treatment by targeting the key processes of change, we can focus on how to produce healthy differences in a few major areas, and then to ensure that these changes are kept and fitted to the needs of the client’s goals and situation. Every major therapeutic approach contains methods that target many of these areas, so no one needs to check their minds, preferences, or training at the door so as to become more effective – instead we can let our clients be our teachers, now that we know what skills to focus upon.
Objectives
- TBD
- TBD
FRIDAY – August 1, 2025
One Size Fits None
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and a Process-Based Approach
Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D.
August 1, 20235 – Time TBD
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy provides a simplified framework for a unified and effective process-based approach to your practice, one that can integrate most of the things you already do well, while expanding your focus to include virtually all biopsychosocial change processes of known importance. This workshop will show you how to do that by embodying, reading, and targeting the key processes of change at a mental, biological, and social level. Instead of a focus on normative categories that label human beings but fail to guide successful intervention, we can attend to the specific change mechanisms that are related to particular goals for particular clients. This workshop will guide you to understand the how processes of change interconnect in different ways for different people so that we can finally abandon the “one size fits all” mentality that has dominated psychotherapy research, even though every clinician knows that treatment must be personalized to be effective. Through “real plays,” experiential exercises, skill demonstrations, and methods to improve the therapeutic relationship, the workshop will go beyond theory to implement an approach to practice in which every voice matters and clients can be helped without having to force them into syndromal boxes.
Objectives
- TBD
- TBD
ALL THAT'S MISSING IS YOU!
We have the venue, the speakers, and the three day experience ready and waiting for you!
