Neuroaffirming ACT for ADHD and autism

Your neurodivergent client leaves the session with a clear plan and every good intention. A week later, the plan is exactly where they left it. Over two days in London, Dr Russ Harris shows you how to adapt acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) so that it fits the way autistic and ADHD clients think, move and get stuck. You will watch the methods demonstrated live, practise them with colleagues in the room, ask Russ questions, and leave with tools you can use in your next session.

Background to the workshop

A large proportion of the people who walk into your consulting room are neurodivergent, whether or not they have a formal diagnosis. ADHD and autism often arrive together (typically called AudHD), and they frequently bring trauma, depression, anxiety or addiction along for the ride. Each comes with real strengths and real difficulties, which makes it hard to know where to begin.

ACT is a flexible model with a lot to offer here, as long as it is fitted to the person in front of you. That means meeting clients where they are, in a neuroaffirming rather than deficit-focused way. The aim is not to teach people to mask or fit into a neurotypical world. It is to give them room to explore which moves are workable for them in service of what they value, such as connection. Delivered strictly by the book, ACT can miss the mark: the metaphor lands as a puzzle. The mindfulness exercise lasts four minutes, and your client spends three of them studying the ceiling tiles. The values conversation is lively, yet the first small step never happens, because starting is the hardest part of any task. Many clients are also carrying years of masking, exhaustion and a private belief that they are simply doing life badly.

Many practitioners understand that something needs to change in how they work, without being sure what. You also want to avoid framing neurodivergence as a set of deficits to be fixed. This workshop shows you how to do both.

What you will gain from this workshop

You will leave with a neuroaffirming way of using ACT and a set of specific tools you can apply across the range of presentations you see in practice. You will learn how to:

• Use neuroaffirming language and a biopsychosocial understanding of neurodivergence to shape your formulations and conversations
• Adapt your pace, language and sensory environment to the person in front of you
• Fit ACT techniques, from metaphors and defusion to values work, to the way each client thinks and processes information
• Build on clients’ strengths, self-acceptance and self-compassion
• Scaffold executive functioning and get clients moving when task inertia sets in
• Teach brief “mindfulness on the go” practices for clients who can’t sit still through longer exercises, and build flexible attention for sustaining or shifting focus
• Support emotion regulation, healthy self-soothing and interoceptive awareness, with body-based skills clients can use in daily life
• Work with distractibility, impulsivity, hyperfocus, masking, sensory overload and rejection sensitivity within an ACT framework
• Help clients recognise neurodivergent burnout, recover from it and use pacing and rest to prevent the next one
• Help clients defuse from rigid rules, harsh self-judgement and internalised ableism, and build cognitive and psychological flexibility
• Help clients practise self-advocacy and safe, flexible unmasking
• Help clients build caring, supportive relationships
• Respond to “It’s too hard”, “I can’t change” and “This is who I am”
• Work with co-occurring ADHD and autism, and the depression, anxiety and trauma that often sit alongside them

About this workshop

Learning these skills is easier when you can watch them demonstrated and try them yourself, which is why this workshop takes place in person over two days. After a brief orientation to neurobiology, neurodivergent culture and neuroaffirming practice, most of your time goes on watching, trying and discussing. This is a highly practical and experiential workshop. You will see video recordings of therapy sessions and live demonstrations, take part in role-plays, and work through experiential exercises that give you a first-hand sense of what each technique asks of a client. The second day lets you build on what you tried on the first, bring back questions that occurred to you overnight and refine your approach with feedback from colleagues. You will also receive the following to use in your own work:

• Articles and research on ACT with autism and ADHD
• Client worksheets and handouts
• Scripts for the experiential exercises
• E-books on important topics
• Professionally recorded audios of key exercises

Russ’ workshops are known for being jargon-free and good-humoured, so the emphasis is on simplicity, clarity and enjoying yourself while you learn. Over the two days, you will work alongside practitioners who see the same kinds of clients you do, and the small-group discussions give you a chance to share your experience and learn from theirs.

Dr Russ Harris is a former GP turned ACT trainer and the author of The Happiness Trap, which has sold over a million copies worldwide. Since 2005 he has delivered more than 900 workshops and trained around 90,000 health professionals, and he has lived with ADHD himself, which he draws on openly in his training.

Who will benefit from this workshop?

This workshop is for psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors, psychiatrists, social workers, mental health nurses, occupational therapists and other practitioners who work with neurodivergent adults, or who suspect that a good share of their caseload is neurodivergent. The principles also transfer readily to work with adolescents.

You will need a working knowledge of ACT before you join. This might come from an introductory ACT workshop, a beginners’ course or a core text such as ACT Made Simple. You do not need prior experience of working with neurodivergent clients. The workshop does not cover diagnosis or assessment. It focuses on interventions you can use with any client, whether or not they hold a diagnosis.

Feedback from Russ’ previous workshops

Russ was an inspiring teacher and facilitator, informed, compassionate, accepting, modelling all the things a good ACT therapist should be!
-Dr Sian Williams, psychologist, broadcaster and author

I found the application of ACT to ADHD really useful. It was a great lesson on how to use the ACT skills through the ADHD lenses.
-Susan Hughes, ADHD parent coach

Brilliant course! The way Russ delivers the content works so well: the combination of videos (with animation and humour), exercises, text, and ‘in therapy’ examples.
-Sara Andrews, Licensed Professional Counsellor

Just wonderful. It felt like a bubble of protected time to learn and consolidate. I’ve been to many ACT workshops and they are all good but this one was the one where ‘the penny dropped’ with regard to how all the separate processes interlink.
-Dr Karen Sutton, Consultant Clinical Psychologist

Group booking discounts

Contextual Consulting offer discounts for groups of people from the same organisation e.g. an NHS Trust that does not have a contract arrangement with us.

Please email us here to arrange a group discount or find out more about our CPD contracts.