ACT for OCD: using exposure exercises to help clients break free from OCD and live life to the full with Dr Z

If you’re working with adult clients struggling with OCD, no matter where you’re in the treatment, and no matter how familiar you are with exposure-based interventions, in this webinar you will augment your clinical skills on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Exposure Response Prevention (ERP). It will help  to guide your clients in taming OCD, to bridge the gap between where they are and where they want to go in life.

All the content of this webinar aims to answer a specific question: how can I use ACT facilitate exposure interventions when working with OCD?

 At a general level, you will learn the scientific underpinnings behind contextual behavioral science and exposure therapy as the basis to understand how ACT + ERP blend together. As the webinar progresses, you will learn to train your eyes and ears to notice how the client is responding in therapy and how you’re responding to the client’s behaviors. You’ll learn how to use this  as a framework in deciding to either deliver “acceptance-based interventions” or “change-based interventions.”

Clinically speaking, you will learn how to:

• Guide your clinical work when blending ACT + ERP together for targeting OCD and related conditions.
• Facilitate acceptance-based and change-based interventions through different ACT hexaflex – before, during and after values-guided exposure exercises.
• Contextualize exposure exercises as values-based moves, personal choices and as a way of help clients to choose to feel all types of experiences – including yucky ones- and stay with them with openness, curiosity, and flexibility, in the service of what they care about.
• Introduce W.I.S.E. M.O.V.E.S. to facilitate both, planned values-based exposures and values-based exposures on-the-fly.
• Identify specific blocks that may show up when facilitating values-based exposures or W.I.S.E. M.O.V.E.S.

To make the best of this workshop we’ll have different moments to practice and keep track of our own learning process on an individual level and as a group.

Dr Z says:

“I will  present you with ACT skills in a simple, uncomplicated, unpretentious, and jargon free manner. More importantly, I will share with you all the ACT skills and process that I introduce to my clients and I see them using day-to-day to make a real turn from surviving into thriving!”

About Your Presenter

Dr. Zurita Ona, aka Dr. Z, is a Licensed Clinical Psychologist in California. Her clinical work started first as a school psychologist and then as a clinical psychologist. She has significant experience working with children, adolescents, and adults with OCD, trauma, anxiety, and emotional regulation problems. Dr. Z’s clinical work was initially focused on emotion regulation in response to the different clinical settings she was delivering services; because of her passion on acceptance-based processes, she contributed to the literature on emotion regulation by publishing two self-help books for parents and adults respectively, and an academic workbook for clinicians.

Over the last 17 years, Dr. Z has been learning, practicing, and teaching Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and is passionate about its application to specific struggles such as perfectionism, procrastination, OCD, anxiety and related conditions. As Dr. Z’s career evolved she created a clinical setting to fully pursue her passion: fear-based struggles. Dr. Z is the founder of the East Bay Behavior Therapy Center, a boutique therapy practice, where she runs an intensive outpatient program integrating Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and Exposure Response Prevention (ERP) to support clients getting stuck from obsessions, fears, anxieties and worries; figure out what they care about, and do the stuff that matters to them.

In addition to her doctoral training, Dr. Z is a Fellow of the Association of Contextual Behavioral Science; she’s a graduate of the International OCD foundation Behavior Therapy Training Institute (BTTI) for the treatment of pediatric OCD and adult OCD.

Dr. Z ‘s recent publications include The ACT Workbook for Teens with OCD: Unhook Yourself and Live Life to the Full and Living beyond OCD using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: a workbook for adults. She’s the founder of ACT beyond OCD, the first online class for OCD based on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.