Relational Frame Theory (RFT) made simple

Relational frame theory sits underneath almost everything you do in acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), whether or not you’ve ever opened the textbook. This workshop lifts it out from under the floorboards and puts it in your hands. Dr Joe Oliver translates RFT into plain clinical language, so you can hear how your clients’ minds are working as they talk and respond with more precision. You’ll come away with a sharper ear for language in the room and a handful of new moves you’ll want to try with your next client.

Background to the workshop

Humans can relate anything to anything. A child who learns that a coin is “bigger” than another can, with no further teaching, work out that the second one is “smaller”. The same ability lets a client feel sick at the word “hospital”, measure themselves against a sibling they haven’t seen in ten years, or live by a rule written in their head at age seven. Relational frame theory offers a behavioural account of how this works. It explains the generativity and creativity of human thinking, and it gives us a working model of the self, of rule-following, of metaphor and of the ways people become tangled in their own stories.

For clinicians, that is extremely useful. It is also, historically, hard going. The RFT literature has a reputation for density, and it has earned it. Terms like “combinatorial entailment” and “transformation of stimulus functions” pile up fast, and many practitioners set out curious and turn back somewhere in the second chapter (nobody trained as a therapist for the pleasure of the word “combinatorial”).

The cost shows up in practice. Without a grasp of the underlying science, ACT processes tend to be applied by feel. Defusion techniques get used because they worked last time, metaphors are borrowed from books whether or not they fit, and when a session stalls it is hard to know why. Most of us can play the tune. Fewer of us can see what is happening underneath it.

What you will gain from this workshop

• A plain-English grasp of RFT’s core ideas. You’ll understand how humans learn to relate events, how those relations spread to things never directly taught, and why a thought can carry the sting of the thing it describes.
• An ear for relational frames in everyday client talk. When a client says “I’m the kind of person who ruins everything”, you’ll notice the hierarchy and comparison doing the heavy lifting, and you’ll have options for loosening their grip.
• A clearer model of the self. You’ll learn how perspective-taking develops through I-you, here-there and now-then relations, along with practical questions that help clients step back from their self-stories and see them from somewhere steadier.
• Precision with rules. You’ll be able to spot when a client is following a rule to please others or to avoid a feared outcome, and when they are tracking what actually works for them, and you’ll know how to respond differently to each.
• Metaphors built to fit. Drawing on how analogy works relationally, you’ll learn to craft metaphors around the client in front of you, so they land with the weight of that client’s own life instead of sounding like something off a laminated card.
• Ways to change what a thought does without arguing with what it says. You’ll practise shifting the context around difficult thoughts so their influence on behaviour softens, even when their content stays exactly the same.
• A grounded look at RFT and cognitive ability. You’ll get an overview of how RFT informs work on building relational skills and intelligence, including an honest account of where the evidence is solid and where it is still being worked out.

About this workshop

The theory is broken into short, self-contained modules, each built around a single idea. A brief mini-lecture introduces the concept, then a clinical example shows it at work, then an exercise gives you a chance to feel it in your own thinking. Many of the experiential exercises turn the lens on your own mind first, which is often the quickest way to see a relational process clearly (and occasionally a little humbling). Joe will also run a live demonstration so you can watch RFT-informed interventions unfold in real time, with space afterwards to unpack the choices made along the way. Small group practice with client dialogue helps you start listening for frames yourself, and there is plenty of time for questions throughout.

Dr Joe Oliver is a consultant clinical psychologist, founder of Contextual Consulting and a peer-reviewed ACT trainer, known for making behavioural science make sense to busy clinicians. He teaches RFT the way you might teach someone to read sheet music. You can play piano by ear for years, but once you can read the notes you start to see why the chord you always reach for sounds right, and you feel new ones waiting under your fingers.

Who will benefit from this workshop?

This workshop is designed for psychologists, psychotherapists, counsellors, CBT therapists, psychiatrists, mental health nurses and other practitioners who use ACT in their work. You’ll get the most from it if you already have a working knowledge of ACT and some experience applying it with clients. No prior knowledge of RFT is needed.

It will suit you particularly well if you’ve used defusion or self-as-context work for a while without being entirely sure why it works, or if you once picked up a book on RFT, got a few pages in and quietly put it back on the shelf.

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