Treating perfectionism

Are you struggling to treat your clients’ perfectionism? Join our in-depth intermediate-level workshop, “Treating Perfectionism,” and deepen your skills as a therapist. Learn how to balance your clients’ desire for perfection with the reality of imperfection and help them live more fulfilling lives.

Led by clinical psychologist and author of The ACT Workbook for Perfectionism, Jennifer Kemp, this interactive and practical workshop will equip you with all the skills you need to address the core processes of unhelpful perfectionism. We’ll explore how to treat perfectionism using an approach that is grounded in functional analysis and uses ACT principles to target the development of self-compassion.

Who would benefit from this workshop?

We recommend this workshop for mental health professionals including psychologists, psychiatrists, nurse practitioners and licensed mental health counsellors who see clients with perfectionism in their practice.

Please note that this is an intermediate level skills workshop, so you’ll need to be familiar with the ACT model before attending. Read more about introductory and intermediate level workshops here.

Please note that Contextual Consulting is running an introductory level workshop presented by Patricia Zurita Ona on clinical perfectionism on 8^th November. You can read more about this workshop here.

Combine theory, practice and resources to develop your skills

Through a series of engaging exercises and discussions, you’ll learn how to help your clients

• address unhelpful perfectionistic patterns
• find new ways to respond to their fear of failure
• de-escalate their perfectionistic self-criticism

You’ll broaden and deepen your existing therapeutic skills by using an approach that integrates best practice principles for treating related mental health problems, including eating disorders and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). You’ll find out about and use functional analysis to consider the overlap between perfectionism and neurodivergence.

But this workshop isn’t just about theory – we’ll provide you with practical tools and resources to use with your clients, including templates, e-books, scripts, and handouts. Plus, as a workshop participant, you’ll receive an edited excerpt from the book The ACT Workbook for Perfectionism, a valuable resource you won’t find anywhere else.

Be confident in treating perfectionism

In between sessions, you’ll have the opportunity to reinforce your learning with homework activities and discuss any challenges you experienced in the next session.

Participants will have the ability to explore their own difficult cases, put new skills into practice and gain support in consecutive sessions. An entire 2-hour module will focus on treating perfectionistic self-criticism using self-compassion, offering additional time on this important topic.

By the end of the program, you’ll have deeper skills in applying ACT through the application of behaviour analysis and functional assessment. You’ll have greater confidence in your ability to build psychological flexibility and develop self-compassion in your perfectionistic clients, and in doing so, help them live their best (and imperfect) lives.

Learning Objectives

At the end of this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Describe a concise functional, contextual behavioural formulation of helpful and unhelpful perfectionism
2. Identify helpful and unhelpful perfectionistic behaviour patterns
3. Explain how unhelpful perfectionistic patterns develop and are maintained
4. Outline priorities for treatment that can build psychological flexibility and self-compassion in people struggling with perfectionism
5. Describe several treatment strategies that can build psychological flexibility and self-compassion in people struggling with perfectionism, including:
   1. How to address entrenched and unhelpful behaviour patterns such as procrastination, checking, and avoidance
   2. How to recognise perfectionistic self-criticism and respond to it in more compassionate and flexible ways
   3. How to build a more flexible sense of self that extends beyond being ‘perfect’

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 here.