1st Annual NYC-ACBS Conference

We are thrilled to announce the 1st Annual NYC ACBS Conference, co-sponsored by NYC ACBS & Touro University's PsyD Program in Clinical Psychology, a gathering of clinicians, researchers, students, and professionals interested in cutting-edge applications of contextual behavioral science.

Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or new to contextual behavioral science, we invite you to come learn, share, and connect with like-minded professionals shaping the future of our field.

Info: ACT has been used in a wide variety of contexts with a diverse range of sources of human suffering, however, data on using ACT with racial/ethnic minorities and communities that face chronic marginalization in the US is still needed. In this workshop, we will present components of an ACT protocol we created as a result of our work with the Bronx community and the NIH HEAL Initiative (Helping to End Addiction Longterm) which is currently being evaluated in a large RCT (Bhambhani et al., 2025, Gallo et al., 2025). Incorporating feedback from individuals with lived experience, we repackaged the six flexibility processes into modified ACT skills designed to be more accessible for folks with limited resources and experiencing multiple sources of marginalization. We will highlight the context in which substance use, chronic health conditions and trauma occurs for these communities, and offer specific ways in which ACT can be delivered in a trauma informed and culturally responsive manner.

Info: Lunch will be provided.

Info: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) has long been grounded in the psychological flexibility model, traditionally organized around the six processes found in the hexagon model. In this hour-long virtual talk, Dr. Hayes will invite you to reimagine ACT as a multilevel process-based approach that expands its core processes while extending them into sociocultural and biophysiological domains. That change gives clinicians far more freedom to pursue the change processes that are known to make a difference, including the therapeutic alliance, and allows clinicians to become more central to the journey of ACT as an evidence-based approach.

Info: While ACT and Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) possess distinct scientific origins, their theoretical overlap and clinical synergy are striking. This presentation will introduce a coherent, process-based model for their integration, termed Compassion Focused ACT (CFACT). We will demonstrate how each element of the CFT model can be functionally related to the ACT hexaflex processes, arguing that compassion is an integral component of true psychological flexibility. Grounded in recent advances in contextual behavioral science and affective neuroscience, this model provides a multifaceted approach for targeting transdiagnostic challenges, particularly chronic shame and self-criticism. We will conclude by reviewing the current state of CFACT research, featuring ongoing process and outcome data from our research group at Kean University, and introduce interventions designed to purposefully awaken "compassionate flexibility" in both clinicians and the clients they serve.

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