ACTwithcompassion is for therapists who are interested in bringing more compassion and effectiveness to their work with self-critical and shame prone clients.
Our aim is to bring together information and people who are interested in studying and developing treatments that have compassion, kindness, and belongingness at their heart. This site and related social media serve as a place for conversation and contribution.
We believe we learn best in community and that compassion and kindness are fundamentally about our connections with others and ourselves. If you're interested in learning more about the role of compassion in psychotherapy, I'd encourage you to connect through this website.
Looking for resources?
Check out the therapist resources section and blog. A few things are available through this site:
1) Original resources for therapists. We are constantly creating new handouts and treatment information based on our work in treatment development. We publish these resources as they become available. Most of these resources relate to acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) as a method for working with self-criticism and shame, but we also include work based on compassion-focused therapy, radically open dialectical behavior therapy, and emotion-focused therapy.
2) Training events relevant to therapists wanting to learn more about compassion in psychotherapy. We list trainings that we give, along with those of others that we've heard about on the mindful self-compassion approach (not really therapy, but related), compassion-focused therapy, or acceptance and commitment therapy if there is a focus on self-compassion and/or shame. If you know of a training that is not on our training page, let us know!
3) Content on self-compassion, shame, and self-criticism from around the web. We curate content related to compassion in psychotherapy. We try to pull together the best resources that we run across in our learning and research and post it to the site and our newsletter. These might be videos you could show to clients, handouts that we've discovered in our searches, or new research articles you might be interested in. If you find something interesting that might be worth sharing, we'd love to hear about it.
4) Our newsletter where we summarize all of our new content. Sign up for this free newsletter and you'll receive our newest content each month in your inbox.
Team Compassion
Jason Luoma, Ph.D. is founder of ACTwithCompassion and a leading researcher in the area of shame, self-stigma, and interventions for those difficulties. He is also co-founder of Portland Psychotherapy Clinic, Research, & Training Center, a unique research and training clinic where proceeds from services go to fund scientific research. Jason is an internationally recognized trainer in ACT and author of Learning Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a book popular with professionals for its mixture of sophistication and accessibility. He has almost 50 publications on shame, stigma, emotion-focused therapy, and ACT including publishing first randomized trial of an ACT approach to shame in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. He also maintains a clinical practice focused on helping people with chronic shame and self-criticism to develop more self-compassion.
Jenna LeJeune, Ph.D. is co-founder and President of Portland Psychotherapy Clinic, Research, and Training Center. In her clinical work, Jenna specializes in using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) with adults struggling with various relationship difficulties, including problems with intimacy and sexuality, trauma-related relationship challenges, and also struggles people may have in their relationship with their own bodies. She is particularly interested in the ways in which compassion and perspective-taking interventions can help those struggling with the shame and self-criticism that are often a significant part of relationship difficulties. Jenna is also a peer-reviewed ACT trainer and co-author (with Jason Luoma) of the forthcoming book Values in Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Life a More Meaningful Life.
How to connect with us:
You can connect via Twitter, Facebook by logging in to the right. Get our newsletter to get updates about free content as it comes out and updates on new trainings as we learn about them. We'd love to hear from you!