ACT With Compassion is for therapists who want to bring more compassion and effectiveness to their work with highly self-critical and shame-prone clients.
Our aim is to bring together information and people interested in studying and developing treatments that have compassion, kindness and belonging at their heart. Most of what you’ll find here grows out of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), and we also draw on compassion-focused therapy, radically open dialectical behavior therapy and emotion-focused therapy.
We believe we learn best in community, and that compassion and kindness are fundamentally about our connections with others and with ourselves.
What you’ll find here
1) Original resources for therapists. Handouts, in-session scripts, measures and case-conceptualization frameworks from our treatment development work. Some have been evaluated in research studies; others are not yet tested.
2) The blog. Clinical tools, research summaries and reflections on shame, self-criticism and compassion.
3) Trainings. Workshops on ACT, compassion and shame are offered through Portland Psychotherapy’s training program.
4) Our newsletter. New resources and training news, sent to your inbox.
Team Compassion
Jason Luoma, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and the founder of ACT With Compassion. He is CEO and co-founder of Portland Psychotherapy Clinic, Research & Training Center in Portland, Oregon, a social enterprise where therapy revenue funds research and training. For two decades his research has centered on shame, self-stigma and self-criticism, and on how compassion and psychological flexibility help people who struggle with them; he led the first randomized trial of an ACT approach to shame and has published more than 90 peer-reviewed articles. He is co-author of Learning ACT and Values in Therapy, a peer-reviewed ACT trainer and a past president of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. His recent work extends the same questions to psychedelic-assisted therapy as co-founder and senior scientist at the Portland Institute for Psychedelic Science, including a trial of MDMA-assisted therapy for social anxiety and a book on the topic with Guilford Press.
Jenna LeJeune, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and co-founder and President of Portland Psychotherapy Clinic, Research & Training Center. She has practiced for more than 25 years and trains therapists internationally as a peer-reviewed ACT trainer and Fellow of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science. Her clinical work centers on adults facing relationship difficulties, trauma and body-image concerns, and in particular on the shame and self-criticism that so often sit underneath them; she is especially interested in how compassion and perspective-taking help people build a warmer relationship with themselves. She is co-author, with Jason Luoma, of Values in Therapy: A Clinician’s Guide to Helping Clients Explore Values, Increase Psychological Flexibility, and Live a More Meaningful Life, and serves as a study therapist on Portland Psychotherapy’s clinical trials of psychedelic-assisted therapy.
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