Title: Using the Choice Point & ACT skills to augment your exposures!
Recorded on April 20, 2020
Featuring: Patricia Zurita Ona, PsyD

Patricia E. Zurita Ona, Psy.D., Dr. Z. is a clinical psychologist who specializes in working with children, adolescents, and adults struggling with OCD, anxiety, and emotion regulation problems. Dr. Z is the founder of East Bay Behavior Therapy Center, a boutique therapy practice, where she runs an intensive outpatient program integrating Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and Exposure Response Prevention. Dr. Z is the creator of the online class “ACT beyond OCD,” an online resource for people that want to augment their ACT and ERP skills. 

Webinar Description

This webinar will go  into the nuts and bolts of how to conduct an ACT consistent exposure session, starting with a contextual-functional assessment of OCD symptoms, organizing a values-based exposure menu, increasing clients’ willingness to get out from their fear-based zone and move into values-based exposures, and troubleshooting when getting stuck in an exposure session (e.g. clients have a high degree of believability on thought – action – fusion, client’s continue to have hopes for obsessions to go away, clients’ exposures turn into rituals, etc). 

In addition, the Choice Point, a behavioral intervention derived from ACT will be presented as an additional case formulation and treatment intervention to augment the impact of ERP sessions for pediatric OCD. And experiential exercise will be facilitated to see the choice point in action when working with OCD and help participants to (1) identify client’s hooks and helpers, (2) clarify client’s values, and (3) discriminate values-based behaviors from OCD -driven behaviors.