When ACT Isn't Simple: An ACT in Practice Workshop with Dr Kerry Makin-Byrd

ACT clinicians are urged to be fluid, responsive, and process-based while nesting their work within overarching, interpersonal, and intrapersonal processes. Phew, that’s easier said than done. If you know enough ACT to have experienced feeling stuck in the room, watching an exercise flop, or being unclear where to go next, then this workshop is for you.

Dr. Kerry Makin-Byrd will help you adapt your ACT to work with people struggling with over-controlling behaviour patterns. These include longstanding anxiety, depression, eating disorders, or difficulties relating to others and over-regulating emotions. Integrating ACT, evolutionary psychology, and polyvagal theory, Kerry will teach key clinical processes that foster warm attunement, defuse client resistance, and optimise the clinical relationship as a steroid for the client’s development of a vibrant, open life.

You will leave this workshop with a dozen microskills to use flexibly in session to build aware, open, and engaged interactions. You will be provided with a workshop manual of handouts and exercise scripts. All content will be reinforced with clinical examples, experiential exercises, and not-simple role plays.

Dr. Kerry Makin-Byrd is an author and clinical psychologist with expertise in acceptance and commitment therapy. Her professional mission is to translate science to meaningful living and to leave the world better than she found it. Dr. Kerry has been a violence researcher, a national special matter expert on sexual trauma, and a founding psychologist at a venture capital backed mental health startup. She has authored over 30 peer-reviewed studies, US Congressional reports, and clinical chapters on trauma and resilience. Dr. Kerry’s first book about her own work burnout, “The Ballad of Burnout”, was an Amazon #1 New Release and widely praised as brutally honest, lyrical, and beautiful. Dr. Kerry now lives in Aotearoa New Zealand and spends her days providing clinical care, supervising therapists and doctors, and writing. She is currently having a ton of fun parenting her daughter, loving her partner of 20 years, and building a mansion for her foster cats.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Wharewaka Function Centre, Taranaki Wharf, Wellington, New Zealand