Deeply Functional

In this episode of Deeply Functional: In Conversation, Todd Schmenk is joined by Siri Ming, Julia Fiebig, and Evelyn Gould to explore the thinking behind Frame by Frame, their approach to helping clinicians understand what is happening functionally in the therapy room.

The conversation begins with a familiar problem: ACT is often taught and practiced as a curriculum, protocol, or collection of exercises. The group considers what changes when clinicians move beyond choosing techniques and begin attending more carefully to behavior, context, learning history, and the function of what is unfolding from moment to moment.

Together, they discuss how Relational Frame Theory and functional analysis can inform clinical decisions without pulling therapists away from the human interaction in front of them. They explore the value of “zooming in” on the immediate exchange while also “zooming out” to consider developmental, relational, group, and systemic influences on behavior.

The discussion also examines psychological flexibility across different stages of life, the development of selfing through language, and the therapist’s own participation in the clinical process.

Throughout the episode, Frame by Frame offers a way of slowing the work down enough to see more clearly, conceptualize more coherently, and respond with greater flexibility.

This conversation will be especially useful for clinicians, supervisors, and trainers interested in moving beyond procedural ACT toward a more contextual, behaviorally grounded, and responsive approach to clinical practice.

What are we really reaching for when we criticize, withdraw, demand reassurance, or shut down with out partners?

In this episode of Deeply Functional, Todd Schmenk talks with Lou Lasprugato about yearnings: the deep, recurring experiences people seek within their closest relationships.

Together, they explore how yearnings differ from needs and values, why they make us vulnerable, and how they can become hidden beneath difficult patterns of interaction.

Todd and Lou also examine how a functional assessment can help therapists look beyond the couple’s observable behavior and identify what each person is trying to move toward.

When criticism is understood as a longing for connection, or withdrawal as protection from rejection, new possibilities begin to emerge.

This conversation offers therapists a practical and compassionate way to understand conflict by asking a deeper question: What is each person yearning to experience, and what happens when that yearning feels threatened?

Lou Lasprugato Psychotherapy & Training PLLCCA and VA licensed MFTPeer-Reviewed ACT TrainerACBS FellowPast ACBS Training Committee Chair

In this FLEX LAB conversation, we work through a clinical vignette to examine what the clinician did, why those choices made sense, and how a functional understanding of the case shaped what happened next.

Rather than searching for the “right” ACT intervention, the discussion focuses on tracking function, noticing opportunities for movement, and responding flexibly to what is happening in the room.

The conversation also builds on questions and ideas raised in the online FLEX LAB community at RIACT.org, bringing several clinician perspectives into the discussion.

Together, we explore how case conceptualization becomes a practical, collaborative process—one that helps us think more clearly while remaining responsive to the person in front of us.

What changes when ACT stops being something a clinician does and begins shaping how they understand therapy?

In this episode of Deeply Functional: In Conversation, Todd Schmenk sits down with Peter Binnings, LICSW, to reflect on their shared journey from discovering ACT to developing a deeper, more functionally grounded way of practicing it. Together, they revisit what initially attracted them to ACT, what they misunderstood along the way, and when the model began to feel like more than a collection of interventions.

You’ll explore:

• What first draws many clinicians toward ACT
• Common misunderstandings during the early stages of learning
• How Functional Contextualism changes the way clinicians understand therapy
• What remains meaningful after years of practicing ACT
• Why becoming an ACT clinician requires continued curiosity and growth

Clinician takeaway: Developing fluency in ACT is not simply a matter of learning more techniques. It involves learning to see behavior differently, question your assumptions, and allow your clinical practice to keep evolving.

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 3 of 7

What happens when efforts to protect ourselves from discomfort begin organizing more and more of our lives?

This episode explores experiential avoidance as an inflexibility process within ACT. Todd examines avoidance not as weakness, resistance, or pathology, but as an understandable attempt to gain safety and relief. Difficulties develop when thoughts, memories, emotions, and physical sensations acquire threatening functions, leading behavior to become increasingly organized around controlling, escaping, or preventing internal experience.

You’ll explore:

• How avoidance can provide immediate relief while gradually narrowing behavior
• How emotional withdrawal, intellectual explanation, constant activity, topic changes, and postponement can function as avoidance
• Why the form of a behavior matters less than what it accomplishes in context
• How acceptance and willingness help clients remain in contact with experience while moving toward what matters
• Why acceptance involves making room for experience rather than approving of it, enjoying it, or giving up

Clinician takeaway:

You will learn to look beneath the visible form of avoidance and identify the protective function it serves. Rather than forcing exposure or persuading clients to feel differently, the clinician helps them build the capacity to remain in contact with difficult experience while choosing meaningful action.

The central question shifts from “How do we make this feeling stop?” toward “Can this person carry this experience and still participate in the life they want to build?”

When does holding space support meaningful change, and when might it unintentionally help a client remain stuck?

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 2 of 7

What happens when a thought stops functioning as one possible description of experience and begins operating as reality itself?

This episode opens the first inflexibility process in the ACT model: cognitive fusion. Todd explores how language can organize attention, emotion, and action so completely that behavior narrows around what the mind is saying. Fusion often offers the nervous system a sense of certainty, prediction, or protection. The difficulty emerges when verbal rules begin overriding direct experience, present context, and other available choices.

You’ll explore:

• How thoughts acquire the functions of the events they describe
• Why fusion can feel protective, compelling, and difficult to question
• What rigid rules, absolute language, repetitive reasoning, and identity statements can reveal in session
• How shifting from “this is true” to “this is a thought I am having” can create greater flexibility

Clinician takeaway:

You will learn to recognize when language is dominating behavior and use a simple defusion move to create space between the client and the thought. The goal is not to challenge, correct, or eliminate the thought. It is to change the client’s relationship with it so that context, experience, and chosen direction can influence what happens next.

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 1 of 7

Clients rarely enter therapy naming fusion, avoidance, attentional rigidity, attachment to self story, disconnection from values, or inaction. They arrive describing suffering, conflict, fear, exhaustion, and patterns they cannot seem to change.

Todd opens the Hexagon in Reverse series by showing how clinicians can hear these descriptions as functional signals. The episode challenges the tendency to use ACT as a sequence of six processes or a protocol for selecting techniques. Instead, it introduces a simpler orienting principle: function leads, process follows, and form comes last.

You’ll explore:

• Why beginning with suffering often provides a more natural entry into process based formulation
• How the six inflexibility processes appear behaviorally in the room
• The difference between labeling a process and conducting a functional analysis
• How practical microinterventions can respond to the process that is active now

Clinician takeaway:

This episode offers a foundation for reading psychological inflexibility in real time so ACT can function as a clinical orientation rather than another checklist.

The therapist is not standing outside the clinical system. Our attention, language, pacing, avoidance, and responses all help shape what can happen next.

Todd uses a process based lens to examine therapist behavior as part of the functional context of treatment. Rather than judging moments of overexplaining, filling silence, or hesitating to intervene as mistakes, clinicians can study when these patterns occur, what evokes them, what immediate consequence they produce, and where they take the work over time.

You’ll explore:

• Time, Trigger, and Trajectory as a structure for therapist self observation
• How internal cues and learning history influence clinical decisions
• The difference between reflective self supervision and performance based self criticism
• Questions for reviewing stuck moments and identifying more flexible alternatives

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a practical method for functional self supervision that helps you notice your contribution to the clinical system, learn from difficult moments, and respond with greater intention in future sessions.

Psychological flexibility is not only something clinicians help clients develop. It is also a quality of therapist behavior that shapes the relational context of every session.

Todd turns the ACT processes toward the clinician and examines what happens when self doubt, urgency, discomfort, or a need to get therapy right begins to organize our responses. Interrupting silence, overexplaining, avoiding a difficult intervention, or reaching too quickly for a technique can all be understood as functional behavior rather than personal failure.

You’ll explore:

• Defusion from self critical thoughts about competence and performance
• Willingness to remain with uncertainty and discomfort in session
• Present moment contact with the client rather than the clinician’s internal agenda
• Perspective, professional values, and committed action when the next step is unclear

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with a more compassionate and precise way to notice your own rigidity, return to what matters, and make small adjustments that strengthen presence and responsiveness in the room.

What changes when pain does not resolve and the continued pursuit of symptom elimination begins to make life smaller?

Todd explores chronic pain through a functional, ACT informed lens. Medication changes, activity restriction, reassurance seeking, and constant symptom monitoring can all make sense as attempts to reduce discomfort and uncertainty. When these strategies become the organizing center of life, relationships, movement, pleasure, and purpose may be postponed until pain improves.

You’ll explore:

• Fusion with pain related rules about safety, damage, and capability
• Avoidance patterns organized around controlling symptoms
• Values drift as pain becomes the primary reference point for decision making
• How defusion, willingness, pacing, and values directed action can restore meaningful participation

Clinician takeaway:

The aim is not to deny pain or promise its removal. It is to help free behavior from pain’s rule so that meaningful action can return to the center of life, even when discomfort remains present.

How do clinicians hold compassionate space for suffering while continuing to shape movement toward flexibility?

Todd approaches trauma as more than an event, story, or diagnostic category. From a functional contextualist perspective, trauma also includes what has been shaped over time: avoidance, emotional numbing, hypercontrol, fusion with fear based rules, narrowed identity, and the gradual loss of values directed living. Survival strategies are honored for the work they have done without allowing them to define the limits of the client’s future.

You’ll explore:

• Fusion with trauma narratives and identities
• Experiential avoidance, hypervigilance, and safety seeking
• Values collapse as protection becomes the center of life
• Ways to validate suffering while reinforcing defusion, willingness, perspective taking, and meaningful direction

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a process sensitive way to hold what happened, understand what was shaped, and help clients build a life that becomes larger than the trauma story.

Holding space matters.
Shaping flexibility matters too.

Anxiety is a natural human response. Suffering expands when a person’s life becomes increasingly organized around predicting, controlling, and avoiding it.

Todd begins a series on applying a functional, ACT informed lens to specific clinical concerns. Rather than making anxiety reduction the central goal, he focuses on what clients do in the presence of fear and how understandable efforts to gain safety can gradually narrow relationships, choices, and valued activity.

You’ll explore:

• Fusion with threat based predictions and rules
• Experiential avoidance and the short term relief that keeps it going
• Values drift as safety becomes the organizing principle of life
• How defusion, willingness, and meaningful action can expand behavior while anxiety remains present

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with three functional targets for anxiety work and a clearer way to help clients stop organizing life around symptom management and begin building a broader behavioral repertoire in the presence of fear.

Encountering ACT, Relational Frame Theory, or Process Based Therapy can leave experienced clinicians believing they must abandon what they already know and rebuild their practice around an entirely new set of methods.

Todd offers a different possibility. Existing clinical skills do not become obsolete when the lens changes. They become more precisely organized around function, context, and workability. The shift is less about model loyalty and more about learning to ask what a behavior is doing and whether the clinician’s response expands or constricts what becomes possible next.

You’ll explore:

• Why symptoms can be treated as signals without becoming the sole target of therapy
• How familiar interventions change when they are selected by function rather than diagnosis
• What RFT contributes to understanding thoughts without arguing with their content
• How a process based lens can simplify clinical reasoning rather than add another layer of complexity

Clinician takeaway:

You already have useful skills. This episode shows how to see them with new eyes and organize them around the processes that matter in the room.

Want to learn more about this project?

You’re not your thoughts or feelings.

You’re the space that holds them, and that shift changes everything.

A metaphor becomes clinically useful when it does more than explain an ACT concept. It should alter the context around an experience, evoke something the client can contact directly, and open a new behavioral possibility.

Todd examines what gives metaphors their functional strength and why familiar examples sometimes land powerfully with one client while falling flat with another. Using the Ball in the Pool, Passengers on the Bus, and the Chessboard, he shows how delivery, timing, and the client’s response matter more than selecting the perfect script.

You’ll explore:

• The difference between explaining a metaphor and creating an experience
• How to connect metaphors to the client’s language, history, and present context
• Common problems, including overexplaining, forcing meaning, and using metaphors to persuade
• How to assess whether a metaphor actually shifts behavior, emotion, or perspective

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a practical way to choose, adapt, and deliver metaphors that move the work rather than simply sounding memorable or clever.

A three-step compass to keep sessions process-focused—evoke the process, model it, and reinforce flexibility in the moment.

How can clinicians use the six ACT processes without turning the model into a checklist or searching for the correct intervention box?

Todd brings the core processes together into the Deeply Functional Map, a flexible framework for tracking movement between constriction and expansion as it happens in the room. The map helps clinicians organize what they are observing while continuing to let function, context, and workability guide the next move.

You’ll explore:

• How fusion, avoidance, attentional rigidity, and attachment to self story interact
• How awareness, openness, perspective, values, and action can emerge together
• Ways to use the map during sessions, case formulation, documentation, and supervision
• Why reinforcing small shifts in flexibility may matter more than completing a particular exercise

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with a practical framework for reading process in real time and selecting interventions according to the behavior in front of you rather than a predetermined sequence.

A quick look with Todd at why it’s not pain itself that keeps clients stuck, but the struggle against it—and how openness creates freedom.

Defusion is sometimes reduced to a clever phrase or exercise designed to make thoughts less uncomfortable. Its deeper purpose is to change how language functions so that thoughts can become information or possibilities rather than instructions that automatically organize behavior.

Todd examines how fusion appears through rigid rules, identity labels, repetitive reasoning, and efforts to prove or disprove what the mind is saying. The episode then turns toward process focused ways of interrupting these patterns without becoming trapped in the content of the thought.

You’ll explore:

• How language hooks behavior through relational framing
• Why defusion is not positive thinking, distraction, or cognitive debate
• Practical moves such as naming the voice, “I am having the thought,” and metaphor based pivots
• How to tell whether an intervention has changed the function of a thought rather than merely its wording

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a functional way to identify fusion, evoke greater distance from language, and reinforce flexible responding without requiring clients to replace difficult thoughts with better ones.

Learn the crucial difference between values and goals—and why mixing them up keeps clients stuck. Values are directions; goals are destinations. ACT helps keep that distinction clear and meaningful.

In this episode, Todd breaks down why confusing values with goals can stall therapeutic progress. He clarifies how values guide flexible, purposeful living—while goals mark outcomes. Great for new clinicians and anyone teaching ACT-based motivation.

ACT, Values Clarification, Goal Setting, Behavioral Flexibility, Psychological Flexibility, Process-Based Therapy

Why identity is not who we are, but where we look from.

Clients often become organized around identity statements such as “I am broken,” “I am anxious,” or “I am not enough.” The difficulty is not simply that these thoughts are painful. It is that they can become the position from which every new experience is interpreted.

Todd explores self as context as flexible perspective taking rather than a philosophical idea to explain. When clients learn to notice thoughts, feelings, roles, and self stories as experiences they have, those experiences no longer need to define the full range of who they can be or what they can do.

You’ll explore:

• How relational framing contributes to rigid identity narratives
• The difference between changing a self story and changing one’s relationship to it
• How the Chessboard, Naming the Voice, and other experiential moves can evoke perspective taking
• What clinicians can notice and reinforce when a client shifts from defending an identity toward observing experience

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with a practical understanding of self as context as a behavior to evoke and strengthen, creating more room for cognitive, emotional, and behavioral flexibility.

What’s Showing Up in the Room?
Feeling lost mid-session? TEAMS helps you track internal experience—Thoughts, Emotions, Associations, Memories, Sensations—so you can shift from story to process and regain clinical direction fast.

Another quick, minimal production time, off the cuff moment with Todd Schmenk.

Acceptance is often treated as an insight, attitude, or internal state a client must reach before change can begin. Todd reframes willingness as something clients do when they remain in contact with difficult experience while continuing to move toward what matters.

The episode brings acceptance out of abstraction and into observable clinical behavior. A client may name an emotion, remain present during a painful memory, soften a defensive posture, or take a valued step while anxiety is still present. These small movements create opportunities for clinicians to evoke, model, and reinforce greater openness.

You’ll explore:

• How to recognize small moments of willingness in the therapy room
• Why discomfort is not a barrier to flexibility, but the context in which flexibility is practiced
• How reinforcement helps openness become more available over time
• How experiential exercises and metaphors can support contact without becoming techniques for symptom control

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a practical lens for shaping acceptance as behavior: helping clients come into contact with what they have been avoiding, remain with it, and choose what they do next.

In this short but impactful check in, Todd unpacks one of ACT’s most relatable metaphors: the ball in the pool.

What if your client’s suffering isn’t about what they’re feeling—but about their effort to push those feelings away?

Using the metaphor of trying to hold a beach ball underwater, Todd illustrates the emotional cost of experiential avoidance—and how it keeps clients stuck in a cycle of struggle. When we teach clients to stop pushing and start opening, we free up the energy to engage with life again.

You’ll learn:

• How experiential avoidance functions as a trap

• Why control strategies drain clients over time

• What willingness can look like in practice

“Life isn’t about never having a beach ball. It’s about whether you can keep swimming even when one is next to you.”

Perfect for ACT clinicians, interns, and supervisors who want a fast refresher on a metaphor that lands every time.

Values are often discussed as things clients need to identify before meaningful action can begin. Functionally, values are better understood as chosen qualities of action that help organize behavior when discomfort makes direction difficult to see.

Todd explores how values can serve as anchors without becoming another demand, achievement, or item on a treatment checklist. The focus moves from discovering the perfect answer to noticing what a person wants their behavior to stand for in this moment and this relationship.

You’ll explore:

• The difference between values as ongoing directions and goals as achievable outcomes
• How values can orient behavior without requiring discomfort to disappear first
• Ways to translate abstract value words into observable qualities of action
• How clinicians can notice and reinforce small moments of values consistent movement

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with a more functional approach to values work that helps clients choose direction, evaluate workability, and move meaningfully even when fear, pain, or uncertainty remains present.

Ever feel stuck in session when your client’s tried everything and nothing’s helped? That’s not the end. That’s the beginning—if you know how to use it.

In this very quick check in, Todd unpacks the ACT concept of creative hopelessness, where clients let go of unworkable control strategies and begin to open up to change.

This isn’t despair. It’s clarity.
It’s the moment a client says, “This isn’t working”—and finally becomes ready to try something different.

Listen in to learn:

• What creative hopelessness really is (and isn’t)

• Why it’s a compassionate, process-based move—not a shutdown

• How to use it as a springboard for ACT work

“Creative hopelessness isn’t giving up. It’s giving up the struggle that’s never worked.”

Language allows people to remember, predict, evaluate, and solve problems. It can also make a thought feel like a fact, a prediction feel like a certainty, or a description of the past feel like a permanent identity.

Todd introduces Relational Frame Theory as a practical clinical lens for understanding how language changes the function of experience. Rather than debating whether a thought is accurate, clinicians can begin noticing how relational networks organize attention, emotion, and action in the present moment.

You’ll explore:

• How people learn to relate events through comparison, distinction, causality, time, and perspective
• Why thoughts can influence behavior even when the events they describe are not present
• How rules, evaluations, and identity statements can narrow a client’s behavioral options
• Why changing the context around language may be more useful than trying to correct its content

Clinician takeaway:

You will gain a clearer way to recognize when language is dominating behavior and how to help clients relate to thoughts as experiences they can notice, rather than commands they must obey.

In this very short episode, Todd breaks down one of the most misunderstood—but vital—concepts in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: psychological flexibility.

These "quick blips" will be less than 2-3 minutes and focus on only one topic and will fill in the gaps to the biweekly release of the main episodes.

What if the client’s stated problem is not the most important thing to address, and the most useful intervention begins with a shift in how the clinician sees behavior?

Todd introduces the central premise of the podcast: moving from the form and content of behavior toward its function in context. Using the Ball in the Pool metaphor and practical clinical examples, he shows how attempts to control thoughts, feelings, and memories can provide immediate relief while gradually narrowing a person’s life.

You’ll explore:

• The difference between what behavior looks like and what it accomplishes
• How learning history, present context, and consequences give behavior meaning
• The role of Time, Trigger, Trajectory, and Workability in functional assessment
• Why therapeutic success involves expanding flexible, values directed behavior rather than simply reducing symptoms

Clinician takeaway:

You will leave with a working understanding of function, practical questions for tracking it in session, and a clearer way to choose interventions according to what behavior is doing rather than what it is called.

Deeply Functional is a podcast for therapists who want to move beyond technique and learn to see more clearly.

Each short episode explores a single process, principle, or metaphor—rooted in Functional Contextualism and Relational Frame Theory, the foundation on which Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) stands.

Some episodes focus on core concepts. Others zoom in on processes, metaphors, or moment-to-moment clinical decisions.

This isn’t about chasing content or fixing minds. It’s about learning to track behavior in context, respond to what shows up, and move toward what matters—with precision, presence, and purpose.

This first episode is a prelude—a foundation-setting reflection on why this podcast exists, why now, and what it means to take a deeply functional stance in the work we do.

Let’s train the lens.
Let’s get deeply functional.