3: ACT therapy for teenagers

ACT therapy, or Acceptance Commitment Therapy, provides valuable skills for everyone. Skills to help you to live a life of meaning despite emotional turmoil and hardship. Dr Louise Hayes has made these skills more widely accessible through her model: DNA-V (© DNA-V, L. Hayes & J. Ciarrochi, www.thrivingadolescent.com). This model is easy to understand, and relatable, for children, teenagers, and adults. In this episode Louise introduces the DNA-V model, and provides an overview of the four core skills.

Links and further information:

• Introduction to Acceptance Commitment Therapy (Episode 2)
• Dr Louise Hayes' website
• The DNA-V model (© DNA-V, L. Hayes & J. Ciarrochi, www.thrivingadolescent.com)
• The main website for DNA is dnav.international
• ‘Your life, your way’ (book on the DNA-V model)
• A resilience course based on the DNA V model

Transcript:

Hello, we want to help people to thrive. One of the best tools I have found to do that, which can be practiced and applied in our daily life, is ACT, Acceptance Commitment Therapy. I detailed how the various aspects of ACT have helped me in the last episode. If you missed that, it’s at www.personalstrength.com.au/P2. This month, I am very excited to welcome Dr Louise Hayes to explore a developmental model of ACT, the DNA-V model (© DNA-V, L. Hayes & J. Ciarrochi, www.thrivingadolescent.com), in more depth. In this episode, we explore the main components of the DNA-V model, and in the next episode, we will delve deeper into the developmental, social, and evolutionary context around the DNA-V model.

I really love Louise’s work because she takes complex psychological theories, distils them into practical therapeutic approaches and makes them accessible, understandable and relatable. She's a PhD qualified clinical psychologist a senior fellow with the University of Melbourne a peer reviewed ACT trainer and an author. I love learning from Louise because she's fun. Her clinical experience means that she's seen these techniques in action and can provide relatable examples. Her research experience means she can explain what works and why it works. She also has really helpful books for professionals, teens, as well as videos and resources on her website. I’ll ask Louise to give you all the relevant links at the end of this episode. So let's get to the interview.

Interviewer (Nicky Weeks): OK so could you tell us a bit about the DNA-V model?

Louise Hayes: Sure, so DNA is a developmental model of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and even more deeply underneath that, evolutionary science. So it's a way of looking at the way in which humans grow and develop. That's part of our evolutionary adaptation in terms of how we grow and develop and looking at that alongside acceptance and commitment practises.

Interviewer: So, before we go too much further, what does DNA V stand for?

Louise Hayes: DNA-V each of the letters represents a different behaviour that a human can have and so D stands for Discoverer which is just a word we used to describe the behaviours of trial and error. So that's the behaviour if you think about a child of a child learning to stand up and fall down to walk. Or an adolescent using to develop a relationship with someone that they I'm interested i