Workshop 2
Who do you think you are? Understanding and working with the self from a Contextual Behavioural Science perspective
Louise McHugh, University College Dublin, Ireland
Tuesday 13 October: 9am – 12.30pm
Our sense of self can provide coherence, continuity and direction. However, the stories people develop about who they are can also become powerful sources of psychological restriction: “I am not good enough,” “I have always been this way,” or “This is simply who I am.” Such self descriptions frequently appear across clinical presentations, yet attempts to challenge or correct them can inadvertently strengthen the struggle around identity. Contextual behavioural science offers a distinctive account of the self. Rather than treating the self as a fixed internal entity, it conceptualises selfing as a repertoire of relational behaviours established through interactions with other people and the wider verbal community. Relational Frame Theory distinguishes between the conceptualised self, ongoing awareness of experience and the perspective from which experience is observed. These distinctions can help practitioners understand both the usefulness of a coherent identity and the difficulties that arise when clients become unhelpfully attached to particular self stories that are not serving them. This experiential half day workshop will translate the CBS account of self and perspective-taking into accessible applied practice. Participants will explore how self-concepts develop, why some self-descriptions acquire such powerful emotional and behavioural functions, and how self stories can be helpful sometimes and other times narrow a person’s sense of what is possible. Through demonstrations, experiential exercises, applied examples and small group practice, participants will learn to formulate self-related difficulties functionally rather than debating whether a client’s self beliefs are accurate. The workshop will introduce practical ways of loosening unhelpful self-stories, strengthening flexible perspective-taking and helping clients contact a sense of self that can include difficult experiences without being unhelpfully defined by them
Biography
Professor Louise McHugh is Professor of Psychology and Head of the School of Psychology at University College Dublin. She is an internationally recognised researcher and trainer in contextual behavioural science, with particular expertise in relational frame theory, acceptance and commitment therapy, psychological flexibility, and the self. She has published more than 150 scholarly papers and has delivered training and workshops internationally. Professor McHugh is a Fellow of the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science and a peer-reviewed ACT trainer. Her work explores how our sense of self and identity develops through language and social interaction, and how contextual behavioural approaches can help people relate more flexibly to difficult thoughts, emotions and self-narratives.
