At Talking Therapies UK, we are passionate about equipping professionals with the knowledge, confidence, and compassion to support mental health across diverse settings. With decades of combined experience in clinical practice, public health leadership, and service transformation, our training programmes are rooted in evidence-based approaches and real-world application.
We specialise in delivering high-impact, trauma-informed mental health training tailored to the needs of health, education, social care, and voluntary sector teams. From safeguarding and suicide prevention to emotional resilience and therapeutic communication, our courses are designed to empower practitioners at every level—whether you’re frontline staff, a strategic commissioner, or part of a multi-agency partnership.
Our facilitators bring many years clinical expertise , and a deep understanding of the social determinants of mental health. We prioritise co-production, reflective practice, and inclusive learning environments that foster curiosity, empathy, and professional growth.
Whether you’re looking to upskill your workforce, embed mental health into your organisational culture, or meet statutory training requirements, we offer flexible delivery formats including in-person workshops, webinars, and bespoke consultancy.
Together, we can build psychologically safe, responsive systems that promote wellbeing, reduce inequalities, and improve outcomes for individuals, families, and communities. Let’s shape the future of mental health—one conversation, one training, one transformation at a time..
RFT under the bonnet, process-based therapy, and ACT with complexity, chronic pain and long shadows.
Beneath ACT's accessible surface sits a rigorous behavioural science, and beyond its protocol sits a movement reshaping how psychological treatment is organised. This course works at both depths, for experienced ACT practitioners who want the model's foundations and its hardest applications.
The first module opens the bonnet. You will study Relational Frame Theory in working clinical form, why human language both builds and traps the mind, and what derived relational responding means for how interventions generalise, then follow the field's process-based turn: the move from named protocols for named disorders towards processes of change identified case by case. The second module takes ACT onto hard ground: chronic pain, where the evidence is strongest and the willingness work most demanding, and long-entrenched presentations where values have been abandoned for decades. Throughout, the evidence is read honestly, including where it is thin, mixed or oversold.
Extended written lessons with key points and advanced practice tasks, with a study tutor available for the theoretical and clinical questions this material raises. Fourteen hours of CPD, around a year of access, a final assessment, and a personalised certificate on passing.
▶ See inside the digital classroom1 minute 36 seconds · how a course is laid out, how each lesson is taught, and how the tutor helps
Before you start
This is an Advanced course in the ACT pathway. It assumes that you already work with the approach at Practitioner level and want complexity, process and supervision-level thinking rather than the method itself, which is what ACT in Practice teaches. What it adds is complex presentations, comorbidity, ruptures and impasses, the research and process literature, and the judgement needed to supervise or lead the work; it revisits the foundations only as far as it needs to before building on them, so it does not repeat the course below.
A caution. Taking an Advanced course without the foundational understanding will make it harder to follow and to complete, and you will get less from it. If you are new to this approach, begin at Foundation; if you hold the foundations but have not yet used the approach with clients, begin with ACT in Practice. Choose the level that matches your existing experience and knowledge.
The ACT pathway. Acceptance and commitment therapy from the six core processes to process-based work with complex presentations.
14 study hours14 CPD hours certified12 months of accessAI tutor in every lessonCertificate on completion (pass mark 70%)
What you will be able to do
✓Practise process-based ACT flexibly, moving with what the moment offers rather than following a module order
✓Work with self-as-context at depth, including perspective-taking exercises grounded in relational frame theory
✓Apply ACT to entrenched, multi-problem and high-shame presentations
✓Integrate compassion-focused and exposure-based work within an ACT frame coherently
✓Use your own psychological flexibility, in the room, as the primary instrument of the work
✓Evaluate the process-based therapy movement critically, including its measurement problems
What you will study
Module 1: Foundations of Relational Frame Theory
This module explores Relational Frame Theory and its integration into process-based clinical formulation and intervention.
Relational Frame Theory for the working clinicianLanguage = derived relational framing; functions transfer along relations
The process-based turnProcess-based therapy targets maintaining processes, not diagnoses
Integrating RFT into Process‑Based Case FormulationRFT provides a functional language for describing the relational networks that maintain psychological inflexibility.
Operationalising Relational Frame Theory: Assessment and Mapping of Relational Networks for Process‑Based ACT InterventionRelational Frame Theory can be brought into assessment through validated measures of its clinical processes, such as the CFQ and the AAQ‑II, and through an idiographic relational network interview.
Targeting the Core Processes: RFT-Based Interventions for Process-Based ACTHaving completed a functional analysis of the client’s relational networks, the practitioner is now positioned to intervene directly upon those networks by empl…
Module 2: Advanced Intervention Design and Monitoring
This module covers the design of intervention packages, dynamic mapping, precision targeting, and data-driven outcome monitoring.
Designing Process‑Based Intervention Packages from Relational NetworksPrioritise relational frames that most strongly predict experiential avoidance and cognitive fusion.
Dynamic Relational Network Mapping for Ongoing Process‑Based ACT FormulationDynamic Relational Network Mapping treats relational networks as fluid structures that evolve throughout therapy.
From Theory to Micro-Target: Precision Selection of ACT Processes Using RFT-Based Functional AssessmentPrecision selection of ACT processes requires translating client verbal behaviour into dominant relational operants rather than topographical content.
Process‑Based Outcome Monitoring and Data‑Driven Decision‑Making in Advanced ACTProcess‑based outcome monitoring focuses on change in relational flexibility and the six core ACT processes rather than symptom reduction.
The Relational Frame Theory of the Therapeutic Relationship: Leveraging Process‑Based ACT for Alliance DevelopmentThe therapeutic alliance can be conceptualised as a dynamic relational network that can be mapped, targeted, and reshaped using RFT principles.
Module 3: Process-Based ACT for Chronic Pain
This module examines evidence-based, process-based formulation and intervention strategies for working with chronic pain and entrenched presentations.
ACT with chronic pain and entrenched presentationsIn chronic pain, acceptance is the remaining door; evidence supports values-based re-engagement
