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Learning RFT: An Introduction to Relational Frame Theory and Its Clinical Application PDF

290 Pages·2010·9.83 MB·English
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Learning An Introduction to Relational Frame Theory and Its Clinical Application NIKLAS TÖRNEKE, MD Foreword by Dermot Barnes-Holmes, Ph.D. Afterword by Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D. RFT TÖRNEKE LEARNING RFT A Clear and Comprehensive Guide to Relational Frame Theory Relational frame theory, or RFT, is the little-understood behavioral theory be- hind a recent development in modern psychology: the shift from the cognitive paradigm underpinning cognitive behavioral therapy to a new understanding of language and cognition. Learning RFT presents a basic yet comprehensive intro- duction to this fascinating theory, which forms the basis of acceptance and com- mitment therapy. The book also offers practical guidance for directly applying RFT in clinical work. In the book, author Niklas Törneke presents the building blocks of RFT: language as a particular kind of relating, derived stimulus relations, and transformation of stimulus functions. He then shows how these concepts are essential to understand- ing acceptance and commitment therapy and other therapeutic models. Learning RFT shows how to use experiential exercises and metaphors in psychological treat- ment and explains how they can help your clients. This book belongs on the book- shelves of psychologists, psychotherapists, students, and others seeking to deepen their understanding of psychological treatment from a behavioral perspective. “There is no better place to start learning about RFT than this excellent book. Törneke teaches the principles of RFT simply and elegantly . . . I wish a book like this had existed when I first learned about RFT.” —Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap and ACT Made Simple NIKLAS TÖRNEKE, MD, is a psychiatrist and licensed psychotherapist in private practice in Kalmar, Sweden. Together with Jonas Ramnerö, Ph.D., he has previously authored The ABCs of Human Behavior. Foreword writer DERMOT BARNES-HOLMES, PH.D., is foundation professor of psychol- ogy at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, and coauthor of Relational Frame Theory. Afterword writer STEVEN C. HAYES, PH.D., is University of Nevada Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada, Reno, and has authored and coauthored numerous books, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Relational Frame Theory, and Get Out of Your Mind and Into Your Life. US $49.95 PSYCHOLOGY ISBN: 978-1-57224-906-6 5 4 9 9 5 9 781572 249066 Context Press Context Press An Imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc. www.newharbinger.com “There is no better place to start learning about RFT than this excellent book. Törneke teaches the principles of RFT simply and elegantly, using a wealth of clinical examples to make it accessible and stimulating. I wish a book like this had existed when I first learned about RFT; it would have saved me many hours of hard work, frustration, and confusion.” —Russ Harris, author of The Happiness Trap and ACT Made Simple “On rare occasions, the skills of writer, therapist, and theorist combine to give the field a sophisticated yet highly practical book. This much-awaited translation shows relational frame theory as an accessible, powerful tool for all who use talk therapy. A must-read for those interested in contemporary behaviorism.” —Kelly Koerner, Ph.D., creative director at Evidence Based Practice Institute in Seattle, WA “Since RFT first appeared in the experimental literature, it has been hailed as a breakthrough in our scientific understanding of language and cognition with direct and important implications for clinical psychological practice. Yet, descriptions of RFT, written largely for technical audiences, have been, at best, curiously baffling, and at worst, maddeningly incomprehensible. In this book, Törneke has solved the puzzle of RFT! He summarizes the history of RFT, its key features, and its clinical implications with language that is user-friendly and easily understandable. I believe this book will make a huge difference for clinicians who wish to understand RFT and its implications for clinical practice. It also may be a useful learning tool for researchers and RFT experts themselves who wish to learn and see a beautiful example of how RFT can be presented clearly and comprehensively.” —Jonathan Kanter, associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and director of its Depression Treatment Specialty Clinic “For years, clinicians have asked me for recommendations about what they should read to learn RFT. There was really no good advice I could give except ‘be persistent.’ Finally, I have a better answer. If you want to understand relational frame theory, this is the place to start. Törneke’s RFT primer is both masterful and accessible.” —Kelly G. Wilson, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at the University of Mississippi, coauthor of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and author of Mindfulness for Two “At times, while reading Törneke’s book, I have felt as though I were in the middle of a thriller about the psychopathological behaviors of humans. Clues to unraveling the mystery embedded in complex concepts like ‘arbitrarily applicable relational responding’ have alerted me, as the reader, to what is coming up next. Our ability for relational framing and for rule-governed behavior may at first glance seem fabulous—a gift from the gods—but darkness lurks around the corner. Our ability to problem-solve is the villain. This book helps me make sense of it all.” —Maria Midbøe, M.Sc., candidate in psychology at Stockholm University in Stockholm, Sweden “Until now, explanations of relational frame theory have remained largely esoteric and even impenetrable to all but the most specialized scholars. For the first time, this extraordinary book provides a highly accessible account of relational frame theory, including its larger context within psychology, the current research in the field, and its many potential applications. Törneke strikes a fine balance between doing justice to relational frame theory and making the theory, research, and its implications readily comprehensible to the non-expert. This unique book is a must-read for scholars of human cognition, as well as clinicians, educators, others seeking to harness the power of basic psychological principles in their applied work, and anyone interested in the renaissance of modern behavior analysis.” —James D. Herbert, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA, and director of Anxiety Treatment and Research Learning An Introduction to Relational Frame Th eory and Its Clinical Application NIKLAS TÖRNEKE, MD RFT CONTEXT PRESS An Imprint of New Harbinger Publications, Inc. Publisher’s Note This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering psychological, financial, legal, or other professional services. If expert assistance or counseling is needed, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books Copyright © 2010 by by Niklas Törneke New Harbinger Publications, Inc. 5674 Shattuck Avenue Oakland, CA 94609 www.newharbinger.com All Rights Reserved Acquired by Catharine Sutker; Cover design by Amy Shoup; Edited by Jasmine Star PDF ISBN: 978-1-57224-908-0 The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as: Törneke, Niklas. [Relational frame theory. English] Learning RFT : an introduction to relational frame theory and its clinical applications / Niklas Törneke ; foreword by Dermot Barnes-Holmes ; afterword by Steven C. Hayes. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-57224-906-6 1. Cognitive therapy. 2. Acceptance and commitment therapy. I. Title. RC489.C6313T67 2010 616.89’1425--dc22 2010024048 In remembrance of my father, David Contents Foreword to the U.S. Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ix Foreword to the Swedish Edition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xiii Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii A Personal Word of Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 PART 1 Background CHAPTER 1 Radical Behaviorism and Fundamental Behavior Analytic Principles . . . . 9 CHAPTER 2 Thinking and Human Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 CHAPTER 3 Is the Power of Thinking a Clinically Relevant Issue? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49 PART 2 Relational Learning CHAPTER 4 Derived Relational Responding as the Fundamental Element in Human Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 vi Learning RFT CHAPTER 5 Analogies, Metaphors, and Our Experience of Self . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 CHAPTER 6 Relational Framing and Rule-Governed Behavior . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 CHAPTER 7 The Dark Side of Human Languaging . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 PART 3 Clinical Implications CHAPTER 8 Learning Theory and Psychological Therapies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 CHAPTER 9 General Guidelines for Clinical Behavior Analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 CHAPTER 10 Altering the Context with a Focus on Consequences . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 CHAPTER 11 Altering the Context with a Focus on Antecedents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Afterword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 243 Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Clarity, simplicity, depth. This is what I seek to achieve and unite. Excluding none of the three. Hence the difficulty. —Pär Lagerkvist (translated by Elizabeth Ask de Lambert) Foreword to the U.S. Edition A PRAGMATIC THEORY OF HUMAN LANGUAGE AND COGNITION Behavior analysis is an extremely unusual approach to psychological science. In stark contrast to mainstream psychology, the behavioral tradition refuses to appeal to mediating mental representations and processes as the basis for explaining human behavior. Instead, it adheres to a thoroughgoing functional analytic approach in which the systematic analysis of the interactions between an organism and its past and current environmental contexts provides the framework for explaining all psychological events. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, this unusual approach yielded consid- erable success in the early years, particularly in improving the lives of indi- viduals diagnosed with various learning disabilities. However, the same level of success was not observed when behavior analysis turned its attention to human language and cognition. Noam Chomsky’s damning review of B. F. Skinner’s Verbal Behavior is well known, and is sometimes offered as “proof” that the nonmediational approach of behavior analysis could not stretch to the more advanced or sophisticated aspects of human psychology (such as language and thought). In fact, Skinner’s work did go on to provide the basis for a number of language training programs, but once again success was limited largely to learning-disabled populations. The key problem with Verbal Behavior, and one that Chomsky highlighted, is that it fails to address the highly generative nature of human language. Although the book does not leave this issue completely untouched, it fails x Learning RFT to provide a well-developed technical account of the almost infinite novelty that language can generate. Furthermore, its treatment of advanced language phenomena such as metaphor and analogy is unconvincing. For example, in providing functional analytic interpretations of these verbal behaviors, it interweaves lay terms with technical terms, and the resulting analyses thus lack the required precision. But of course Skinner wrote the book almost two decades before Murray Sidman’s first study on equivalence class formation was conducted, with all of the implications for the behavioral study of human language that emerged from that seminal research. Skinner was clearly at a serious disadvantage in not having access to this equivalence data set and the conceptual work that followed. We now know that derived relational responding appears quite early in the behavioral repertoires of young children, and modern behavioral treatments of human language and cognition have emerged from this work. Unfortunately for Skinner’s Verbal Behavior, this research was lacking in the book. For the most part, therefore, Verbal Behavior was a direct contingency account of human language that made only passing reference to the most important defining feature of verbal behavior: derived relational responding. The first book on relational frame theory, Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition (Hayes, Barnes- Holmes, & Roche, 2001), published over thirty years after Skinner’s work, aimed to present a modern behavior analytic account of human language and cognition. The theory embraced derived relations and indeed put them at the very heart of the account. Nevertheless, RFT remained a natural extension of earlier conceptual and empirical research within behavior analysis. The core concept in the book, arbitrarily applicable relational responding, was based solidly on Skinner’s concept of the operant and drew heavily on Sidman’s seminal work on equivalence classes. Specifically, equivalence class formation was seen as the result of a history of operant conditioning (a learned response class), and based on this argument, the possibility of multiple forms of such response classes (relational frames) was predicted. The 2001 RFT book explains how the basic analytic units of human verbal behavior—relational frames—may be combined into more complex units, giving rise to the relating of relational frames, increasingly complex relational networks, and the relating of entire relational networks to other relational networks. These types of highly abstract concepts are used in the book to provide a nonmediational and purely functional analytic account of the full range of human verbal abilities, including naming, storytelling, humor, abstract logic, the verbal construction of self, and spirituality. The primary purpose behind the 2001 RFT book involved provid- ing more than a modern behavioral interpretation of human language and xi cognition. Its purpose was intensely pragmatic. Among other objectives, the book aimed to stimulate both basic and applied research on human language and cognition, and to provide a set of functional analytic terms that would facilitate communication among researchers and practitioners. It appears to have been relatively successful in achieving the first goal, but the latter objec- tive, I believe, requires another book: the one you are currently reading. Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian Account of Human Language and Cognition is intensely academic, full of jargon, and littered with highly abstract concepts. Learning RTF contains many of those concepts and some of the jargon, but it presents the material in a very accessible manner and, critically, does complete justice to the subject matter. The first section of Learning RFT starts with a succinct but well-worked introduction to the philosophical and conceptual underpinnings of behav- ior analysis, an understanding of which is essential in grappling with what is to follow. The topics of thinking and human language are then introduced, and the traditional Skinnerian perspective on these topics is explained and contrasted with that of traditional cognitive therapy. In this examination it is proposed that neither approach has fully dealt with the role of thinking and language, at least in the clinical domain. The first section of the book will serve as a strong motivator for the reader, and particularly the clinician, to delve into the next and perhaps most challenging section. In the second part of Learning RFT, the theory itself is presented, but in a highly accessible way. The chapters in this section strike a perfect balance between providing an appropriate level of technical detail and keeping the writing lively, light, and a pleasure to read. Furthermore, although the earlier chapters in this section focus necessarily on the more abstract features of RFT, the writing progresses rapidly and with relative ease to issues that will be of more interest to the practicing clinician, dealing with topics such as self and perspective taking. The final chapter in this section, “The Dark Side of Human Languaging,” will be particularly relevant to clinicians in that it explains how RFT means that human language and cognition may be the source of much human suffering. The third and final section of the book focuses on the clinical implica- tions of RFT. The section begins with traditional behavior therapy and how it relates to other therapeutic approaches, then it explains how RFT makes a unique contribution to our understanding of psychotherapy itself. The reader is now prepared for the final chapters of the book, which work systematically through the application of modern behavior analysis to clinical psychology. This material provides a powerful review of clinical behavior analysis and in particular explains how RFT supplements and extends the traditional behavior therapeutic approach. It is only in this final part of the book that xii Learning RFT the intensely pragmatic nature of RFT is fully revealed. This highly abstract and arcane theory allows the practitioner to conceptualize human language and thought as composed of behavioral units that may be subjected to func- tional analyses and behavioral intervention strategies. In short, Learning RFT clearly illustrates in a very powerful way how RFT can contribute toward the conceptualization and treatment of human suffering. In truth, this is a book I would love to have written. —Dermot Barnes-Holmes National University of Ireland, Maynooth Dermot Barnes-Holmes is foundation Professor of Psychology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has published approximately two hundred scientific articles, book chapters, and books, the vast majority of which have focused on the study of human language and cognition from a behavior analytic perspective.

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.