A resource for RIACT members, residents, and supervisors
Where This Came From
Over the past five years, something kept coming up in supervision.
A resident would be doing genuinely good work — present with their client, using ACT language skillfully, tracking process, and yet something was missing. Not a technique. Not more knowledge. More like a particular way of seeing. A different angle on what was happening in the room.
At the same time, I kept watching experienced clinicians hit plateaus. Not because they had stopped learning, but because they had stopped asking certain kinds of questions. They were working hard inside a frame they had not examined in a while.
What I noticed, again and again, was that clinical growth in ACT does not follow a single linear path. It unfolds differently for different practitioners. Some people develop deep functional analysis skills early. Others find their way into Functional Contextualism as a lived stance before they could articulate it theoretically. Some develop a felt sense for relational framing in session long before they study RFT formally. Some plateau in process-based work for years before something shifts.
The supervision group here in Providence kept circling around a shared need: a way to name where someone's attention currently lives, what they might not yet be seeing, and what the next area of development might be. Not to evaluate. Not to rank. To orient.
That need is what produced this framework.
What the Lenses Document Is
The Lenses of ACT Practice is a clinical development framework organized around six core competency areas — called lenses — and one supplementary lens for practitioners who want to go further.
