Deeply Functional

The provided sources explore the transformation of stimulus function through the combined frameworks of Functional Contextualism and Relational Frame Theory.

They explain how human language and cognition allow stimuli to acquire new psychological meanings without requiring direct conditioning for every single experience. Furthermore, the text details how clinical practices like Acceptance and Commitment Therapy utilize these relati...

What happens to ACT when you have fifteen minutes with someone and may never see them again?

In this episode of Deeply Functional, Todd Schmenk talks with Kirk Strosahl and Patricia Robinson about the development of Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, better known as FACT.

They explore the clinical problems that gave rise to FACT and what working in brief, integrated healthcare settings revealed about ACT itself.

The conversat...

What happens when a client remains physically present while becoming increasingly disconnected from their immediate experience?

In this episode of Deeply Functional, Todd Schmenk explores loss of present moment contact and the subtle ways clients leave the room without moving. Rumination, prediction, analysis, and overexplaining may sound thoughtful or productive. Functionally, however, they can help clients avoid direct contact wit...

Why can a single word, thought, or memory trigger intense emotional or physical distress, even when no direct threat is present?

This episode breaks down core principles from Relational Frame Theory (RFT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) into accessible, everyday language to explain how human language shapes psychological suffering.

Today the focus is on the Transformation of Stimulus Function.

Rather than treating painfu...

In this episode of Deeply Functional: In Conversation, Todd Schmenk is joined by Siri Ming, Julia Fiebig, and Evelyn Gould to explore the thinking behind Frame by Frame, their approach to helping clinicians understand what is happening functionally in the therapy room.

The conversation begins with a familiar problem: ACT is often taught and practiced as a curriculum, protocol, or collection of exercises. The group considers what cha...

What are we really reaching for when we criticize, withdraw, demand reassurance, or shut down with out partners?

In this episode of Deeply Functional, Todd Schmenk talks with Lou Lasprugato about yearnings: the deep, recurring experiences people seek within their closest relationships.

Together, they explore how yearnings differ from needs and values, why they make us vulnerable, and how they can become hidden beneath difficult patt...

We all carry stories about who we are: I’m anxious. I’m broken. I’m the responsible one. I’m someone who always fails. These stories can help organize our experience, but they can also become prisons when we begin treating them as fixed truths rather than ways of making sense of ourselves.

In this installment of Deeply Functional, we explore the conceptualized self through the lenses of functional contextuali...

In this FLEX LAB conversation, we work through a clinical vignette to examine what the clinician did, why those choices made sense, and how a functional understanding of the case shaped what happened next.

Rather than searching for the “right” ACT intervention, the discussion focuses on tracking function, noticing opportunities for movement, and responding flexibly to what is happening in the room.

The conversation also ...

What changes when ACT stops being something a clinician does and begins shaping how they understand therapy?

In this episode of Deeply Functional: In Conversation, Todd Schmenk sits down with Peter Binnings, LICSW, to reflect on their shared journey from discovering ACT to developing a deeper, more functionally grounded way of practicing it. Together, they revisit what initially attracted them to ACT, what they misunderstood along t...

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 3 of 7

What happens when efforts to protect ourselves from discomfort begin organizing more and more of our lives?

This episode explores experiential avoidance as an inflexibility process within ACT. Todd examines avoidance not as weakness, resistance, or pathology, but as an understandable attempt to gain safety and relief. Difficulties develop when thoughts, memories, emotions, and physical sensa...

When does holding space support meaningful change, and when might it unintentionally help a client remain stuck?

This episode offers an AI generated conversation created through NotebookLM and based entirely on Todd Schmenk’s article, “Beyond Holding Space: Helping Clients Get Unstuck.” Todd reviewed the conversation for accuracy and consistency with Functional Contextualism and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy.

Th...

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 2 of 7

What happens when a thought stops functioning as one possible description of experience and begins operating as reality itself?

This episode opens the first inflexibility process in the ACT model: cognitive fusion. Todd explores how language can organize attention, emotion, and action so completely that behavior narrows around what the mind is saying. Fusion often offers the nervous system a...

The Hexagon in Reverse — Part 1 of 7

Clients rarely enter therapy naming fusion, avoidance, attentional rigidity, attachment to self story, disconnection from values, or inaction. They arrive describing suffering, conflict, fear, exhaustion, and patterns they cannot seem to change.

Todd opens the Hexagon in Reverse series by showing how clinicians can hear these descriptions as functional signals. The episode challenges the ten...

The therapist is not standing outside the clinical system. Our attention, language, pacing, avoidance, and responses all help shape what can happen next.

Todd uses a process based lens to examine therapist behavior as part of the functional context of treatment. Rather than judging moments of overexplaining, filling silence, or hesitating to intervene as mistakes, clinicians can study when these patterns occur, what evokes them, wha...

Psychological flexibility is not only something clinicians help clients develop. It is also a quality of therapist behavior that shapes the relational context of every session.

Todd turns the ACT processes toward the clinician and examines what happens when self doubt, urgency, discomfort, or a need to get therapy right begins to organize our responses. Interrupting silence, overexplaining, avoiding a difficult intervention, or reac...

What changes when pain does not resolve and the continued pursuit of symptom elimination begins to make life smaller?

Todd explores chronic pain through a functional, ACT informed lens. Medication changes, activity restriction, reassurance seeking, and constant symptom monitoring can all make sense as attempts to reduce discomfort and uncertainty. When these strategies become the organizing center of life, relationships, movement, p...

How do clinicians hold compassionate space for suffering while continuing to shape movement toward flexibility?

Todd approaches trauma as more than an event, story, or diagnostic category. From a functional contextualist perspective, trauma also includes what has been shaped over time: avoidance, emotional numbing, hypercontrol, fusion with fear based rules, narrowed identity, and the gradual loss of values directed living. Survival...

Anxiety is a natural human response. Suffering expands when a person’s life becomes increasingly organized around predicting, controlling, and avoiding it.

Todd begins a series on applying a functional, ACT informed lens to specific clinical concerns. Rather than making anxiety reduction the central goal, he focuses on what clients do in the presence of fear and how understandable efforts to gain safety can gradually narrow re...