Personal Strength

Personal Strength


4: ACT therapy for teenagers (Part 2)

March 01, 2021

ACT therapy, or Acceptance Commitment Therapy, provides valuable skills for everyone. Skills to help you to live a life of meaning despite emotional turmoil and hardship. Dr Louise Hayes has made these skills more widely accessible through her model: DNA-V (© DNA-V, L. Hayes & J. Ciarrochi, www.thrivingadolecent.com). This model is easy to understand, and relatable, for children, teenagers, and adults. In the previous episode Louise introduced the DNA-V model, and provided an overview of the four core skills. In this episode Louise discusses how self-view and social-view apply to each area of the model, and we explore the developmental context around the development of the DNA-V model.
Links and further information:

* Introduction to Acceptance Commitment Therapy (Episode 2)
* ACT Therapy for Teenagers (Part 1)
* Dr Louise Hayes' website
* The DNA-V model (© DNA-V, L. Hayes & J. Ciarrochi, www.thrivingadolescent.com)
* The main website for DNA is dnav.international
* ‘Your life, your way’ (book on the DNA-V model)
* Resilience courses based on the DNA V model

Transcript:
Introduction: Hello, welcome back! This is the second half of my interview with Dr Louise Hayes. If you missed the first interview, and are new to the DNA-V model, I would recommend you start there. In Episode 3 Louise outlines the DNA-V model, and we explored those four processes. Your Discoverer – which is your ability to learn through trial and error, to try things out and observe what happens. Your Noticer, the part of you that senses your internal and external world, and allows you to live in the moment. Your Advisor, the part that gives you advice, tells you what to do and how to act. And your Value or Vitality, what you need and care about, what energises you.
In this episode Louise helps us to put these processes in perspective by understanding the self-view and social-view, which provide context to all four processes. We also discusses the broader evolutionary, and developmental context to the DNA-V model.
Let’s get to the interview! 
Interviewer: You mentioned self and other approaches could you talk a bit more about those?
Louise Hayes: Sure, well so we consider DNA-V as four basic behaviours if you want. Ways that we can think and act and feel. And those ways are influenced by different perspectives such as our view of our self, self-as-context as it is sometimes called or self-view. And what we mean by that is that we are not a fixed thing, that our Self is created from all of our actions, and so by the time you become a teenager a very formative part of being a teenager is discovering this Self, who I am.
And our task with young people is to help them know that your Self is actually constantly changing, and your Self is not a thing, it's a product of what you do, it's an outcome of your memories and your history and your thinking and your feeling and everything, and that that is no not a thing, but a behaviour. So when I say to myself ‘I am stupid’, I am Selfing I'm doing Selfing behaviour,