Prof Emeritus at U of Mississippi, co-founder of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy, teach, write, talks-a-lot, slow trail runner, residing in the Sonoran Desert
Saddlebrooke, AZ, USA
Joined February 2009
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Here is a little sample video from my values course about tightly held stories about our troubles, from a behavioral view. I think it gives a reasonable sample of some of the didactic bits of the course.
tinyurl.com/values-course
Making a few slides for a retreat style workshop in Moab next month. Proust captures so much humanity in this sentence. Oddly, it is a parenthetical. Just stunning.
Not a believer in "the good old days." Any examination of evidence over time will make clear the old days weren't good. Burying 1/2 our children before age 5, oppression of minorities, rampant nationalism & on & on, not good.
Public executions!? Fuck Hegseth & all his enablers.
This is for a bit of art I am working on back home. Tinkering with words and images is not a distraction. It's how I prepare--wandering and cultivating negative space.
Missing my wife and wanting to be home with her, but also deeply grateful to have work that I love....still.
Last touches on a workshop starting this afternoon in Madrid @_MICPSY for my old friends Carmen and Barbara Luciano. ACBS Romania done, nice visit to Prague to take in Czech cubist art, this one last bit of work then I will make my way home.
In the library this morning, drinking a dark roasted Ethiopian coffee with a bit of sweetened condensed milk (in the Vietnamese style). Fiddling with images and words.
Here are a few/a birthday present/from me to you.
Kelly G Wilson -- loving poetry and psychotherapy retweeted
"Perhaps every client we see is an unfinished poem. Perhaps you and I are unfinished poems.” - Kelly Wilson, Ph.D. on the place of poetics in contextual behavioral science at #ACBSWC26 in Lyon.
Missed the live session? Get the recording when you register for the 2026 ACBS Virtual Summit. Learn more: ow.ly/8zJO30sYlyp
#ACBS #ACT #Psychology #MentalHealth
New Portuguese translation of Mindfulness for Two and kicking off with an opening plenary at Congresso Wainer in Salvador, Brazil. Probably a 1000 in the room. It was a fun day!
Prepping a couple talks at the Congresso Wainer in Salvador, Brazil next week. My prep is unconventional. I don't lay out my talk and practice. I read. I immerse myself in materials that speak at some level to the topics. Sometimes a single sentence can orient me. I find my way.
Clients most often come to therapy with a theory of their life that has a foreclosing effect. Their theory of life occludes the complexity and richness of their actual life. We don’t just want to convert them to another, “better” theory— 1/2
Kelly G Wilson -- loving poetry and psychotherapy retweeted
Therapeutic "love" is neither romance nor limitless accommodation. It is the disciplined refusal to reduce a person to symptoms, defenses, pathology, or inconvenience while still asking them to change. It is a deep respect for the patient's humanity, with all the responsibilities and dignities entailed therein.
“I believe it is love that endows the therapist with the emotional power to foster change and love that gives the patient the courage to pursue it.”
(McWilliams, Psychoanalytic Diagnosis, 2004, p. 150)
I just submitted some desert poems to SPLIT ROCK REVIEW splitrockreview.submittable.…
Kelly G Wilson -- loving poetry and psychotherapy retweeted
“Much of the science that has changed the world did not emerge from planned experiments” - Kelly Wilson, Ph.D. on The Place of Poetics in Contextual Behavioral Science at #ACBSWC26 in Lyon.
#ACBS #ACT #Psychology #MentalHealth
For anyone who has done psychotherapy training with me over the past 30 yrs. See if this doesn’t seem familiar in many ways. And perhaps stop wondering why I hang out w the psychoanalysts on X—even when they are mean to my therapy ;) @JonathanShedler
open.substack.com/pub/jonath……
Bought Fonagy's book Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of Self, looked a little, but it's time to go home and dig in. The talk was packed to the rafters. Proud of #ACBS for being so good at listening to smart people no matter their theory--it's about the work.
“Psychotherapy changes people because it generates trust in new knowledge. Achieving the ‘we-mode’ through mentalizing creates an experience of joint purpose and shared understanding. It’s an act of mutual creation—the patient has as much a role as the therapist. And when that is achieved, and the patient improves, that is what you have truly given them: the gift of trust.”
—Peter Fonagy, Ph.D., on using mentalization to treat epistemic trust and trauma at #ACBSWC26 in Lyon.
#ACBS #ACT #Psychology #MentalHealth
Peter Fonagy’s plenary at #ACBS2026 way more people than seats in the biggest room in the house. I introduced myself earlier and told him he would find a very receptive audience.
@JonathanShedler the talk was recorded so at some moment after the dust settles from #ACBS2026, I'll see that you get a look. It was a super fun talk and a very receptive audience. This was the opening plenary, so the kickoff of the conference. Also a h/t to @KemtrupTweets
A Father's Day offering, perhaps esp to my depth psych X friends
the way fathers work
a shadow looming larger
than the figure who casts it
isn’t that the way of fathers
and notice how his silhouette
becomes less distinct
at the end of day
but also how far it extends
1/x
that edge has moved through us
whether we notice or not
we move this way and that
head and heart disconnected
people in our lives can’t grasp the why of it
just that we are prickly or critical or silent
at the weirdest moments
5/x