ACT for Gender Identity

Reviews / Votes

Alex Stitt has written a truly delightful, comprehensive, thoughtful, and engaging book about working with trans and nonbinary clients in therapy. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) - a mindfulness based approach - provides a meta framework for understanding gender, sexuality, and intersectional identities. I have learned so much from Alex Stitt's perspective, about the complexity of gender, the power of relational therapy, and of course, about ACT - a series of skills and techniques available to all clinicians, regardless of your background and training. The tone is deceptively casual, the language is decidedly queer, and the range of tools is broad and comprehensive. -- Arlene Lev, School of Social Welfare, University of Albany, Choices Counseling and Consulting, Author of Transgender Emergence: Therapeutic Guidelines for Working With Gender Variant People and Their Families Alex Stitt has accomplished something wonderful; they have fully elaborated the relevance of Acceptance & Commitment Therapy to working with gender and gender identity. This book is grounded in cultural awareness of the needs of gender diverse clients with a strong unifying thread of respect for the agency and autonomy of transgender, genderfluid, and non-binary clients. -- Matthew D. Skinta, Ph.D., ABPP, Peer-Reviewed ACT Trainer, Assistant Professor, Roosevelt University, Chicago, IL A courageous volume that leaves no issue unexamined in its goal of modifying and applying ACT to function as a gender affirmative therapy. Never condemning, and yet never avoidant, this book asks practitioners to look deeply within themselves and to embark on a values-based journey to create a space in which the full range of issues in gender identity, expression, and experience can be approached openly, competently, and compassionately. Moving, wise, and effective it rises to the challenge it sets for itself, and invites readers to do likewise.

Highly recommended. -- Steven C. Hayes, Ph.D., Foundation Professor of Psychology, University of Nevada, Reno, Co-developer of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and author of A Liberated Mind