About Us

The process-based community is large and we do not wish to speak for everybody in it, but we do want to note some principle goals and hopes that seem to be present in the movement.

There are many who have worked on the initial development of the PBAT, including Joseph Ciarrochi, Steven Hayes, Frederick Chin, Brandon Sanford, Stefan Hofmann, Kathleen Gates and Baljinder Sahdra. Many more are working on it now and we hope to recognize them in some form on this website.

Unification of interventions

We hope the PBAT and process-based therapy will empower people from different therapeutic islands to communicate and share their methods.

Whether you are a positive psychologist, cognitive-behavioural therapist, organizational psychologist, or psychodynamic analyst, you should be able to share your insights and potentially make use of techniques from other areas, so long as they theoretically cohere with your approach.

Democratisation of interventions

We believe a process-based approach to interventions will not only lead to more effective interventions, but it may also lead to more people being able to provide help. People don’t have to complete postgraduate study in clinical psychology or psychiatry to deploy evidence-based kernels that fit human needs. They don’t have to complete specialised training by a guru or have elaborate professional guilds to be able to use evidence based process. Nobody owns these evidence-based processes, the way people may own packages and training programs.

There will be challenges to training up a broad group of psychological helpers who take a process-based focus. There have been negative effects observed in therapy and mindfulness-based training (Cuijpers et al., 2018; Britton, 2019; Curran et al., 2019). Helpers will need to be taught a core set of skills that will reduce the risk of client alliance ruptures and minimize helper behavior such as rigidity, over control, and delving into areas like past abuse and trauma without adequate knowledge.Even with these training challenges, however, ending the era of top-down, one-size-fits all protocols and taking a process-based approach will help positive psychology step forward to assume its rightful role in human development world-wide.

Improving the human condition

The problems we suffer as a human community are too great for a handful of specialists to solve alone. The time has come for a more democratic and broadly focused intervention science that better meets the needs of those we serve.