Bruce Arroll
Bruce is a General Practice and Primary Health Care Professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, and was a practising GP at Greenstone Family Clinic in South Auckland since 2006.
In 2024, he left Greenstone Clinic to join the Calder Clinic at the Auckland City Mission. He is a general practitioner, as well as providing special consultations using Focused Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (FACT) for people who are feeling stuck in their lives due to stress, pain, or low energy. He does this work with his patients and those referred by his clinic colleagues, as well as for people outside of the clinic.
He has also developed an interest in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and a new intervention called Written Exposure Therapy (WET). It is a protocol-driven intervention designed to be used by clinicians who do not have clinical psychology training but do work with mental and distress health. The intervention includes five sessions of 30 minutes of writing in detail about what happened and what were the emotional reactions to the trauma(s). The client does not need to disclose the traumatic event verbally, but part of the intervention is that the therapist has to read what has been written before the next session. This is to ensure the client is writing in specific detail. While clients feel more stressed at the end of the first visit, this is expected and means they are dealing with the most bothersome trauma. By the third or fourth session, the client is finding they are viewing their trauma differently and have a new perspective on it and how it has affected their lives.
Dr Arroll plans to offer training and supervision in late 2024.
FACT
FACT is a new model of brief therapy that is a highly condensed version of a well-established longer-term treatment called acceptance and commitment therapy (Strosahl et al 2012). FACT uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies to help people transform their relationship with unwanted, distressing experiences, such as disturbing thoughts, unpleasant emotions, painful memories, or uncomfortable physical symptoms. FACT does not attempt to change the content of such private events; indeed it is efforts to change, suppress, eliminate, or control these events that FACT views as problematic-the attempts to make those changes becomes the problem in terms of anxiety and low mood. When people become preoccupied with managing these uncomfortable experiences they cannot attend to the immediate needs of their life situation. In effect they can become rigid, ineffective problem solvers. FACT teaches clients to instead simply observe and accept them to see emotions as just emotions, memories as just memories, thoughts as just thoughts, and sensations as just sensations.
A second feature of FACT is its emphasis on helping people connect with personal values and engage in committed actions that are consistent with those values. Instead of focusing on emotional control, FACT helps people focus on regaining a desired quality of life. Since we have no control over the arrival of uncomfortable internal experiences and unpleasant physical experiences that are often associated with them we must focus energy on what we can control i.e. our immediate behaviour. This may involve re-expanding the shrunken world that has become smaller in response to the distress. The term "commitment" in the name FACT refers to taking actions that are values-based flexible and ever expanding in scope.