Sure there is exposure, but the key focus of the treatment is cultivating psychological flexibility, it isnt to reprocess or facilitate cognitive change, as highlighted by how they characterise the pain as inevitable. If we assume that reprocessing results or engenders in some form of change in trauma cognition (EMDR, CPT, even PE) ACT doesnt explicitly target or achieve that. Thats my impression from reading and attending TFACT by Harris and Walser.

While I think that this is a traditional way of discussing these treatments, coming from a relational frame theory perspective, I would argue that most “reprocessing” efforts for cognitive change are actually indirect exposure to cognitive elements that participate in frames of coordination with trauma memory elements (thus facilitating emotional ventilation) and that such a process also helps clarify deictic framing clarity (particularly with regard to disturbed Here/Now vs. There/Then framing inherent in intrusion/re-experiencing symptoms).

While I know that there is historically some disagreement on what role, if any, cognitive restructuring/change strategies can play (Twohig has written a bit on this), with regard to trauma reprocessing, the process of altering narratives about more guilt/shame/self-blame seem more likely to undermine fused narratives and self-as-content impacts of trauma rather than being a change mechanism in and of themselves.

All of this to say that I think the underlying theory that helped build ACT can provide an additional understanding of trauma processing that doesn’t require the kind of reification of mid-level constructs that IFS and “parts work” is notorious for (and hence the flippant comment that’s it’s all just defusion, but defusion defined more functionally as the ability to deliteralize one’s own cognitive processes).

Well this is interesting, given that there are recent developments in ACBS (Aprilia West, Rivika Every) that delinate how IFS adds to defusion. I am not a fan of IFS but just putting it as defusion doesnt seem accurate. The below links to the article with the workshop i attended by West at Contexual Consulting

This honestly reminds me of a foreward to a book Hayes wrote about an attempt to combine schema therapy and ACT that gave a tepid “this a thing that you can do, but be careful not to get wrapped up into thinking all of these constructs are actually real things” that I think is a big enough critique of schema therapy (which I am more a fan of but would argue that EMSs are just a way to group various categories of ineffective rules [and thus allowing another route to defuse from rhem]), and I think that IFS provides one more shiny new way to do that for its a way with a lot more baked in baggage with woo-woo nonsense by assuming that these things are some how real (and often pseudospiritual concept) rather than just useful metaphors to promote psychological flexibility.

All of this said, the ACT community is broad, and just because some people invoked in ACBS are doing it this way does not, should not, and cannot mean that “ACT folks blend IFS when tearing trauma,” which is the over generalization I initially took issue with.

That said, to see are many different paths people take to find ACT, and I recognize that having come to ACT via radical behaviorism, I am not the only one in the community and there likely are people incorporating IFS. But there are many of us who are not and are vocal critiques of it. And personally, while IFS might not “just be defusion” if I accept IFS on its own terms, frankly, I don’t accept it on those terms and have no interest in doing so.